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I read this today:
"People say, did you used to be an alcoholic?"
now I know that normally one would say "He used to be an alcoholic" (ne'mind the psychopathological issues); but 'used to' doesn't sound right in this case.
what is the grammatical standard for use of use to vs. used to?
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From Bartleby
"We use the verb use in its past tense with an infinitive to indicate a past condition or habitual practice: We used to live in that house. Because the -d in used is not pronounced in these constructions, people sometimes mistakenly leave it out when writing. Thus it is incorrect to write We use to play tennis. When do occurs with this form of use in negative statements and in questions, the situation is reversed, and use to (not used to) is correct: You did not use to play on that team. Didn’t she use to work for your company?"
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>the situation is reversed (when do occurs)
English.. ya gotta love it.
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that is a damn weird word. I mean use(d) is a damn weird word.
formerly known as etaoin...
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old hand
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Well, from the outside, it looks perfectly logical to me  . You also say: you wanted to go home, but: did you want to go home?
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tswum:
Thanks for bringing this up. I learned from looking around on the net that it is "used" plus an infinitive. I'd not thought about it before and I would have said that it was one of them pesky compound word verbs: used to. Sort of like look up, which was the subject of some discussion here a while back.
I had never seen one like it before, so when I was at the fashion library I looked up her skirt.
TEd
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TEd's got it right about the use of use with a periphrastic do. The use in this case is the infinitive (no, it doesn't need to to be infinitive) and is not modified for person, number, or tense. That's all carried by the do.
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Goodness me, what a to-do over one little word.
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Pooh-Bah
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Quote:
Goodness me, what a to-do over one little word.
I dunno, this use of "use" used to flip me out a little. Still does.
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this use of "use" used to flip me out a little yeahbut, it is - useful  .
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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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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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Quote:
But that would be a different construction, no?
No, this very construction. 19th Century British writing, I think.
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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.
Quote:
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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That's probably because you are limited to a simplistic prescriptive grammar.
In a word -- crap.
TEd
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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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<< 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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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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Pooh-Bah
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Quote:
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.
¿? But: "He will do his homework."
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Quote:
¿? But: "He will do his homework."
Exactly. The periphrastic future in go uses the form of the infinitive with to. The periphrastic future in will does not. Doesn't stop the version without the to from being an infinitive. I changed the example sentence to avoid using go in both the future marker and the base verb of the sentence.
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Pooh-Bah
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Quote:
Quote:
¿? But: "He will do his homework."
Exactly. The periphrastic future in go uses the form of the infinitive with to. The periphrastic future in will does not. Doesn't stop the version without the to from being an infinitive. I changed the example sentence to avoid using go in both the future marker and the base verb of the sentence.
Hmm. It's going to take me a little while to figure out what you're saying. In the meantime, I think my grammar primer distinguishes between the base and infinitive forms, that is, it does not allow that the base and infinitive are the same form. I think this is what my question stems from.
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Quote:
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.
No, it is not in the same position. Will and shall are auxiliary verbs for the future tense, also known as modal verbs. There is absolutely nothing periphrastic about either one.
http://www.mauspfeil.net/Shall+and+will.html
As to the construction "I am going to do my homework" it is NOT going plus an infinitive "to do", rather it is a "future tense future": "going to" plus a verb. See in this respect:
http://www.mauspfeil.net/Going-to_future.html
BTW, this web site is chock full of interesting stuff. Tons and tons of it. Another itneresting article is at:
http://www.mauspfeil.net/prescription_and%20description.html
TEd
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> chock full or check here: prescription and description jes' being a snit...
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Quote:
Quote:
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.
No, it is not in the same position. Will and shall are auxiliary verbs for the future tense, also known as modal verbs. There is absolutely nothing periphrastic about either one.
That's just what periphrastic means in this context. A non-periphrastic (or inflected) future construction would be one where the verb was used with some future marker built in. Spanish, for example, has both periphrastic and inflected futures, e.g., va a hacer (he is going to do, where hacer is the infinitive) and hará. We don't have the inflected future in English. If you don't like "going to do", how about "he wants to do his homework"? This would be a periphrastic construction of mood, rather than tense, but the principle is the same. The German would be er möchte seine Schularbeiten machen, where machen is the infinitive.
If you want to call one form of the infinitive the base form and reserve the term infinitive for the infinitive preceded by the preposition to, that's OK by me, I guess. I'll stick to calling them both infinitive.
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Quote:
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"?).
No, those sentences would express a different meaning, Marianna.
I didn't usually play in the park.
I didn't use to play in the park.
The first sentence simply refers to a past habit, while the second contrasts it with the present -- I didn't use to play in the park (but now I do).
It's ok to have 'used to' in negatives and interrogatives, though 'never used to' is probably more common than 'didn't use to'.
I never used to watch TV so much.
I didn't use to watch TV so much.
Never used to probably contrasts the present with the whole of my past life, while didn't use to might contrast the present with a particular past period in my life .
I suspect that used to is more common in negative questions than positive ones:
Didn't you use to have a motorbike?
But that is more a matter of semantics than grammar. We are more likely to want to contrast past and present states/habits in a negative question than in a positive one.
Bingley
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Quote:
But that is more a matter of semantics than grammar. We are more likely to want to contrast past and present states/habits in a negative question than in a positive one.
Or we are more likely to expect a positive answer to a negatively phrased question and a negative answer to a positively phrased one:
Didn't you use to have a motorbike?
Yeah, back in the '70s, when I was young and crazy.
Did you use to have a motorbike?
Nope, never. You wouldn't catch me on one of them death traps
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Thanks so much for your comment, Bingley... Let’s see... I see why you say that "I never used to play in the park" is a negative sentence, as it is definitely one in terms of meaning (something was NOT so). However, in terms of grammatical structure, it is no different from “I always used to play in the park”, because the verb form is not in the negative. It is this that I was referring to earlier: when you make a negative form of a verb, it requires an auxiliary “do” plus a negative particle “not” and then the base form of the lexical verb. So in fact I was very wrong in citing this as an example of “negative” sentence, because I was really only considering the negative structure of the verb phrase itself. I see that now.
However, the point in question was “didn’t use to” and “did / didn’t [noun / pronoun] use to…?”. As you say, “I didn’t use to watch TV so much” is less frequent than “I never used to watch TV so much”, and I’d suggest that this is because the first is actually not so correct. As I said before, what we learn as EFL students is that “used to” can only be used in affirmative structures in the past tense. I am adventuring here, but perhaps native speakers are reluctant to use the negative and interrogative structures of this verb because they are consciously or unconsciously aware of this norm?
(I will say, though, that while “I didn’t use to go to the park” and “Did you use to go to the park?” sound wrong to me, “Didn’t you use to go to the park?” sounds not-so-wrong. I don’t really know why…)
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Quote:
Thanks so much for your comment, Bingley... Let’s see... I see why you say that "I never used to play in the park" is a negative sentence, as it is definitely one in terms of meaning (something was NOT so). However, in terms of grammatical structure, it is no different from “I always used to play in the park”, because the verb form is not in the negative. It is this that I was referring to earlier: when you make a negative form of a verb, it requires an auxiliary “do” plus a negative particle “not” and then the base form of the lexical verb. So in fact I was very wrong in citing this as an example of “negative” sentence, because I was really only considering the negative structure of the verb phrase itself. I see that now.
No, it might be grammatically equivalent but the adverb never is negative, just as is the adverb not. The fact that one uses the auxiliary in the one case does not change that fact.
Quote:
However, the point in question was “didn’t use to” and “did / didn’t [noun / pronoun] use to…?”. As you say, “I didn’t use to watch TV so much” is less frequent than “I never used to watch TV so much”, and I’d suggest that this is because the first is actually not so correct. As I said before, what we learn as EFL students is that “used to” can only be used in affirmative structures in the past tense. I am adventuring here, but perhaps native speakers are reluctant to use the negative and interrogative structures of this verb because they are consciously or unconsciously aware of this norm?
I don't know if the one is more or less common than the other. As a native speaker I don't hear either choice as being wrong. You wouldn't use "used to" in the negative in the past tense because the auxiliary verb takes the tense marker as well as the negative adverb so you use, if you will, the base form of the verb "use".
Quote:
(I will say, though, that while “I didn’t use to go to the park” and “Did you use to go to the park?” sound wrong to me, “Didn’t you use to go to the park?” sounds not-so-wrong. I don’t really know why…)
You hear those all the time. There's nothing wrong with them. You certainly won't be likely to hear "Used you to go to the park?"
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