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Infinitives- Adjectives, Nouns, Adverbs?
I'm having a lot of difficulty differentiating the difference between the uses of infinitive phrases.
For example, what would the following sentence be, "The team's fans hope to see a victory." Would the infinitive "to see" be used as an adjective or something?
And also, "I was sorry to hear about her dad cat." Would "to hear" be an adjective also?
Any help would be great to clear up my questions on these phrases.
3 Answers
- Gary BLv 67 years agoFavorite Answer
Your second sentence is less ambiguous, so let's start with that.
- I was sorry to hear about her dead cat.
The infinitive phrase is "to hear about her dead cat". Inside this phrase we have the infinitive "to hear" and the prepositional phrase "about her dead cat". It's the entire phrase, not merely the infinitive, that modifies "sorry".
"Sorry" is an adjective. Since the infinitive phrase modifies an adjective, it is an adverbial infinitive phrase.
Not ever infinitive phrase is a modifier. Some act as nouns. This makes the sentence "The team's fans hope to see a victory" grammatically ambiguous. On the one hand, "to see a victory" could be a modifier. On the other hand, it could be an object.
If we choose to see it as an object, then it is the direct object of the verb "hope". If it is a modifier, then it modifies this same verb.
I can't determine whether this infinitive phrase is adverbial or nominative. Regardless of whether it is an object or a modifier, the overall sense of the sentence remains the same. If the phrase is nominative, then the sentence means something like "The team's fans hope that they see a victory". If the phrase is adverbial, then the sentence means something like "The team's fans hope for seeing a victory". There is no noticeable semantic difference to match the grammatical difference.
