"Want to go look for something" - what is the verb?

Question

1) I want to go look for my wedding dress today.
2) I want to go to look for my wedding dress today.

Are these both acceptable ways to say this?

Also, could someone point out the parts of speech?
According to my thoughts, in first sentence:

I ⇒ Subject
want to go ⇒ compound verb (intransitive)
look for my wedding dress today ⇒ adverb

@DamkerngT. I'm confused about the usage of "to" in second sentence. — Sandeep D, May 04 '14 at 16:56
I'd say that "want to go to look" is not very common, but not that rare either. (I'm not even sure if it's standard, by the way.) But I think it's not too difficult to understand. I understand it quite the way I understand "going to look", e.g. "What do you want?" "I want to do something." "What do you want to do?" "I want to go to look for my wedding dress today." If you want to dissect the sentence, you probably can think of it as a nested to-infinitives phrase. — Damkerng T., May 04 '14 at 17:46
Also see Is “I’m going to go to vote” correct? and Go to play VS go play. — choster, May 05 '14 at 14:32

score 0 · Answer 1 · answered May 05 '14 at 10:29

Both are acceptable. Grammatically, they change things a bit but they mean the same thing. The second one also sounds a bit strange because you're using "to" twice so I think that's why we drop it in natural speech. Also, the second one may also be stressing why you want to go since it's used as an adverb modifying "to go" (see below for that explanation).

1) I want to go look for my wedding dress today.

Subject: I
Verb: want
Direct Object: to go look (infinitive noun form of compound verb "go look")
Indirect Object (as a prepositional phrase): for my wedding dress
Adverb: today (Note that this adverb is modifying the infinitive and not the main verb.)

2) I want to go to look for my wedding dress today.

Same as above except now "to look" is an adverb infinitive modifying the noun infinitive "to go" (which is still the direct object like above)

"Want to go look for something" - what is the verb?

1 Answers1