1154: Small Clauses and Tense Feb 5, 2018

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Something that everyone who speaks English (and German, and many many other languages) knows subconsciously is that the verb only needs to be marked for tense and number etc. once. Usually this is once per clause, such as 'he has seen' or '...had seen' rather than '...has sees'. This is also true when one verb, such as 'need', takes another, such as in 'he needs her to explain' which has 'to explain' in the infinitive form. When there is another clause, then the verb will also be conjugated, such as what follows 'what' in "he needs her to explain what she needs". The reason however, that one cannot say that there will be one verb marked for conjugation for every clause precisely is that so called 'small clauses' contain unmodified verbs. If you were to say "I find these inconsistencies to be confusing", the phrase "these inconsistencies to be confusing" is a small clause, because of the type of verb it follows. To be clear, this is not to say that they have no tense, but just that it is not marked, and that meaning is then dependent upon the main verb.
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