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A CNN article titled "Euthanasia: Hope you never need it, but be glad the option is there" starts with this:

The time was always going to come when society would need to face the pointy end of the voluntary euthanasia debate: Those hard cases that would challenge most people's support for the issue, the cases and circumstances which constitute never-before trodden ground.

While in most Western countries polls repeatedly show strong community support for a terminally ill person's right to obtain medical assistance to die, the results would likely be quite different if the person involved was not an adult, was not of sound mind or was not, in the strictest sense, terminally ill.

In the boldfaced phrase, I wonder if "to die" modifies "medical assistance" (thereby forming the noun phase "medical assistance to die") or not. If not, "to die" should be interpreted as a subsequent act of "obtaining medical assistance", if you will.

Which one is it going to be?

JK2
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  • It is "a person's right to die". "obtaining medical assistance" is just the means to accomplish that. – user3169 Jan 19 '17 at 05:44

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to die describes the kind of medical assistance we're talking about. What kind of medical assistance are we talking about? Medical assistance that helps you die. In other words, medical assistance to die. So, medical assistance to die is the object of the verb obtain.

Compare this with the will to live and work to do. What kind of will? The will to live—the will that makes you want to live. What kind of work? Work to do—work that you must do. I don't know the proper grammar term for this, but I hope you can catch the general idea I'm trying to get at.

Michael Rybkin
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  • Thanks. I think I get what you're trying to get at. That said, it still feels somewhat awkward to my non-native ears. If "medical assistance to die" can be a noun phrase, then can "medical assistance to live" be one, meaning "medical assistance that helps you live"? – JK2 Jan 19 '17 at 05:05
  • To be more precise, "to die" describes the purpose of the "medical assistance". "medical assistance to live" is just not a common phrasing, but it would mean medical assistance that is used for the purpose of helping you live. – Michael Rybkin Jan 19 '17 at 13:37