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I found the following in 'Of Mice and Men' by Steinbeck.

'Evening of a hot day started the little wind to moving among the leaves.'
Why is 'started' followed by 'to' + 'moving'?
Thanks in advance to whoever can help me.

Usenet · Accepted Answer

[nq:1]I found the following in 'Of Mice and Men' by Steinbeck. 'Evening of a hot day started the little wind to moving among the leaves.' Why is 'started' followed by 'to' + 'moving'? Thanks in advance to whoever can help me.[/nq]
Sounds a little more folksy to use 'to'.
Also influenced by the fact that the alternate constructions are Verb + to + Infinitive - Started to move or
Verb + Participle - Started moving

Usenet · Answer

Carlo, I don't think I can help you much here, since this construction is not mentioned in the usage manuals I keep at home. A little bit of research reveals 574 hits on "start to moving" on Google, but most of the first results are clearly typos or non-native speaker mistakes. 20 hits come up when we restrict the search to .co.uk, or British universities, while a mere 8 show up when we run the search on .edu, or American-affiliated tertiary educational institutions. All of these examples are, unfortunately, clearly mistakes on the part of the writers.
A simple search of the British National Corpus reveals no start to . My limited computer skills and free access to the BNC do not allow me to run a search on "start + (something) + to doing (something).
The reason I've done as much work on this as I have, though, is that based on my personal understanding of the language as a native speaker and an EFL teacher, Steinbeck did not simply make a mistake here. John Ramsey seems to have come up with something that I'd like to expand on. "Start something to doing something" seems to me to be a little-used, colloquial form of the causative. It is certainly not standard English.
The following examples might make this clearer.
I had Dave start cleaning the house.
I got Dave to start cleaning the house.
I started Dave on cleaning the house.
I started Dave to cleaning the house.
The last two means that you either yelled at Dave enough to get him to work, supervised the first few minutes of work, gave Dave a hand doing some of the initial work, or some combination of all of the above.

The very last rings, as John Ramsey put it, of "folksy" use.

Needless to say, this is not something that you would either want to spend time on teaching your students, if you're a teacher, or learning yourself, if you're a student.
I hope this helps, but if it doesn't, well, sorry.

Usenet · Answer

[nq:1]Carlo, I don't think I can help you much here, since this construction is not mentioned in the usage manuals ... doing something" seems to me to be a little-used, colloquial form of the causative. It is certainly not standard English.[/nq]
I can expand on it and save you some trouble.
Steinbeck was very precise about folk idiom. Even
lectured his editor as to when folk idiom would
and would not drop the final g from the present
participle, e.g. goin/going down the road.
(He actually missed the Broadway opening of the stage version of 'Of Mice and Men' because he was in migrant camps getting the facts and folk idiom right for 'The Grapes of Wrath.')

I suspect when an author is writing a novel using folksy/colloquial dialogue,essential for realism, it would be in keeping to write the narrative & descriptive parts on the same level.
It's part of what a fine author does but you're right to say it's not for standard English usage by us ordinary folks.
John Ramsay

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