English Language & Usage Asked on December 26, 2020
I am currently working on the English idiomatic phrase "Someone is said (to do/to be doing/to have done) something," and, try as I might, I cannot find any worthwhile piece of information about the question I am asking myself.
Provided that…
what, then, does "It is said that John will leave for good." become? Is there anything in English like a future infinitive?
John is said to be to leave for good. (?)
John is to leave for good it is said, would be my first thought. Although, it is not natural in my head.
Answered by Karel on December 26, 2020
“John is said to be going to leave for good” is the closest I can suggest. Here is relevant material from the Cambridge dictionary ...
Future: be going to (I am going to work)
Grammar > Verbs > Tenses and time > Future > Future: be going to (I am going to work) from English Grammar Today
We use “be going to” + the base form of the verb:
I’m going to take a few exams at the end of the year.
It’s going to be difficult to get a job during the summer as the tourist industry is suffering from the economic downturn.
Answered by Anton on December 26, 2020
In tenses where we can't use auxiliary verbs, will is replaced by going to:
John is said to be going to leave for good.
However, most of the time we'd just use the present continuous, even though it's a future event:
John is said to be leaving for good.
Answered by Peter Shor on December 26, 2020
I don’t mean to detract from the clarity and correctness of Peter Shor’s answer. You should use what he said to use here. I’d like to address the theoretical notion of “future infinitives” in English.
Mind you, Ancient Latin did have infinitives inflected for tense and voice, and Modern Portuguese today has so-called “personal” infinitives which are inflected for person and number.
But not English. You cannot inflect an English infinitive.
Here are the four most common infinitive constructions in English:
There is no future to be seen there. That’s because the infinitive in English — such as be, have, go, or hold — is morphologically inert: it lacks any vestige of inflectional morphology. Try as you may, you cannot fiddle its internal bits to produce some alternate form of the base verb that now expresses traits like its person or number, time or mood, voice or aspect, or even its grammatical relationships with other syntactic constituents.
It’s not that English is incapable of expressing those traits in its infinitive constructions. You simply have to include various extra words along with your infinitives when you want to express those ideas.
So let’s look at some of those specific approaches in the context of your question.
Here we talk about a past event in various ways:
Just keep in mind that this version also talks about a past event in the present, but it has the added connotation that you're sure he did so:
Which leads to this sort of thing:
Here we talk about a future event in various ways:
However, these versions don't sound as good:
That's because we prefer to use be plus a nonfinite verb form to talk about the "normal" present in English. Here are three ways, of which the last is the most customary:
Choosing the last of those, meaning be plus a progressive, makes it easier to convert to your formulation using John is said to plus the infinitive:
Those can all also refer to future events—and arguably, they already do so. You can make this shift in time more obvious by changing today to tomorrow.
Which leads to your be said to forms in this way:
And a very great many they say variants:
The English strategy of adding separate little words for whatever trait you want to express may seem more complicated than in Romance languages like French, Italian, Spanish, or Portuguese, but the flexibility it affords us is more combinatorially expressive in the long run.
Answered by tchrist on December 26, 2020
My dear friend, any language is to be used to express our feelings in the best way. In my opinion we must not think our feelings should be expressed using these particular words or so. Come to your question still, we can express this as:
Answered by user399988 on December 26, 2020
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