Chapter 10 of our textbooks discusses verbals which act as shortened forms of clauses. There are three types of verbals—infinitives, gerunds, and participles. For this first half of chapter 10 we focused on infinitives. An infinitive can be used as a noun, adverb, or adjective; and they follow this structure: “to” followed by a verb. Infinitives as nouns take the place of a noun and can often be replaced by the word “it” or “something.” They are usually diagrammed above the baseline. Infinitives as adverbs modify a verb, and are usually diagrammed below the baseline/ under the verb. Vitto provides us with tip for infinitives as adverbs—if the words “in order to” can be placed before the verb, the infinitive is an adverb modifying the verb. Infinitives as adjectives follow the noun they modify, and are diagrammed below the baseline/ under the noun. And finally, we learned about complementary infinitives which are infinitives that complete a verb.
I struggled the most with distinguishing between an infinitive as an adverb and a complementary infinitive. As soon as I saw any verb followed by an infinitive I just assumed it was an adverb. I also struggle with exercise 10.7 (page 232), because some of the sentences had multiple infinitives or prepositional phrases within infinitives which then confused me when diagramming. I think with a little extra practice these concepts will make more sense.