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Carpal Tunnel
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Use guys need to stop this.
Faldage, can you explain further what you meant? You state that the "do" is periphrastic. I assume you meant "did" as in "You did not use to play for that team." I cannot think off hand of a sentence where the present tense of do would work. Periphrastic I am guessing you are using in what most dictionaries carry as the secondary meaning:
"formed by the use of function words or auxiliaries instead of by inflection <more fair is a periphrastic comparative>"
Lets go back to the sentence "You did not use to play for that team." If I recast it to get rid of the did, I would have something like "You used to not play for that team."
I cannot put a finger on it exactly, and it may not be a good sentence to use for this discussion, but to me the second construction almost implies that though you were on the team you did not play, while the first one is more along the lines of "You changed to a new team." Perhaps not, though, and if there is a difference it is extremely subtle and might be better seen with some other sentence.
But the part I am having trouble with is where you say that the sentence with the present-tense "use" takes "use" as an infinitive without the word "to" which you state is not necessary to an infinitive. That goes against everything I ever learned in grammar; the infinitive is still the to followed by the verb that is later in the sentence.
TEd
TEd
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With my students, I'm happier calling this the "base form" of the verb and reserving "infinitive" for the "to+verb" construction. It is also sometimes called the "infinitive without 'to'".
The base form carries only lexical meaning because other parts of meaning (tense, person, aspect, modality, voice) are carried by the auxiliary verbs (do, be, have) or by modal verbs (will, shall, ought to, would, might, must, should...)
About "used to", I've only ever learnt (and taught) that this was used to talk about past states, habits or conditions which are now finished, in affirmative sentences ("I used to play in the park"). In negative and interrogative sentences, which require auxiliaries and therefore a "base form" of the lexical verb, you can express the "past habit" part with adverbs such as "never", "usually", "always" etc. ("I didn't usually play in the park", "I never played in the park", "Did you always play in the park"?). Oh, and textbooks generally stress the fact that this construction can only be used to speak about past states.
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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
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I am almost certain I've read (but never heard) "to do X, as I am used to do."
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But that would be a different construction, no? "To be used to something" or "to be used to doing something", meaning "be accustomed to"... expressed in the present, the past or the future.
The difference between "I used to do something" and "I am/was/will be used to (doing) something" is quite the battlehorse for our students of English. They get them mixed up all the time...
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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
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Quote:
But that would be a different construction, no?
No, this very construction. 19th Century British writing, I think.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Quote:
Use guys need to stop this.
Faldage, can you explain further what you meant? You state that the "do" is periphrastic. I assume you meant "did" as in "You did not use to play for that team." I cannot think off hand of a sentence where the present tense of do would work. Periphrastic I am guessing you are using in what most dictionaries carry as the secondary meaning:
"formed by the use of function words or auxiliaries instead of by inflection <more fair is a periphrastic comparative>"
That's what I meant in this use of periphrastic. AHD marks this secondary meaning as a grammar usage. Do is the infinitive (or, if you prefer, the base form as Marianna likes to call it) and covers any conjugated form.
Quote:
Lets go back to the sentence "You did not use to play for that team." If I recast it to get rid of the did, I would have something like "You used to not play for that team."
I cannot put a finger on it exactly, and it may not be a good sentence to use for this discussion, but to me the second construction almost implies that though you were on the team you did not play, while the first one is more along the lines of "You changed to a new team." Perhaps not, though, and if there is a difference it is extremely subtle and might be better seen with some other sentence.
I agree with you that it is probably best we leave this subtlety alone in this thread.
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But the part I am having trouble with is where you say that the sentence with the present-tense "use" takes "use" as an infinitive without the word "to" which you state is not necessary to an infinitive. That goes against everything I ever learned in grammar; the infinitive is still the to followed by the verb that is later in the sentence.
TEd
That's probably because you are limited to a simplistic prescriptive grammar. Descriptive grammars are much more complex, having to describe language as it is actually used. Just as an example, what would you say about the nature of the verb go in the sentence He will go to the house? The German, e.g., would be Er wird zum Haus gehen where gehen is clearly an infinitive.
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Carpal Tunnel
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Carpal Tunnel
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That's probably because you are limited to a simplistic prescriptive grammar.
In a word -- crap.
TEd
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Carpal Tunnel
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I'm glad you brought this up because I've always wondered why I said and heard "use to" without the "D". ever since I was a little kid I have never uttered this phrase with the "D" pronounced. I think it just naturally disappears. It wasn't until I started seeing the "D" in print and wondered about it, years later, that I even questioned the incorrectness, grammatically, of "use to". But, to my ear, and because I became use to hearing and saying it, it *sounded correct to me. I was never comfortable saying or envisioning the "D" there. I'm still not, even though I know it's supposed to be there. In short, I got use to use to instead of used to used to (or somethin' like that).  You see, as Guy de Maupassant once said, "'tis all a muddle."
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Pooh-Bah
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Pooh-Bah
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<< tis all a muddle >>
It's an elision -- and the kind of thing GdM would be comfortable with, because "___d t____" is just so damned troublesome to spit out; don't you think?
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Carpal Tunnel
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Quote:
… crap.
So what do you make of the go in my example He will go to the house? It's clearly in the same position as, e.g., the to do in He is going to do his homework, another perphrastic future, this time in go.
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