“Iambics march from short to long; / With a leap and a bound the swift Anapests throng”

[larryhammer]

(Tangentially sparked by the previous post.) As a professional copy editor, I have a decent grasp of English grammar and syntax, but this one has me stumped.

Why is it that, for phrases in the form “{causative} {object} {verb},” when {causative} is “make” or “have” the verb is in stem form (“make him stop”) but when it’s “require” or “cause” it’s in infinitive form (“require him to stop”)? You can categorize most* other verbs of causation into these two bins.

Why these two separate syntaxes for what’s apparently the same structure?


* A sneaky one is “tell,” which takes an infinitive—except when it takes what looks like a stem but actually is an imperative in an unmarked direct quotation, “tell him stop.”

---L.

Subject quote from Metrical Feet: A Lesson for a Boy, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Comments

[mme_n_b]

Is it because for "make" and "have" you are doing something to him, but for "require" and "tell" you are having him do something and there's even a possibility that he won't?

[cmcmck]

In older English forms the equivalent would have been 'make him to stop'.

And in English english even now it's 'tell him to stop'.