This 29th collection of students’ pearls of wisdom, laboriously digitised from hand-written papers, demonstrates once again how students new to the study of language speculate about grammar after having imperfectly absorbed what their teachers think they have taught them.

Test Question—the word ‘to’

Analyse the different word classes of the word ‘to’ in the following data.

1. She was bored to death.
2. Nobody wants to die too soon.

Answers

• a. ‘death’ is not a verb and ‘to death’ is a prepositional marker.

• a. ‘to’ is a preposition because it doesn’t affect the tense of ‘death’.

• a. The word following ‘to’ is always infinite, so the word ‘death’ is in its base form.

• b. The verb following ‘to’ is in the base form and not in the past participate because it is more like making a statement.

• b. ‘to’ is here used to express a wish, therefore it is a proposition.

• b. ‘to’ acts as an auxiliary verb constraining ‘die’.

• Prepositions tell the direction of the action only, e.g. under the tree. Hence ‘the tree’ and ‘death’ in a. is the noun phrase. In b., ‘to’ is a finite form of the verb.

• In ‘to death’, ‘to’ is a preposition because death is non-finite. In b. ‘to’ is a modal, the base form is known as the verb ‘to be’.

• The infinitive marker must precede a noun and not a verb, that’s why it can’t work in *She was stoned to die. Stoned to death is a preposition because she is already dead.

• ‘to’ is a prepositional word and ‘too’ is just an adverbial which is redundant.

More to come...

	Linguistics and Television—C. Robson
	Degenerative Grammar—Our Current State of Linguistic Degradation—D. T. R. O’Rait, D. Bauch, and Wayne N. DeKay
	SpecGram Vol CLXVI, No 4 Contents