1. From a verb
a. Active form
Example:
a. Active form
Example:
- do becomes do, be doing, have done (do - did - done), and have been doing.
b. Passive form
Example:
do becomes be done and have been done.
2. From an adjective
Examples:
- punctual becomes be punctual.
- able becomes be able.
3. From a noun phrase
Example:
- an engineer becomes be an engineer.
4. From an adverbial of place / a prepositional phrase
Example:
- in the office becomes be in the in the office.
B. Various Uses of Bare Infinitives
1. After the auxiliary verbs shall / should, will / would, can / could, may / might, must, do / does / did and needn’t (need not)
Examples:
- I / We shall drop you a line as soon as I / we get to London.
- I think the government should do something about the economy.
- At nine o’clock tomorrow, the manager will be addressing the business meeting.
- By the end of this year, he will have graduated from Harvard University.
- The sales meeting will be held soon; you should plan to be attendance.
- Jane will have been employed for 25 years before she retires.
- By the end of this year, he will have been studying at Harvard University for approximately two years.
- He promised he would be punctual in payment for his rent.
- I wish somebody would give me a job.
- You can get in touch with me by telephone at 371415.
- After the success of Windows 95, Microsoft could outsell any competitor.
- To improve your spoken English, we wish all of you could join us in AECC.
- Doctors may be able to operate on patients at a distance in future.
- Don’t call on him at 8:30. He may / might be expecting guests.
- He may be in the office now.
- I don’t know what his occupation is. He may be a computer programmer.
- Could / Can / May I look at your newspaper? Could / Can / May have a light?
- You mustn’t make unauthorized copies of software.
- You have been working hard all day. You must be tired.
- Do you / Does he have the courage to ask your / his employer for a raise in a pay?
- How much did you put aside every month while you were working abroad?
- You needn’t learn how to program in HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language) before designing web pages.
2. After an expression
Examples:
- You had better mind your own business.
- As you are unemployed, you might as well accept the job offer.
- She would rather have a laptop than a palmtop.
3. After 'Why …?' and 'Why not …?'
Example:
- Why put off the plan until tomorrow? Why not carry it out right now?
4. As the part of an idiom
Examples:
- I hear say the price of a computer is going up.
- It’s foolish to let slip such an opportunity.
- They made believe they knew everything.
5. As an objective complement
Examples:
- Graphical User Interface lets you point to icons and click a mouse button to execute a task.
- The new director made all of the staff members work hard.
- I had them cope with the problem themselves.
- We have never known our manager lose his temper.
- I never find my assistant neglect his work.
Note:
Besides using a bare infinitive, we can also use a present participle after the object preceded with the verbs find, talk about, listen to, smell, and see. Here, the use of a bare infinitive means that a subject does something from the beginning to the end against the object that does something or that happens, and the use of a present participle means that the subject does something against the object that is doing something or that is happening.
Examples:
- The police found him hack into / hacking into a computer system.
- We heard him talk about / talking about this incident.
- I listened to them talk over / talking over the problem.
- She smelt something burn / burning.
- I saw you peep through / peeping through the window of the teaching staff room.
6. For a command sentence
Examples:
- Be careful.
- Arrange the icons.
- Adjust the speaker volume.
- Shut down the system.
- Debug the program.
- Display the date.
- Click on the Find button to start the search.
- Select the appropriate programming language.
- Let’s (us) go home now.