Quote:
Originally Posted by user_gary  Is this mean `non-finite form' and `non-finite verb' different?
I thought both are same. |
There's no easy answer to this one. It depends how people look at grammar, and how they count verbs.
How many verbs are in this sentence:
I have been eating cake all morning.
One could argue: 1 verb ("eat" put in the present perfect progressive tense).
Or one could argue: 3 verbs (two auxilary verbs and a main verb)
Neither is wrong; neither is right. The underlying definition of the word "verb" is different in both cases. Since English often expresses tense/aspect with extra verbs, it's quite possible to collect all auxillaries together and call it "one verb".
This is an issue that divides linguists. For example, there are people that argue that English has no future tense, while others disagree, viewing "will" as a future marker.
A similar problem exists with compounds: some people count "taxi driver" as one noun (a compound noun), while others count it as two nouns (or one adjective and one noun).
Different ways of looking at language yield different ways of using terminology. How you talk about something depends most on who you talk with.
See, for example, how usingenglish uses "non-finite" in the section you quote: "The infinitive and present and past participles are the
non-finite parts of a verb."