ASSist TO, HELP TO, etc.

RonButters at AOL.COM RonButters at AOL.COM
Mon Feb 4 18:55:40 UTC 2002


In a message dated 1/9/02 11:31:10 AM, vneufeldt at MERRIAM-WEBSTER.COM writes:

<< 'Assist' has not usually been used with an infinitive, either with

or without 'to'.  Both "assist aspirants prepare for college" and "assist

aspirants to prepare for college" sound odd to me, and the former sounds

*really* odd.


Victoria >>

AND

In a message dated 1/9/02 7:08:36 PM,
juengling_fritz at SMTPGATE.SALKEIZ.K12.OR.US writes:

<< for years I have been taking notice of whether people write "help...to +
verb" or simply "help ...verb." I do not know what grammar books suggest, but
the 'to' seems wordy and unnecessary and I leave it out of both my writing
and speech. >>

Neither ASSIST TO nor HELP TO sounds particularly strange to me, any more
than WANT TO. A number of years ago I did I study in AMERICAN SPEECH of the
Southern-States English construction HAVE TO, as in "They almost had the
ceiling to fall on their heads" or "Shall I have him to call you?" (Both of
these constructions are quite common in North Carolina, but not in the
North.)  Using questionnaire methodology, we sampled a fairly large number of
Duke students from various parts of the country and documented the fact that
HELP TO and HELP are used almost interchangeably by most Americans. We did
not sample ASSIST (TO), but I would guess that a lot of people would accept
it because of the close semantic relationship with HELP.

I imagine that one could do a Nexis search that would yield interesting data
for all three --HAVE (TO), HELP (TO), and ASSIST (TO).

Maybe I'll ask my students do this as an extra-credit project.



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