Teacher Discussion Forums

Everybody,

I feel fairly confident what I put in the title is grammatically correct, but I don't have a clue as to why... Anybody got an explanation? It feels like it should be really obvious, but just can't work it out.

More examples:
I saw him disappear.
I saw the coin disappear.

James

P.S. Checked on British National corpus, it's in common use...

Verbs that refer to the senses can often be used either with the bare infinitive or with the -ing form.

The difference in meaning is whether the action referred to is all the action or some of it:

I saw three men build a house (They built a house. I saw the whole thing)

I saw three men building a house (They were building a house but I only witnessed a part of it)

So your "I saw him disappear" is subtly different from "I saw him disappearing".

It's a neat little structure. "I saw him disappearing" can be explained by elision "I saw him when he was disappearing". Typical PSimp/PCont structure. But "I saw him disappear" is an example of verb number two being the unadorned base form when verb number one isn't some kind of auxiliary often with modality, which is always interesting to people who like that kind of thing (me and Andrew!).

Thanks, that was a great answer and the more I think about it, the more examples I can think of...

James