A subject that came up in a linguistics class I’m taking. What does it mean if you say:
“Adam promised Betty to be on time.”
Is Adam promising to Betty that he will be on time, or is Adam promising to someone else that Betty will be on time?
Or is this sentence not even grammatical?
I would go with the first one, though I could see how one could make a case for the second also being correct. Seems awkward, though.
In my opinion it’s slightly ambiguous, but only slightly, so I voted for Adam; in usage that I am familiar with, it might have said:
Adam promised Betty that he would be on time; or
Adam promised to be on time.
For the other meaning, it pretty much would have had to say:
Adam promised that Betty would be on time.
Probably this is a location thing, and Brits or Aussies or someone would say it your way if they were promising for someone else; but I’ve never heard it.
Roddy
IME, a native speaker of American English would understand the sentence to mean that Adam is making a promise to Betty that he will be on time. However, the sentence also strikes me (a native speaker of American English) as, if not outright ungrammatical, nonstandard.
Personally, I would say “Adam promised Betty that he would be on time” or “Adam promised to be on time,” where “to Betty” is understood. If I thought there might be some confusion about, it might come out something like, “Adam promised to be on time. He promised Betty [as opposed to Veronica], I mean.”
Adam promised Betty to be on time.
I don’t see how it could be anything but Adam promising Betty. Otherwise, it would be “Adam promised (that) Betty would be on time.”
It means Adam said to Betty, “I promise, Betty, to be on time.”
I can see how it *might *mean that Adam said, “I promise, Hortense, that Betty will be on time.” But if it meant that, I would consider it an ungrammatical construction. In that case, I would say, “Adam promised Betty would be on time.”
Too much trouble to diagram on a message board, but my first crack at it would be:
Adam (subject)
promised (verb)
Betty (indirect object)
to be on time (infinitive phrase functioning as direct object)
No matter when Adam arrives, I’ll bet he has to wait for Betty to finish getting things sorted out.
And later, Adam prayed Betty would only be late.
Crap…I answered ‘Adam’, as in ‘this is a shitty sentence but he is promising Betty he’ll be on time’. However, I can now hear, in a slightly old-fashioned way of writing, that the sentence does seem grammatically correct if he’s promising that Betty will be on time.
As everyone has said, this is not a particularly pleasing formulation. I voted Betty, it seems less poorly-formed that way.
Adam made a promise to Betty Tobeontime, whose name was misspelled.
Yes. If instead (Betty to be on time) were the direct object a different form of to be would be required.
Agreed. Adam promised to Betty… would be proper and perhaps a bit clearer, but dropping the to and saying Adam promised Betty… is quite common, probably how it’s said 90+% of the time. Adam promised Betty would be on time is how I expect anyone would phrase it for the other meaning.
It should be “Archie promised Betty…,” anyway.
If it were “Adam promised Betty be on time” I could see it as a pseudo pre-1900 phrasing to mean Betty would be on time, but not as it stand with the “to” in there.
Speaking as a Brit, I would say either:
Adam promised Betty that he would be punctual
Adam promised that Betty would be punctual
I am also a native speaker of American English. The sentence was being used as an example in our textbook, and I was the only one in the class who got the ‘Adam is promising that Betty will be on time’ reading of the sentence. My professor said she could sort of see it with the passivized version: ‘Betty was promised by Adam to be on time.’
Also, ‘Adam promised to be on time’ is ungrammatical for me: I can only say ‘Adam promised that he would be on time’. We did realize that a lot of the examples in that particular chapter seemed to be on the edge of acceptability; it depended on your dialect/idiolect as to whether you could say them.
Stupidly awkward phrasing, and not a sentence I could imagine uttering, but, to me, it means that Adam is promising to Betty that he will be on time. The other reading is possible, but less likely. I would phrase both possibilities as “Adam promised Betty (that) he’d be on time” and “Adam promised that Betty would be on time.”
Neither. It’s just a promise.