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I have heard that cognitive verbs such as 'think, believe, consider, suppose, understand, imagine...etc.' should use 'to be + noun' or 'to be + adjective' in the object complement.

She believed him to be a teacher.

She considers him (to be) rich.

Yet, there is a saying that 'to be' cannot be omitted before a noun, but 'to be' can be omitted before an adjective.

Which one is right?

  1. Is 'to be' always something that can be omitted?
  2. Please let me know if there is a subtle difference in meaning between the presence and absence of 'to be'.
fev
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hero yoo
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2 Answers2

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The verb BE can sometimes be omitted in English without losing grammaticality or changing meaning. (guinlist. press)

So, whenever we will agree here that be is omissible, it would mean that neither grammaticality nor meaning will be changed. The omissibility of be between an object and its complement is no easy matter, and it depends on the choice of verbs.

Grammar errors are likely in this area because many verbs whose object can be followed by a complement-like noun or adjective either require mention of to be or forbid it – they do not allow a choice about it.

As for think, it belongs to the category of those verbs that can, "at least sometimes", omit to be before an object complement (whether it is an adjective or noun):

  • Plato considered the world (to be) a copy of reality.

The object here is the world, and the object complement is a copy of reality. Other verbs usable at least sometimes in the same way include many that can have a “descriptive”, “role” or “belief” complement, such as APPOINT, BELIEVE, DECLARE, ELECT, FIND, JUDGE and THINK.

So whether to be can or cannot be omitted is not dictated by the fact that it is followed or not by a noun object complement, but by the verb choice.

But I find your example with believe particular. I don't think She believed him a teacher is common, in fact Gngram finds no instance and I think this is because the object complement (a teacher) does not really express opinion. GNgram did find such instances:

She believed him a monster.

Here opinion is much stronger. Consider seems to be much more prone to omiss to be:

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CONCLUSION: It would be easy to have a set rule and just follow it, but this is one more proof that English does not work this way. The omissibility of to be is dictated by verb choice, by the element of opinion, but also by the behaviour of each verb in part. Also, I think it would be fair to say that the omission of to be before adjectives is much more common than before nouns, but the latter can and does sometimes occur within the boundaries of grammaticality.

fev
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Here are your two hypotheses:

A. When followed by 'Object (O) + to be + Object Complement (OC)', cognitive verbs such as think, believe, consider, suppose, understand, imagine, etc. should use a noun phrase (NP) or an adjective phrase (AdjP) as OC.

B. In the structure 'cognitive verb + O + to be + OC', to be cannot be omitted when OC = NP, but can be omitted when OC = AdjP.

Before answering the question, let me make it clear that hypotheses A and B are not terribly accurate. Firstly, those verbs are so called not because of their syntactic behaviors but because of their semantics. Just because you can lump them together under the same semantic group doesn't mean that their syntactic behavior will be the same.

For example, think can rarely be followed by 'O + to be + OC':

(1) ?She thought him to be a teacher.

(1) is unidiomatic at best and can be thought of as a counterexample of hypothesis A.

Hypothesis B presumes that the structure with to be is somehow more readily allowed than the one without. But that presumption is wrong in the case of think:

(1') She thought him a teacher.

Although (1) is ill-formed, (1') is well-formed albeit less idiomatic than (1''):

(1'') She thought he was a teacher.

Likewise:

(2) ?She thought him to be rich.

(2') She thought him rich.

(2'') She thought he was rich.

So it's not like that the structure with to be is always possible and that you only have to figure out when you can omit to be.

Having said all that, in order to answer your question, let's just focus on those verbs that allow the structure 'cognitive verb + O + to be + OC' with or without to be.

In (3)-(5) and (3')-(5'), an AdjP can be OC, but an NP can be OC unless the NP is referential (i.e., referring to a particular person, thing, etc.)

(3) She considers him to be rich/a teacher/Steve Jobs.

(4) She supposes him to be rich/a teacher/Steve Jobs.

(5) She imagines him to be rich/a teacher/Steve Jobs.

(3') She considers him rich/a teacher/??Steve Jobs.

(4') She supposes him rich/a teacher/??Steve Jobs.

(5') She imagines him rich/a teacher/??Steve Jobs.

Since Steve Jobs refers to a particular person, to be is required.

JK2
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