I found the following sentence in my Mathematics book.
All we need to do is rewrite it.
I knew that rewrite is a verb. In that sentence, is rewrite a noun or an adjective.
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1You say that rewrite is a verb and then ask if it is a noun or adjective?? Very odd. – Lambie Nov 25 '23 at 16:40
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Does this answer your question? Why "to" is dropped after "is"? Also all you need to do is figure out - if "figure out" is changed to "to figure out", how does the meaning change? and Is the sentence 'What I need is to do/doing the things I like.' grammatically correct?, among others. In your example, *rewrite* is a "bare infinitive verb" (without the optional infinitive marker *to*). – FumbleFingers Nov 25 '23 at 17:25
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[Is X correct? No does] – Lambie Nov 25 '23 at 17:53
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In your sentence, 'rewrite' is a verb (as it usually is), denoting the action that is all we need to perform (the only action we need to perform, usually to complete some task).
An expression of the type All that I/you/we need to is... must be followed by a verb in the bare- or to-infinitive form.
I have cooked the bacon. All I need to do is fry the eggs.
After we have dug the hole, all we need to do is to throw the dead dog in.
'To do' is optional. and can be omitted, provide the to-infinitive form of the following verb is used:
To complete the cake, after icing or ('frosting') all you need is to place a cherry on the top.
Michael Harvey
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3Actually, the to infinitive would also be possible in all these cases: "All we need to do is to rewrite it". – Colin Fine Nov 25 '23 at 17:05
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Because people do. The WOW corpus has 39 instances of all * need to do is VERB and 7 of all * need to do is to VERB. – Colin Fine Nov 25 '23 at 22:41