grammar - Infinitives with "ought not"


Most of the references I can find about the word “ought” indicate that even when negating it, you should use an infinitive: “You ought not to go there.”


That sounds quite bad to my ear. Much better sounding to me is “You ought not go there.” Without the “to”.


Comparing this to similar usage of “should” does no good, since they can’t even agree without negation: “should go” versus “ought to go”.


Now that I think about it, I am suddenly far from certain that “ought to go” actually contains an infinitive in the first place; maybe “ought to” works together as some part of speech that modifies the verb, rather than “to go” being a unit.


I’m obviously no linguist. Can someone shed some light on this for me? Specifically, can you explain the function/part-of-speech of each word in a way that makes it clear whether "to go" or "go" is more correct?



Answer



I agree with Peter Shor's answer, however, looking at this phrase in the COCA corpus, there seems to be an exception that is most prevalent in spoken English where ought not be is a frequent although still less common alternative to ought not to be. For example:



...one could argue then that President Bush ought not be succeeding.



2005 Tavis Smiley, PBS


Searching a selection of classic texts I found no instances of ought not be, and British English also appears to reject omission of the 'to' in negative ought. So I would tentatively conclude that this is a development in contemporary American English.


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