DEAR RICHARD: Now retired from 50 years of college teaching and having no more student papers to grade and critique, I address your recent U-T column. I so enjoy, appreciate, and support your language ...

An "infinitive" in English is a verb preceded by the word to, as in to study. Many English verbs can be followed by a grammatical structure that contains an infinitive and is known as an "infinitive ...

The imperative is a verb form that is used to give orders, instructions, advice, encouragement etc. It's formed by using the ...

Reader Don in Los Angeles County wrote recently with a question about a well-known grammar issue called a “split infinitive.” “I learned about them 50 years ago and I am somewhat sensitive about them ...

Language Acquisition, Vol. 14, No. 1 (2007), pp. 75-113 (39 pages) This article focuses on the meaning of nonfinite clauses ("root infinitives") in Dutch and English child language. I present ...

You’ve probably heard the old story about the pedant who dared to tinker with Winston Churchill’s writing because the great man had ended a sentence with a preposition. Churchill’s scribbled response: ...

JUST why the split, cleft, gashed, hashed, or mangled infinitive should have become the rallying point it is for contempt and fury — on both sides of the argument — it is hard to say. Possibly the ...

A refereed publication, The Modern Language Journal is dedicated to promoting scholarly exchange among teachers and researchers of all modern foreign languages and English as a second language. This ...

When you look up a verb in the dictionary what you find is the verb in the infinitive form. In English it’s two words - ‘to swim’ - but in German it’s just the one schwimmen. In German, there’s a ...

When you look up a verb in the dictionary you find the infinitive form.‎ In English it’s made up of two words: to swim. ‎ But in French it’s just one, nager. ‎ And if you want to say something more ...