"I heard him come home late." How would we analyze this sentence?

Elliptical infinitive is when you drop the “to” part from the infinitive, correct?

In that case, I definitely think it’s an elliptical infinitive. “to come home” to “come home”.

“I heard him coming home late” – progressive present (-ing)
“I heard THAT he came/had come home late” – indirect statement

Language is fun!

i think when we say the sentence you have mentioned, we are rushing our thoughts to make the statement. it could be restructured like “i heard him, but it was very late when he got here.”

does that sound right?

I heard him… Come home late!

Hmm.

Let’s focus on the rest of the sentence before we focus on “come home” so that, once we analyze “come home,” we will better be able to understand its relation to the rest of the sentence.

I – subject of the sentence
heard – verb sentence

I heard.

I heard what/whom?

I heard him.

him – object of “heard”

I heard him how/when?

I heard him late.

late – adverb

Elliptical infinitives are when the “to” is dropped from an infinitive. Let’s look at some examples and see if “come” could be an elliptical infinitive.

The use of a simple infinitive can be observed in the sentence, “My goal is to achieve greatness.”

The “to” is typically dropped in cases that would make the sentence ambiguous and before verbs like bid, dare, help, let, make, need, and see.

An example of the to being dropped when it would make the sentence ambiguous is, “All he did was _ succeed at everything he tried.” “to” is dropped before succeed because, otherwise, the sentence could mean that he did everything he did in order to succeed.

I do not believe this to be an example of this case. “I heard him to come home late” is not logical.

Let’s think of another verb after “him” in a more simple sentence. “I heard him yell.”

What is yell in that case? I heard him do what? I heard him yell.

I am not sure what “yell” would be called in this instance, but whatever “yell” would be called, “come” functions as the same thing.

I then believe that “home” is something that is modifying “come” because it answers the question “where” he comes.

(One year ago, I totally would have been able to answer this better… I was a grammar terminology queen… Having been away from tutoring grammar for a year, I have apparently lost some of this, and this question has made me realize that. Quite depressing.)

sidebar: i hate it when i call somebody early in the morning and the reply to my question “are ya up yet?” is “yeah, i’m woke.”

MAKES ME CRINGE!

@charliecompany34: Whoa, I have never heard that.

Looking at the sentence again, I think the elliptical infinitive is there for smoothness and brevity.

“I heard him to come home late” doesn’t work because it sounds funny and the verb isn’t really agreeing with its subject.

If you were to just have the verb going with him (the subject), you would need the “that” in there to make it a complete statement.

I heard THAT he came home late…

Using the elliptical infinitive eliminates extra words, is smoother, and is without confusion.

@girlofscience yup, depends on your geographics though. it’s an inner-city response that rarely gets corrected.

What do you call a secondary adverb and modifier?

It’s basically a compound sentence, but i don’t know the correct terminology:

I heard him come home.
I heard him late.

@fireside: It is NOT a compound sentence. A compound sentence must have two independent clauses, a comma, and a conjunction.

EXAMPLE: I am right, and you are wrong.

“Late” definitely modifies “come.”

My mistake, I meant:

I heard him come home.
I heard him come late.

I can see how it should be but don’t know the lingo.

Edit: just saw that Jeruba posted at the same time I corrected.

@Jeruba: Ahhh, you’re totally right. Late modifies come. Sorry about that! :(

wait, are we talking about women masturbating or coming? i got my threads mixed up.

Elliptical infinitive is such a cool phrase, should be the next Bond title.

Raising to object.
The underlying structure is
I heard [he came home late]
The second clause is subordinate. “He” is raised to be the object of the verb in the first clause, and “came” changes to the plain form “come”.

I (subject)
heard (verb)
him (object)
come home late (participial phrase used as adjective, come substituted for coming)

“Come” is not a participle. Participles don’t take stand-ins.

I think morphail may be closer to the mark, but I don’t know anything about “raising to object” and would like to see it explained. I do know that the subject of an infinitive is in the objective case (as in “I know her to be a responsible person.”). That’s what prompted me to suggest an elliptical infinitive.

For some contrary reason, it pleases me to know that our everyday speech is full of similar constructions that are idiomatic and sound natural to our ears but are anything but easy to analyze. I like to call them out when I notice them. Thanks, everyone, for your comments so far. I hope we will see a definitive explanation.

Verbs like “expect” and “believe” raise the subject of the subordinate clause to the object
I expected that you would be late – I expected you to be late

I think the same thing is happening in “I heard him come home late”, but I could be wrong.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raising_(linguistics)#Types_of_raising_elements