A few days ago
does the word “to” in a sentence “I want to be a writer” is a preposition?? thank you?
My brother is still leaning English And he asked me whether the word “to” in a sentence “I want to be a writer” is a preposition or just an auxiliary. And I just couldn’t answer it 🙁 In fact, I confused with “to be”, can we assume that all “to” in “to be” is a preposition, or it’s just an auxiliary verb? Thank you very much
Top 3 Answers
A few days ago
Favorite Answer
“To” in your sentence is part of the infinitive “to be”. It isn’t a preposition because it isn’t followed by a noun or a noun/adjective phrase, e.g., “I’m going to the store.” In a larger sense, ‘to be a writer’ is the direct object of the sentence. (In the sentence “I want dinner”, ‘dinner’ is the direct object.)
0
A few days ago
In this case the word ‘to’ refers to the auxiliary verb ‘to be’. Also, I don’t think that the word ‘to’ is a preposition any way, well at least not on its own.
Hope this helps!
0
A few days ago
No
The verb ‘to be’ is, in most cases, what we call a stative verb. These are verbs which refer to states rather than actions, and are hardly ever used in continuous (progressive) verb forms, i.e. present continuous, past continuous, future continuous, etc.
“to the store” would be a prepositional phrase
0
- Academic Writing
- Accounting
- Anthropology
- Article
- Blog
- Business
- Career
- Case Study
- Critical Thinking
- Culture
- Dissertation
- Education
- Education Questions
- Essay Tips
- Essay Writing
- Finance
- Free Essay Samples
- Free Essay Templates
- Free Essay Topics
- Health
- History
- Human Resources
- Law
- Literature
- Management
- Marketing
- Nursing
- other
- Politics
- Problem Solving
- Psychology
- Report
- Research Paper
- Review Writing
- Social Issues
- Speech Writing
- Term Paper
- Thesis Writing
- Writing Styles