A friend of mine is teaching English in Viet Nam, and her students asked a question, which she referred to me, and so far all are stumped. Of the following sentences, which is correct?
I will help do the dishes.
I will help to do the dishes.
My feeling is that both are correct, but the first is more common. One of her students claimed there is a subtle difference in meaning between the two, but I don’t agree with that opinion. Also, what makes “help” different from “want”. You always “want to do” something, but you can “help do” it.
As for the native speaker test, I like your first sentence “I will help do the dishes,” but I’d be hard pressed to accept the latter as grammatically correct.
My reasoning, well it’s in no small part influenced by helping to a lot of Spanish speakers learn English. Spanish doesn’t muck about with that whole base form + ‘to’ thing to form an infinitive*, and as a result, speakers tend to overcompensate when switching to Eng.
Regarding ‘help’ vs. ‘want’, as pointed out above, these verbs take different complements. Specifically, ‘want’ accepts an infinitival compliment whereas help does not. Of course, this line of reasoning is bunk if you think ‘I will help to do the dishes’ is OK.
And the student who thinks there’s a subtle difference in meaning, well, I’d be inclined to agree with him/her (excepting the fact that I don’t like the sentence in the first place). As I see it there are two potential explanations for his/her thinking:
In both sentences the student reads ‘do’ as verb. In this case changing ‘do’ (bare stem) to ‘to do’ (infinitival) might be interpreted as producing a change in aspect. That’s to say the bare stem doesn’t account for actually commencing the action, but the infinitival does.
2.In the first sentence the student reads ‘do’, as a pro-verb but does not do so for ‘to do’ in the second sentence. This would explain his/her thinking that there’s a difference in the two sentences, but I must admit, I’m at a loss ass to how s/he could come to that conclusion.
Come to think of it, I wouldn’t accept #2 as a reasonable explantion. I think I need to go get me some coffee.
*I can’t, not for the life of me, remember the term for this.
There is little doubt that both forms are correct. So what? There are plenty of examples of two correct structures. I would say that the second is slightly marked, meaning it is less common and that colors its meaning a little bit maybe.
Consider “dare”. “Dare” is an optional modal. “He dare do that” v. “He dares to do that”. But, “Dare he do that?” v. “Does he dare to do that?” In each case it is modal the first time and a verb the second. But “help” is not a modal; it is just a verb that takes a verbal complement either with or without “to”, which makes it a bit unusual, but not seriously. I once saw a classification (by Oxford) of the English verb into 52 classes depending on what kind of complement they took. For example, both “give” and “elect” take two noun complements, but the syntax of them is quite different.
There are a handful words which when used before an infinitive negates the use of “to” - they include (I am doing this from a list I made my reporters so a couple could be missing) “dare,” “hear,” “help,” “let,” “make,” “please,” “see,” and “watch”.
In these cases the “to” is understood rather than stated.
example: The student helped teach.
example: The girl let go of the rope.
OK, so you say “help to do the dishes” is definitely wrong? Your list is somewhat helpful, though for several of those words, I can’t come up with examples of them going before infinitives at all. For example, “make”, “hear”, “see”, and “watch”. I saw walk? I will watch do? Also, “please” only goes before imperatives, not infinitives, though I guess the imperitive and infinitive forms are always the same in English. Still, you don’t mean the verb “to please”, so it’s somewhat out of place on that list.
It’s starting to make more sense to me now. With the provided examples in mind, I can now see how TV Time’s list is useful. Even Achernar’s example, which has an object intervening between the two verbs is relevant because, “he makes me laugh,” but, “he forces me to cry.”
However, we still have gray areas with “dare” and “help”. As Hari Seldon points out, “dare” is an “optional modal”. “He dares predict the collapse of civilization,” and, “he dares to create a colony to survive that collapse,” both sound correct. Is “help” an opitonal modal as well?
