I came across the sentence below in a book on Linguistics:
This makes possible to consider language as a regulator not only of its perception, but also of its representation and action.
I cannot tell if the sentence is correct. Should not it read "makes it possible to…?" Thanks.
Best Answer
Certainly a noun phrase may follow "This makes possible" as the direct object of makes. From the Congressional Record in 1960:
It seems possible to allow a gerund as that noun phrase. From a US patent application:
To my ears, an infinitive won't do without a dummy subject it:
However, the infinitive alone appears in print. It's certainly distinctly disfavored: the google finds 27.5M instances of "this makes it possible to" but only but only 274K instances of "this makes possible to." For books, the counts are 884K for the former, only 12.3K for the latter.
A look unto fatigue at the search results in the Ngram viewer containing "this makes possible to" finds numerous authors from non-Anglophone countries using the phrasing and numerous editors from non-Anglophone countries allowing it. The usage appears predominantly in publications covering science, medicine, and technology, and it slips into prose that otherwise seems natural and fluent.
The rare locution* seems more common than can be written off as editing errors, but it also seems that native speakers have not adopted it.
* That is, when the infinitive is the direct object of make.
EDIT: I have removed an erroneous cite to a US source, which I find I cannot replace.