Author Topic: Which one is correct?  (Read 3123 times)

Sky

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Which one is correct?
« on: October 11, 2010, 07:31:07 PM »
1. Let us go to [a, the] cinema.

2. To my mind, essay is a means of communication using a framework that consists of organization, examples, analogies, relationships, and other elements to help illustrate one's ideas. Can you explain the usage of the two verbs "help and illustrate" in the sentence?

Sky

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Re: Which one is correct?
« Reply #1 on: October 12, 2010, 09:36:35 PM »
 :(

Joe Carillo

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Re: Which one is correct?
« Reply #2 on: October 13, 2010, 06:31:26 AM »
Sorry for this delayed response, Sky. I was out of the country for the past seven days and just got back to Manila last night.

Here’s what I think about your questions:

1. The normal, idiomatic construction of Sentence 1 uses the definite article “the”: “Let us go to the cinema.” This is because the cinema referred to here refers to “a motion-picture theater” or “movie house,” something that’s definite or previously specified by circumstance—meaning that both the speaker and the listener or listeners already know which movie house is being referred to. It would be different if the speaker said this instead: “Let us go to a movie.” The indefinite article “a” will be called for because it isn’t definite yet which movie they will want to see.

2. About this sentence: “To my mind, essay is a means of communication using a framework that consists of organization, examples, analogies, relationships, and other elements to help illustrate one’s ideas.” Here, “to help” is an infinitive and “illustrate one’s ideas” is an adverbial phrase modifying that infinitive. Another way of looking at that construction is that in the infinitive phrase “to help illustrate one’s ideas,” “to help” and “illustrate” are both infinitives—but the former is a “full infinitive” and the latter, a “bare infinitive.” This is because the phrase “to help illustrate one’s ideas” is actually an elliptical form of “to help to illustrate one’s ideas” with the “to” in “to illustrate” dropped, making it a bare infinitive. (Click this link to an earlier discussion of bare infinitives in the Forum.)