I think that the word “to” serves some function in the infinitive, but does that mean that it has no meaning, in and of itself? I can’t seem to figure out what it means when it’s used that way. Does it mean absolutely nothing? That seems sort of strange, although I feel as if there are a few other instances of that. (One example might be in the phrase “there are.” The word, “there” doesn’t seem to mean anything.) But, to my question - what does “to” mean, if anything?
It can sometimes indicate purpose, the answer to “Why?”
“She went out to dance with her friends.” Why did she go out ? “To dance with her friends”.
She stopped to ask for directions." Why did she stop ? “To ask for directions.”
Well, its other use is as a preposition indicating movement closer to the object of the clause, but I don’t think that’s what you had in mind.
Really, the only thing it means in “to dance” is to mark the verb as infinitive. English doesn’t have many case markers, so it’s not surprising that the ones it does have look a little weird. Contrast this with a marker-heavy language like Japanese:
Watashi wa inu o mita.
I saw a dog.
Watashi means I, inu means dog, and mita is saw (as in past tense of see, to be completely unambiguous). Wa and o mean absolutely nothing by themselves; their sole purpose is to mark the word they follow as the topic/subject of the sentence (wa) or the direct object of the sentence (o). There’s many different such markers in Japanese that simply don’t appear in English; we tend to use position within the sentence and subclauses to determine case. To is one of the few we do have.
It’s a particle marking the use of the infinitive form of the verb in some contexts. Japanese, as mentioned by Bosstone, uses particles a lot more than English does, and Japanese particles are often translated as prepositions or conjunctions – but sometimes just indicate a grammatical role that is conveyed by word order in English. But in this case “to” is just marking the infinitive form of the verb. (There are very few particles in English, and the term isn’t used in the more traditional grammar of English).
Particle, thank you. I knew there was something a little more specific than case marker, but it wasn’t coming to me right at the moment.
As English speakers, we’re not used to thinking of words as a set. If there’s two words, there must be two meanings, right? Not in this case. “To dance” is one, single unit. If you think that “to” doesn’t have a meaning in this instance, may I ask why you think “dance” does?
I guess it’s only because “dance” evokes a concept, one that’s relevant to its use in any particular situation, e.g. “I am going to dance.” Whereas “to” doesn’t evoke much of anything, and it’s that lack of meaning that intrigues me.
I don’t understand why English speakers aren’t more used to this. Our verbs are more likely to need word sets than many foreign languages - “to” and “have” are particularly common in this regard.
I’m tempted to blame it on education, but my sense from people who went through the sentence-diagramming era is that they didn’t understand it either. For me, I learned more about English grammar in my high school Spanish classes than I ever learned in a dozen years of English. Most of my English teachers seemed more interested in teaching us to spell or to write poems like e e cummings than in explaining silly things like grammar.
It’s interesting to note that for many people learning English as a foreign language, the to verb construction for infinitives is apparently logically interchangeable with the gerund construction verbing. This is grammatical in most English constructions but occasionally will sound a bit odd. To a native speaker.
“I like to cook.” == “I like cooking.”
“I enjoy to run.” not so much == “I enjoy running.”
And “I want to run” but not “I want running.”
Much bolder example, thank you.
While I cannot defend the nature of our educational practices, I don’t think that’s the problem here. I believe that in general, we understand that words have meaning. It’s rare to find one that does not. That’s all that I’m pointing to. Although, maybe, if when I was in school, some teacher had pointed that out, I’d not be so intrigued by my little discovery. By the way, a famous study done for the National Council of Teachers of English examined years and years of research on sentence diagramming. And they were able to prove that teaching sentence diagramming is very effective in developing the ability to diagram sentences. No connection could be made, however, to the ability to read or write. And, by the way, it’s *still *in a lot of curricula.
English teacher checking in.
I agree about the Spanish thing; I learned more English when taking Spanish in college than I ever did anywhere else. Learning a foreign language makes you learn all the grammatical stuff.
Vis-a-vis sentence diagramming-
I don’t have my developmental college classes do it, but it can serve a purpose; it can serve to illustrate how words in a sentence relate to one another. One problem I run into is when it comes time to ask “okay, what word is XXX modifying?” a lot of students are clueless. I generally use arrows to point things out, but sentence diagramming would seemingly work, too.
Treeing sentences in X-bar schema (a la linguistics) could also be useful, but it’s a little too technical for my classes. I think X-bar is more logical than traditional diagramming, though.
The trend now, as far as I know, is in sentence combining. Start with simple sentences and work up to compound-complex, identifying all of the parts of speech/parts of sentence as you go. I kind of discovered its effectiveness on my own (I start developmental classes with “Jesus wept” and work up from there, but there is some research that suggests that it is effective.
YMMV.
There’s a difference, however, between content words and function words. Content is evocative with easy definitions: nouns, adjectives, verbs, adverbs.
Function words don’t have direct meaning as such. All they do is give language its structure and allow us to make sense of how the content words fit together. They’re harder to define in a way that makes sense, but native speakers never have trouble with them. “I ought to have gone to the store” means something specific and different from “I have had to go to the store” and both of those mean something different from “I went to the store.” The same content, “I”, “go”, and “store” are used in all of them, but the function words change the meaning around. We know what all three sentences mean and can probably sensibly explain the meaning behind each one, yet I dare you to try to define exactly what “ought”, “have”, and “had”, as well as the various "to"s, mean individually in those sentences.
Another such particle (I think they’re technically called “enclitics” but I could be wrong) is “that” introducing a relative clause. It does not have a grammatical function, only a syntactic one – it’s a flag that says “subordinate clause following”, not a word carrying meaning or standing for one that does. Consider the following (which has fun with "that that"s):
“This man said that that woamn thought that that dog was hers, not his,” he said, gesticulating wildly.
The second “that” in each pair contrasts with “this” to flag relative location to the speaker – but what exactly does the first “that” in each pair mean?
It means “here is the start of a noun clause”, so it does seems to be a particle when used that way. (The word “that” can also be an adjective or pronoun, but isn’t in this context).