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I am writing to seek clarification on the structure of two specific auxiliaries: "ought" and "used."

  1. Modal auxiliary: "ought"
  2. Marginal auxiliary: "used"

I have encountered some confusion regarding the following constructions:

  • "used + infinitive with to"
  • "ought + infinitive with to"

OR

  • "used to + infinitive without to"
  • "ought to + infinitive without to"

I would greatly appreciate any insights or explanations you can provide to clarify these structures.

  • 1
    A bit of both! This"use" is always followed by a to-infinitival clause, while "ought" is usually (but not always) followed by a to-infinitival clause. The bare infinitival is marginal (found mainly in AmE) and occurs in non-affirmative contexts (particularly negatives) as in Ought we invite them both? – BillJ Mar 16 '24 at 11:14
  • If you're asking whether you need the "infinitive marker" *to* in contexts like "I ought to go now", that linked usage chart should make it clear you really ought o include it. I very rarely encounter the bare infinitive after *ought* in any text less than a century old, and I've never encountered anything like "We used go fishing on Sundays" without *to*. – FumbleFingers Mar 16 '24 at 11:49
  • @BillJ: This looks like an ELL question to me. Given how uncommon the "bare infinitive" is even in constructions like Ought we migrate this to ELL? (AmE only; effectively non-existent in BrE), I don't think learners really need to know that it's even a possibility. – FumbleFingers Mar 16 '24 at 11:55
  • You should try and be more specific what your question is. Asking for "any insights or explanations" is far too vague, and will get downvotes and close votes. What do you need to be clarified? Maybe post a sentence you are unsure about. – Stuart F Mar 16 '24 at 13:29
  • @FumbleFingers That's only because you are in the UK not the US. You shouldna outta been making so many generalizations. :) – tchrist Mar 16 '24 at 13:29
  • Remember that use(d) to has phonemic changes akin to those of have to: /ˈjustə/ works like /ˈhæftə/ in devoicing and stress. Notice also how in all the most careful speech, ought to is invariably a flapped /ˈɔɾə/ somewhat as though it were awed a. – tchrist Mar 16 '24 at 13:37
  • MW has a decent piece on used to. https://www.merriam-webster.com/grammar/is-it-used-to-or-use-to. I'm reasonably comfortable that they did use see each other or he used go there a lot are nonstandard. Ought is more complicated. But I think the OP wants to know about how to parse the to when it does appear. – Phil Sweet Mar 16 '24 at 13:55
  • @tchrist: It may be that as an American you don't find the lack of *to* in Ought we migrate this to ELL? so "quaint" as it is to me. But *ask* was the best verb I could come up with (NGrams produced no infinitives at all](https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Ought+we+ask%2COught+we+to+ask&year_start=1919&year_end=2019&corpus=en-2019&smoothing=3) when I searched for Ought we [asterisk] . So I charted *ask, but as you can see from the actual link, (which because of capital Ought* should be very accurate), not using *to* is *very* unusual. – FumbleFingers Mar 16 '24 at 19:46
  • @FumbleFingers That's not true. You can't actually trust the casing thing when doing direct searches in google books; they're always case insensitive. I quickly found ten easy examples from the past two decades alone. 2010: Ought we do X? 2010: "What ought we do?" I asked. – tchrist Mar 16 '24 at 22:33
  • @FumbleFingers 2015: All the Things a Woman Oughtn't Do. 2014: Nor ought we see ourselves as merely bright or stupid... There are many, many more of these, and richer ones as well, but it's simply not worth pasting you all the references, since I can fit only two per comment. – tchrist Mar 16 '24 at 22:34
  • @FumbleFingers 2008: If you ought not do a thing, then a fortiori, you ought not do it in order to bring such and such about. We need to be able to say that a person did a thing correctly though he ought not have done what he did. For what was then the case is that Alex ought not fire the gun on himself. Alice ought not give her child an alpha-pill in order to kill it. – tchrist Mar 16 '24 at 22:36
  • @tchrist: It may well be that to you, the lack of an infinitive marker is totally unexceptional. But as this NGram clearly shows, "What ought we do?" is very much a minority usage even in AmE (far less common in BrE). I can't see why on earth learners would want to take the usage on board. I'm sure one could find hundreds of written examples without *to* - but by implication, one could just as easily find thousands that do include it! – FumbleFingers Mar 16 '24 at 23:57
  • @FumbleFingers For the simplest reason of all: because there exist native speakers for whom the version with to is not grammatical in certain contexts. But this question could not be less clear. What in the world is "used/ought to + infinitive without to" supposed to mean? That will hafta be answered before we can continue here. – tchrist Mar 17 '24 at 01:33

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