A Student's Introduction to English Grammar

32 Chapter 3 Verbs, tense, aspect, and mood

[3] IMPERATIVE
ii SUBJUNCTIVE
iii INFINITIVAL

{a. TO-INFINITIVAL

b. BARE INFINITIVAL

Keep us informed tonight.

It's essential [that he keep us informed].

It's essential [(for him) to keep us informed].

He should [keep us in formed].

Imperatives are normally main clauses, and are typically used as directives - the

term we have given for various ways of getting people to do things, such as

requests, orders, instructions and so on. They usually have the subject you under­

stood rather than overtly expressed.

Subjunctives occur as main clauses only in a few more or less fixed expressions,

as in God bless you, Long live the Emperor, etc. Their most common use is as

subordinate clauses of the kind shown in [i i]. Structurally these differ only in the

verb inflection from subordinate clauses with a primary verb-form - and many

speakers would here use a present tense in preference to the slightly more formal

subjunctive: It 's essential that he keeps us informed.

To -infinitivals, as the name indicates, are marked by to. The subject is optional,

and usually omitted. If present it is preceded by fo r, and if a pronoun such as I,

he, she, etc., it appears in a different inflectional form from that used for sub­

jects in canonical clauses and also in subjunctives: compare him in [iiia] with he

in [i i].

Bare infinitivals lack the to marker and almost always have no subject. They

mostly occur after various auxiliary verbs such as should, can, may, will, etc.

The gerund-participle

Traditionally (for example, in the grammar of Latin), a gerund is a verb-form that
is functionally similar to a noun, whereas a participle is one that is functionally
similar to an adjective. English verb-forms like walking are used in both ways, and
no verb has different forms corresponding to the two uses, so we have only a sin­
gle inflectional form with the shape walking in our paradigm, and we call it the
gerund-participle. These examples show what we mean about its two main kinds
of function:

[4] a. She argued against [buying any more of them].

b. She argued against [any fu rther purchases].

II a. People [earning $50,000 a year] don 't qualify

fo r the rebate.

b. [Moderately aUluent] people don 't qualify fo r

the rebate.

[gerund-participle]

[noun]

[gerund-participle]

[adjective]

In the [i] examples the bracketed parts function as complement to the preposition
against. In [ia] the bracketed part is a clause, with the verb buying as its head; in [ib]
the bracketed part is an NP with the noun purchases as head. The similarity between
the verb-form buying and the noun purchases is simply this: they head expressions
with the same function.