How do you do? My name is Zack, an English illiterate. I'm from Hong Kong.
This is my first time to post a topic here. First of all, in English, as is well-known, catenative verbs are verbs followed by another nonfinite verbs (either infinitives or gerunds) in the same clause; 'He stops to smoke', for example, where the verb 'stops' is a catenative verb directly followed by the to-infinitive 'smoke'. In my view, given pragmatics, some catenative verbs may sometime be used in the passive voice followed by an infinitive: you are forbidden to smoke in libraries. Besides, some catenative verbs can rather be followed by bare-infinitive than to-infinitive, directly with or without the optional conjunction 'and', if a language user intend to lay less stress on the duration of the non stative verb followed by; in rhetoric, this stylistic phenomenon is called 'hendiadys', which refers to a subordinative construction that the former word modifies the latter one with the conjunction 'and'.
As in the topic, some catenative verbs vary in meaning, depending on respective forms of the nonfinite verb, i.e. infinitive or gerund. Let's revise the above sentence as below:
(1) He stops to smoke. (The referent stops the current action, like '[to] drink', and then begins another action: to smoke)
(2) He stops smoking. (The referent just stops the current action: smoking)
And then, back to the topic again, both the durative aspect and non-telic aspect are in reference to the weak but valuable concept: lexical aspect, by Zeno Vendler(1957) & Bernard Comrie (1976), as below.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lexical_aspect
As defined by the two scholars, telicity is the property of a verb or verb phrase that presents an action or event as being complete in some sense; those verbs have no natural endpoints and/or involve no change are said to be non-telic. And for durative aspect, it is another property of the verb or verb phrase that allows the incomplete action or event in progress to last for a certain amount of time; in short, it is one of the marker that indicates whether they are allowed to be used in continuous/progress tense.
Then, in my narrow glimpse, I appear to have roughly found out that some catenative verbs cover the above two aspect, like the verb 'mean' in the below examples:
(3) I meant to tell her yesterday, but I forgot. (Intention. I intended to tell her.)
(4) The promotion will mean moving to a new area. (Signify, imply, entail, necessitate.)
Both of the verbs 'mean' have no natural endpoints that the endpoint of action 'intending' in the sentence(3) depends on when the language user is going to stop, and even the thing that the language user implied is constant and not being transitively changed if the sentence(4) keeps grammatical and logical; that why there are no common examples of '(be) meaning' in use <pragmatic view>.
Thus, to decide whether a verb is catenative verbs, not only should the allowance of being followed by a nonfinite verb be considered, but also the absence of natural endpoint implied in themselves, and the allowance of being used in continuous/progress tense.
Have you found out any verb that can be used as catenative verbs, my dearest. Do you think that the above two criteria are problematic and not necessary for (re)discovering and (re)justifying catenative verbs? Let's have a discussion. Thanks a lot.
Best Wishes,
Zack
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