Dave's ESL Cafe's Student Discussion Forums

[Marrion]

I don't know why to buy those bolls.

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Is this sentence awkward or wrong?

[dragn]

Hi Marrion,

Can you describe the intended meaning? (And double check your spelling.)

dragn

[zorro (4)]

Can you imagine a situation where you might say that?

I don't know why to buy x?

I think for the very few situations you might want to say this, you should normally say;

I don't know why I should buy x?

My first instinct was to take out why and replace it with where. That would be fine then.

[Marrion]

I don't know why to + infinitive?
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I think that it is not ackward, but wrong.

I can say;

I don't know what to do.
I don't know where to go with her.
I don't know when to meet him.
.
.
.

But I don't know why to meet him.<--This sentence is not correct, because "why" is never used with "to-infinitive".

Are you agree with me?

[zorro (4)]

Hi Marion,

I agree with you. why + infinitive with to is not correct.

Take a look at the British National Corpus search results here.

You will notice that this search only turned out 27 examples. This should be a warning when the results are so low. It means that through searching millions of examples, the corpus only found this structure 27 times. Compare this with a search of how + to, and there are 9,000+ results.

I love the Corpus because if you ever have a query of usage, you can simply type it into the search function and it shows you how people use structures in writing and speaking.

Give it a go next time you have a query.

Corpus

[Marrion]

I got it perfectly.^0^//

Thank you very much.


May God bless you!! And Good luck to you!!