Why Verbs Like 'Witness' Are Weird: Bare Infinitivals

A listener named Daphne sent us this sentence from an online news story about package thieves: "Noel Rivera gets a notification on his phone anytime someone comes to his front door, but early in December, in the middle of the day, he witnessed two women walk up to his porch and nab his four-year-old son's Christmas gifts.”

That sentence didn’t sound quite right to her, and the reason was the specific forms of the verbs “walk” and “nab.” If she had been the one writing the story, she would have written, “He witnessed two women walking up to his porch and nabbing his four-year-old son's Christmas gifts.” She says she’s been hearing short forms of verbs often lately, and wonders what’s happening.

In cases like this, you need to be aware of something called the Recency Illusion: the tendency to think that something is new because you started to notice it only recently. That happens a lot, but in this case, it turns out that Daphne is right. Sentences like “He witnessed them nab the gifts” are a relatively recent development, and they are becoming more frequent. And that’s not where the surprises end.

Verbs Take Many Kinds of Complements

Before going further, we need some grammar vocabulary in order to talk about these two structures more easily. In particular, we need to talk about complements. A verb’s complement, you may remember from other episodes, is a phrase that needs to accompany the verb in order to complete its meaning. (In fact, the words “complete" and “complement” come from the same Latin root.) One kind of complement is a direct object of a transitive verb; for example, in the sentence “They stole the packages,” the noun phrase “the packages” is the direct object of “steal,” which makes it a complement of “steal.” (Stole the packages) Another kind of complement is an indirect object; for example, in the sentence “Squiggly sent Fenster a lint roller,” the proper noun “Fenster” is the indirect object, “a lint roller" is the direct object, and they’re both complements of the verb “sent.” Yet another kind of complement is an adjective phrase after a linking verb; for example,...

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