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TENSES

 
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KejciorF



Joined: 21 Jan 2006
Posts: 91

PostPosted: Sat Jan 13, 2007 12:32 pm    Post subject: TENSES Reply with quote

HI,

can you tell me which tense form is correct, what kind of tense it it and why it is correct.

1. The minister WAS TO HAVE TALKED / WAS TO TALK to the strikers, but he failed to arrive.

2. The manager obhected to PAYING / PAY the new employees in advance.

TIA,

Kate.
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buddhaheart



Joined: 13 Jan 2007
Posts: 195
Location: Vancouver, BC Canada

PostPosted: Sat Jan 13, 2007 10:27 pm    Post subject: TENSES Reply with quote

Depending on the meaning or intent of your 1st sentence, both could be correct.

If you were talking to a friend today about the fact that the minister was a no-show during the strike yesterday or some other time in the past, you could say, �The minister WAS TO HAVE TALKED to the strikers, but he failed to arrive.�

The perfect infinitive �TO HAVE TALKED� indicates the action (talking) could have just started &/or completed after this time yesterday or some other time in the past.

Now you could be in the strike with a friend waiting anxiously for the minister to arrive. He (or she) was a no show. You could lament and say to a reporter, �The minister WAS TO TALK to the strikers, but he failed to arrive (or did not arrive).�

� TO TALK � is a simple �gerundial� or qualifying infinitive. It does not convey any perfect or progressive aspect of the meaning. In the second situation, you were merely telling the fact that the minister was supposed to be there to talk to the strikers at the time but he failed to show.

As a rule, do not use perfect infinitive if it does not refer to a time prior to that expressed by the finite verb.

Now to your 2nd question. �The manager objected to PAYING the new employees in advance� is the grammatically correct version.

The fact that the �to� here is not the marker of an infinitive as in �to pay�, it is a preposition. What follows a preposition must be a noun, noun phrase or pronoun. Therefore �pay� must be a gerund (verb-noun) in " PAY the new employees in advance� to make it a noun phrase and hence "PAYING the new employees in advance."

Take another example to illustrate the point. It�s ok to say �The manager objected TO SMOKING in the shop� but not �The manager objected TO SMOKE in the shop.�

Hope this help.

BUDDHAHEART
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2006



Joined: 27 Nov 2006
Posts: 610

PostPosted: Sun Jan 14, 2007 1:06 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Further to what buddhaheart said:
"was to talk" is short for 'was (supposed)(going)(planning) to talk'.

Both of the phrases, "was to have talked" and "was to talk', are correct and have the same meaning in that sentence because they both are said after the minister failed to arrive and the chance for him to talk had passed.
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