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Structure: ‘Negative infinitives’

Fly High English - Structure

This time in our structure help we talk about negative infinitives. Most people are familiar with the idea of infinitives and we saw some structures which use infinitives in our post on verbs + verbs 1.

Take a look at the following normal infinitive structure;
I decided to fly on Friday.

To make infinitives negative, we usually use not before the infinitive, so from our previous example to make it a negative we say;

I decided not to fly on Friday.

We also use infinitives with ‘infinitive of purpose’ structures. See our link here to review that.

Let’s look at an example;

I went to the airport to meet a friend.

And again, to make this a negative we say;

I went to the airport, not to have lunch but to meet a friend. (in this kind of sentence there is a sense of clarification)

There are other situations when we use infinitives and to make them negative we follow the same structure as shown above.

Try to write some more examples of your own.

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