I had a Grammar homework and I was asked to fill in the gap of the following sentence :
My father ... subscribe to the Newsweek.
I had been given four options and only one of them fits in with the sentence, they are as follows :
A- Said to me
B- Suggested that I
C- Suggests me to
D- Encouraged me
I had chosen the answer "C" but I discovered later that the teacher considered it as incorrect, and that "B" is the appropriate answer, which made me so confused. Could you please explain to me why ?
This has a simple answer: of those four answers only suggested that I fits the blank. None of the other answers has a form which the verb suggest 'licenses'—permits.
But there are two questions hiding behind the one you ask, which will in the long run be more important to you as a student of English.
Of course we can't read your mind, and we have no idea what exactly you have learned in your studies. But it's a pretty safe bet that you were reasoning by analogy to more familiar constructions—perhaps one or more of these:
My father tells me to do such-and-such ...
My father asks me to do such-and-such ...
My father orders me to do such-and-such ...
My father urges me to do such-and-such ...
My father encourages me to do such-and-such ...
The problem with this sort of reasoning is that it won't work, or if it does work, it's pure coincidence. Every verb has its own pattern of 'complementation'—the sorts of phrases and clauses which it licenses to complete its thought. For instance, suggest licenses these sorts of complement:
noun phrases — My father suggested a subscription to Newsweek. In this case it's an object rather than a complement.
gerund clauses — My father suggested subscribing to Newsweek.
mandative finite clauses — My father suggested (that) I/we/he subscribe to Newsweek.
Some "authorities" say that the mandative one, with 'subscribe', is a use of the subjunctive, others that it's a use of the infinitive. I'm usually convinced by whichever I read last; but it doesn't really matter what you call it as long you are aware that suggest does not license infinitival clauses in which the infinitive is marked with to.
The important thing is that you can't reason from another verb's complementation pattern, even if the other verb means exactly the same thing. So the second question is
Unfortunately, there's no easy answer. Each verb's complementation pattern has to be learned individually.
But it's not that hard to find out what sorts of complement a verb licenses. Whenever you learn a new verb (or are unsure about an old one), start by looking it up in a good dictionary, one that gives you example sentences; that will give you at least one acceptable complement. For more examples look in a corpus such as Google Books, or a more carefully curated formal corpus like those at BYU, and search on "he VERBed"—that will give you a full range of acceptable complements, and will usually provide you many more clues to acceptable uses.
Subordination in English is one of the more complex areas of the grammar, and I didn't study this until my honours year. That anyone ever gets is is amazing.
Suggest (this particular version anyway) takes a full S (sentence) as a complement, subordinated by an optional that. So in effect, when you see a sentence with suggest in it, you should be able to remove everything up to suggest(s) (that), and the result should be complete, and grammatical.
My father suggested that I subscribe to Newsweek.
In the above, I subscribe to Newsweek is a fully complete, grammatical sentence.
Encourage works differently. It does not take a complete S as its complement; it takes what Lexical-Functional Grammar calls an XCOMP, which is essentially a non-finite verb phrase. As it's a verb phrase, it lacks an agent (ordinarily mapped to subject), which it must absorb from the matrix clause, and it lacks tense inflection, which it inherits from the matrix clause.
Consider the following:
I subscribe to Newsweek.
I is the agent, and Newsweek is the, well, patient (not exactly, but it'll do). Agent maps to subject, patient maps to object. Easy.
He encouraged [ me to subscribe to Newsweek ]
Here, me is the agent of subscribe, but it comes out as me rather than I, the accusative form. What's happening here is that the matrix clause he encouraged me supplies its object, me, to the subordinated clause to act as the agent of the verb subscribe.
To make matters worse, there are intransitive verbs that take an XCOMP as well, but in those scenarios, there's no object of the matrix clause to act as the agent of the subordinate clause, so instead it uses the subject of the matrix clause:
I promise to do the dishes.
It is I that does the dishes, which that clause gets from the matrix clause.
So to sum, B is correct. D would have been correct if it had been encouraged me to.
Which verbs work like suggest and which like encourage is just something that you have to learn; there's no pattern to it, it's simply arbitrary.
(C) is wrong because "suggest", just like other verbs of Latin origin (describe, explain, propose, indicate, announce, communicate, confess, dictate, prove, reveal, transmit), always takes the indirect object ("me", in this case) with the preposition "to", whether the indirect object is placed before or after the direct object. (C) is also wrong because it never takes "to"-infinitival but gerundial complements.
You could say -- but it would be unnecessarily redundant because of the coexistence of "me" and "I" -- the following:
Of the four options provided, only (B) is grammatical. Additionally, you could say:
E- My father suggests my subscribing to the Newsweek.
Option A would work if subscribe to the Newsweek were put into direct speech - but not in indirect speech.
Option B is correct: My father suggested (what?) - that I subscribe to the Newsweek.
Option C is wrong because (as Jim remarks) you can't suggest me to. You can:
Suggest (that) I/we/he/she/they close the door
but not me and not to close the door.
Option C would work with a different verb than suggest:
My father advised/counselled/encouraged me to subscribe to the Newsweek.
Option D would have been correct if it had read: encouraged me to subscribe to the Newsweek. To was missing.
