[Grammar] I bought a knife to cut bread (with)

[jutfrank]

Hm. What meaning does it add? We wouldn't buy a knife to cut bread without.

We're talking here of semantics and word meaning. If you add a word to a sentence, you add that word's word meaning to the sentence meaning. I don't want to complicate and confuse things further at this point.

 

[Phaedrus]

OK. With the definite article "the" before "knife", can sentence (1) be a reply to the following question:

Friend: Why did you buy the knife?

Me: I bought it to cut bread with. (meaning I bought the knife with which I intend to cut bread; interpretation (b) in the OP)

I know that, with the definite article "the" before "knife", sentence (2) would be possible as a response.

I think that it would be more natural not to omit the object in the infinitival clause in that context:

A: Why did you buy the knife?
B: I bought it to cut bread with it.

Interestingly, when a "why"-questions is answered with an infinitival clause, the infinitival clause can be preceded by "in order," whereas object-gap infinitival clauses can never be thus preceded. The following is ungrammatical:

*[strike]I bought it in order to cut bread with.[/strike]

For that observation, I received help from Charles Jones's Purpose Clauses: Syntax, Thematics, and Semantics of English Purpose Constructions (1991, Klewar Academic Publishers), a doctoral dissertation I have had on my shelf for years but, I must confess, have only browsed through.

Let's consider the following dialogue:

A: What did you buy to cut bread with?
B: [I bought] this knife [to cut bread with].

In that case, note that it would not work to use "it" after "with" in the reply. Note, too, that if "in order" were added to the question, along with the obligatory object of "with" in the "in order to"-clause, the dialogue would require a very different type of response:

A: What did you buy in order to cut bread with it?
B1: *[strike]This knife.[/strike]
B2: This cutting board.

My sense of the meaning of the object-gap purpose clause (I bought a knife to cut bread with), as distinct from that of the purpose clause without the gap (I bought a knife to cut bread with it), is that the object-gap version is backgrounded as an adjunct. As evidence, I would cite that only the version without the gap can be foregrounded by means of focal stress:

I bought a knife TO CUT BREAD WITH IT.
*? I bought a knife TO CUT BREAD WITH.