How to diagram the bare infinitive
English teacher here.
How is a bare infinitive diagrammed when providing action to a direct object as in the sentence below?
“We watched the man run toward the door.”
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Notes:
1. Obviously, the diagram must hold to the rules defined by the ten sentence patterns.
2. We could use the rule for a participle, but it would require changing its tense.
3. We could diagram the direct object “phrase” as a noun clause, which is my tendency, here, and I think is probably correct.
Anybody familiar with this situation?
Top answer
We watched the man run toward the door . This is a complex catenative construction . " Watch" is a catenative verb , and the underlined infinitival clause is its catenative complement.
- We watched the man run toward the door .
- This is a complex catenative construction .
- " Watch" is a catenative verb , and the underlined infinitival clause is its catenative complement.
- The intervening noun phrase "the man" is the syntactic object of "watched", and the understood subject of the subordinate infinitival clause.
- Here is a tree diagram: The term 'catenative' comes from the Latin word for "chain", which is appropriate here since "watch" and "run" do indeed form a chain of verbs here, separated only by the NP "the man".
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We watched the man run toward the door.
This is a complex catenative construction.
"Watch" is a catenative verb, and the underlined infinitival clause is its catenative complement.
The intervening noun phrase "the man" is the syntactic object of "watched", and the understood subject of the subordinate infinitival clause. Here i
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