English grammar question

[Querneus]

Can anyone think of a "to infinitive" verb that can't take the object "it", or a bare infinitive verb that can?

I hear it.
I hear him sing.

I make it.
I make Rover sit.

?

Those aren't bare infinitives, rather that's just the way you conjugate those verbs for present tense first person singular. "She hears it", "She makes it" etc. a bare infinitive would be something like "She let him walk to the store." or "Please go to the store."

Cainntear used terminology that's a bit hard to follow, but if you read the rest of his/her post, you'll see that by "bare infinitive verb" he/she actually meant "a verb that takes a (complement clause with a) bare infinitive". So smallwhite's reply is relevant.

[aokoye]

Can anyone think of a "to infinitive" verb that can't take the object "it", or a bare infinitive verb that can?

I hear it.
I hear him sing.

I make it.
I make Rover sit.

?

Those aren't bare infinitives, rather that's just the way you conjugate those verbs for present tense first person singular. "She hears it", "She makes it" etc. a bare infinitive would be something like "She let him walk to the store." or "Please go to the store."

Cainntear used terminology that's a bit hard to follow, but if you read the rest of his/her post, you'll see that by "bare infinitive verb" he/she actually meant "a verb that takes a (complement clause with a) bare infinitive". So smallwhite's reply is relevant.

If you go with Cainntear's explination then yes, smallwhite's comments were relevent. I think the issue for me isn't that what Cainntear was hard to follow, rather that I'm pretty sure the original usage of "bare infinitive" wasn't correct.

[aokoye]

Like most peopke, I never learned the rules about my own native language explicitly and this is a question that's been bothering me for a few days:

I want you to do something.
I allow you to do something.
I let you do something.

In the first two sentences, the second verb is an infinitive, but in the third it isn't. Does anyone know why? Is it idiomatic or is there some other rule that I only know implicitly? Maybe a non-native speaker knows the answer?

I'm glad that I never had to learn English the hard way, it's too complicated.

Somewhere in my syntax notes there is something that explains this....somewhere...

edit: my gut says this has something to do with valency patterns (which people touched on), "to" as a preposition, and null prepositions but I have a feeling I could be wrong. I'd need to do more thumbing through of a textbook or two.

[Jbean]

Well thank you for the discussion. Very interesting.

I was an engineer in college. Numbers are so predictable.