View Single Post
  #4 (permalink)  
Unread Mar 18th, 2010, 10:52 am
susan53 susan53 is offline
Sue
 
Join Date: Oct 8th, 2006
Location: Milan
Posts: 1,406
susan53 is on a distinguished road
Default Re: Diffference between "not to" and "to not"

I don't know where these examples come from, but if they were written, then they're not correct. The only possibility would be that in spontaneous spoken discourse the person had started a sentence, changed their mind about what they wanted to say, hesitated and corrected themself, thus repeating the to. You can almost imagine it with I mean inserted :

I told you to .... (I mean) not to play that game.

But it's very definitely a repetition - just as if I hesitated and repeated "some" in the following example : We saw some .. some nice houses

But as a "complete" sentence, all your examples 1-4 are ungrammatical. To can't be used twice in that way. As I said in the last reply, it will usually come after the negation (as in the second version of the examples in the second group) : I told you not to play that game etc.

As for prepositions ... Well, in that case not would come in front of the verb, whether the preposition was to or any other. Here are some examples, the first few with random prepositions, the others with to :

Thank you for not saying anything to David.
Do you think I'll offend him by not going.
We're thinking of not having a holiday this year.
He wasn't used to not seeing her
She was committed to not letting it happen again.
Third World bishops objected to not being consulted about Sollicitudo Omnium


The explanation is that the negation always comes before the word or phrase which it negates - here it negates the verb, so is placed in front of the verb. When to+infinitive is used on the other hand, it's seen as a unit - we often think of to as being part of the infinitive. So placing not in front of to still follows the rule that the negation is placed in front of the phrase it negates.
__________________
An ELT Notebook
The DELTA Course
Reply With Quote