Learn English – “He saw it stop and his son get out”

infinitivessubordinate-clausestenseverbs-of-perception

I have been reading Men With Brooms for a few days. I read a sentence which did not make any sense to me, so I landed here to get some help on it. I have pasted the sentence from the novel. Please go through it and let me know your valuable feedback on it.

An excerpt from the novel (Men With Brooms: A Sweeping Epic, paperback 2002, a novelization by Diane Baker Mason):

Gordon was about to walk away from the Impala when he saw it stop and his son get out. So it was real the boy had come.

As per my opinion it should have been:

Gordon was about to walk away from the Impala when he saw it stopped and his son got out. So it was real the boy had come.

I have two questions here:

  1. Why did the writer use stop and get instead of stopped and got? As she is telling us a story which happened in the past.
  2. Let's say the writer is telling us her mind's situation and she used the present tense for it but why did she use stop and get instead of stops and gets?

Best Answer

Some answers have already been given to this question, I will try to phrase it differently, I hope that helps.

Gordon was about to walk away from the Impala when he saw it stop and (saw) his son get out.

This sentence is correct. As already mentioned, the past tense is "saw". The man saw something. What did he see? Two things:

1) He saw the car stop.

2) He saw his son get out.

That means he observed those two actions from start to finish.

Now if "saw" is the past tense, what form are "stop" and "get out"? This is what I call "a bare infinitive", you can call it "an unmarked infinitive", it is the infinitive of the verb without "to". As mentioned before, verbs of perception (hear, listen, see, etc.) take a bare infinitive:

I heard him slam the door.
I watched them grow.

It is possible to say "got out",

He saw it stop, and his son got out.

but the sentence will have a different meaning: what he saw was the stopping of the car; after that was completed, his son got out. But we are not talking about what he saw in the second part, we are talking about the action of the son getting out, and the sentence sounds a bit clumsy to me without "then" after "and".

You could also say something like

He saw it stopped in the middle of the road.

Then it means that he did not see the action of stopping, when he saw the car it was in the middle of the road and it was not moving.

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