The transitive verb "work"

Question

Hello everyone. I have a couple of questions.

Regarding the following passage:

In the warm months, the soldiers enjoyed being outside. When winter came, they got to work building rustic huts to live in.

Q1 Is the "work" in the second sentence a transitive verb? I mean, is this verb phrase close in meaning to "do the activity of building rustic huts to live in" ?

Q2 How does the construction "got to work" work in the last sentence? Is this close to "began to work"?

GPY · Accepted Answer

"get to work" is an idiomatic phrase meaning "start working". "work" is actually a noun there.

BillJ · Answer

seagullIn the warm months, the soldiers enjoyed being outside. When winter came, they got to work building rustic huts to live in.

Q1 Is the "work" in the second sentence a transitive verb? I mean, is this verb phrase close in meaning to "do the activity of building rustic huts to live in" ?

No, “work” is a catenative verb used intransitively here. The non-finite subordinate clause “building rustic huts …” is not an object but catenative complement of “work”.

seagullQ2 How does the construction "got to work" work in the last sentence? Is this close to "began to work"?

"Get to x” is an informal verbal idiom with a meaning similar to "embarked upon", "commenced", “permitted”, "instructed to do something" etc. The first of those meanings seems applicable in this case.

Syntactically, “get” is a catenative verb taking infinitival and other non-finite clauses as catenative complement, so the structure is "get" (head verb) + "to work" (infinitival clause as catenative complement).

Note that "to" is a subordinator here, not a preposition.

The transitive verb "work"

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