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I've reached an impasse with my girlfriend (both non-native speakers) about this sentence she used:

Maybe we didn't have enough of it for it to become routine again and help measuring time

To me, the use of "measuring time" instead of "measure time" after "help" is intuitively wrong. Alternatively you could use "help with/in measuring time". She insists that "help measuring time" is correct because "measuring" is an argument of help.

If possible can we get a syntactical explanation of this issue?

Radu
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  • I like it as is. It is reasonably parallel with become routine again. – Yosef Baskin Jan 18 '22 at 20:14
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    As Tinfoil Hat said in their answer, the verb help takes only an infinitival (with or without to) as a complement in catenative constructions. One should not confuse such constructions with superficially similar ones where help is a noun, such as Since this is a pretty large house, I figured she could use help measuring* so I offered.* – linguisticturn Jan 18 '22 at 22:50
  • (The sentence Since this is a pretty large house…. comes from here.) – linguisticturn Jan 18 '22 at 23:08
  • 'Maybe we didn't have enough of it for it to become routine again' seems unnatural. What is 'it'? If there are different usages (one referential, one non-referential), this needs rephrasing. – Edwin Ashworth Jan 19 '22 at 17:05
  • Does this answer your question? What is the function of MIGHT , HELP and LEAVE here? ['Help is a catenative verb that may be followed by a bare infinitive (leave) or a to-infinitive (to leave).'] – Edwin Ashworth Jan 19 '22 at 17:09
  • This sounds like conversational English, and honestly, hard to parse when written. Rather than dissect the sentence, I'd ask "Can you explain?". – jimm101 Jan 24 '22 at 02:15

1 Answers1

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Help is a catenative (“chaining”) verb that is followed by an infinitive, where the to marker is optional:

Maybe we didn’t have enough of it for it to . . . help measure time.

Some catenative verbs are followed by an infinitive, others by a gerund, and still others by either (with or without a change of meaning).

The non-native speaker will need to memorize. Here’s a list: Verbs Followed by Gerunds and Infinitives.

Tinfoil Hat
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  • Here is another helpful list of catenative verbs, classified by what kind of complement they take. – linguisticturn Jan 18 '22 at 22:45
  • In its classification of catenative verbs, CGEL says (p. 1229) that help belongs to class 2Ai: 'catenative verbs appearing in both simple and complex constructions, to-infinitival but not gerund-participial, and plain-complex, with ordinary object' (where help gets an annotation '(B)', for 'bare', meaning 'bare infinitival', meaning that to is optional). – linguisticturn Jan 18 '22 at 23:17