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There is the following entry in the Oxford Learners Dictionaries

recommend somebody to do something

  • We'd recommend you to book your flight early

Is it correct usage of recommend with the infinitive? Can that expression mean that one recommends somebody for doing something because that person is good at doing something.

2 Answers2

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We'd recommend you to book your flight early. U The sentence means "we'd advise you to book your flight early".

The use of the verb " recommend" in this pattern is a bit controversial. It's correct to some writers and incorrect to others. So you cannot say it's absolutely wrong. OLD (both AE & BE), McMillian, and The Free Dictionary use the word recommend in this pattern. It's misguiding to say that you cannot do so. However, as this use isn't acceptable to many people, we may advise English learners to use the verb in the following patterns instead of the construct under controversy.

  • We'd recommend booking your flight early.

  • We'd recommend (that) you book your flight early.

  • We'd recommend that you should book your flight early (BE). If you follow AE, you may avoid this construction.

Khan
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    The asterisk (*) is commonly placed before ungrammatical sentences. Is that your meaning here? –  Jun 04 '15 at 12:06
  • @pazzo, I appreciate your comments. I don't know that. I mean that the said sentences are grammatical. – Khan Jun 04 '15 at 12:32
  • No, it is not correct. I think this is an error in the dictionary. –  Jun 04 '15 at 14:36
  • The sentence presented by the OP is grammatically correct. Please refer to OLD, McMillain, The Free Dictionary, etc. – Khan Jun 04 '15 at 15:44
  • @Khan I took the liberty of editing your answer. (I saw this part: "subject + present participle (-ing form)".) I hope you don't mind. – Damkerng T. Jun 04 '15 at 16:04
  • @AmD Do you have any specific reason that makes you think that the example you found in the dictionary is incorrect? Like Khan said, it's absolutely fine. – Damkerng T. Jun 04 '15 at 16:06
  • @DamkerngT. Thanks for editing my answer; you are right. – Khan Jun 04 '15 at 16:31
  • @DamkerngT I've always thought that recommend smb to do smth is an incorrect structure. I think, that specific dictionary is an unreliable source. I wanted to make sure of that. –  Jun 04 '15 at 17:49
  • @DamkerngT BTW, look here (http://forum.wordreference.com/threads/recommend-somebody-to-do-something.1542096/) The native speakers of English there said that it would sound odd to them and would mean you recommend another person because this person is good. –  Jun 04 '15 at 17:53
  • @AmD I read that thread only halfway through. (I probably won't read more.) FWIW, I agree with native speakers in #2, #9, and #13. – Damkerng T. Jun 04 '15 at 19:05
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Recommend takes an object. Whatever the object is is what is being recommended.

There's a difference between the literal meaning of these two sentences:

  1. We'd recommend you to book your flight early.
  2. We'd recommend to you to book your flight early.

In sentence #1, the thing being recommended is 'you'. This means that, out of all the people who could potentially book the listener's flight early, the speaker thinks that the best person to do so would be the listener. In other words. This sentence takes booking the flight early as a given, and simply considers who should do it.

In sentence #2, the speaker is recommending "to book your flight early". This is a course of action. They think the listener should book their flight early.

Obviously, the literal meaning of sentence #1 would not make much sense in most situations. This, combined with context, would likely lead me to believe that they intended the meaning of sentence #2. In other words, the first is not particularly well constructed, but would probably be understood to mean the second.

I've looked in several dictionaries for the usage of recommend found in #1. The only one I found that attributed the meaning of sentence #2 to sentence #1 noted that it is considered wrong by some, and recommended to instead use the form in sentence #4, found below.

Some more common ways to phrase this thought include:

  1. We'd recommend you book your flight early.
  2. We'd recommend that you book your flight early.

"You book your flight early" is an action that is being recommended, but it sounds like an odd phrasing by itself. Instead, I would use a different tense:

  1. We'd recommend booking your flight early.
DCShannon
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  • Thank you. +1..It is a pity that the downvoter didn't explain the reason. –  Jun 04 '15 at 20:17
  • @AmD I'm the downvoter. I downvoted this answer because of the tone This is silly in most situations implies. One thing that we all should not forget is that We'd recommend you to book your flight early is from a reputable dictionary. However, I'm more than willing to retract my downvote if this answer is edited to state something along the lines "This is silly in American English" instead. – Damkerng T. Jun 05 '15 at 08:13
  • I looked into this issue and gathered more evidence around the web, which is probably worth a community wiki post, but I'm quite lazy now, so I'll just give some links to the results I found here. Here are the results of [recommend] you to [v*] on some corpora: http://corpus.byu.edu/coca/?c=coca&q=39802186 (COCA; AmE), http://corpus.byu.edu/bnc/?c=bnc&q=39812951 (BNC, BrE), http://corpus.byu.edu/glowbe/?c=glowbe&q=39802194 (GloWBE, Global Web-Based English). – Damkerng T. Jun 05 '15 at 08:20
  • Some more links: “Recommend you to” vs. “recommend that you” (The accepted answer says "the variant with to is incorrect"; the top voted answer tries to interpret I recommend you to ... in the way that I think is unlikely.) This web page clearly says that it's a mistake, "In natural English, we do not use the structure recommend somebody to do something." – Damkerng T. Jun 05 '15 at 08:26
  • ... This best answer in this Yahoo! Answers thread says "I recommend you to go there" just sounds stupid in English. Even a native UK English speaker says "It doesn't sound quite right in UK English at least". But we can find this construction of recommend in OED1, 7c. Though all evidence seems to suggest that the usage is fading out, to say that it's incorrect is an overstatement, in my humble opinion. – Damkerng T. Jun 05 '15 at 08:36
  • ... You can also check out the results I found in various dictionaries in our chat log here: http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/message/22018048#22018048. To sum it up, Merriam-Webster doesn't mention this usage; Dictionary.com (which is based on Random House Unabridged Dictionary doesn't mention it); Wiktionary doesn't mention it; but Oxford Dictionaries has several of its examples; Macmillan also has it. Practical English Usage by Michael Swan also mentions it (in 283). Mark Liberman also used it on Language Log. – Damkerng T. Jun 05 '15 at 08:41
  • @Damkerng T. In matters of language I usually rely on views of ordinary people, who speak English every day, rather then lookups in dictionaries . The language is like a living organism, vivid and volatile. –  Jun 05 '15 at 11:02
  • @AmD It's the same for me, but! Even though their views are important, how can we know whose views are correct when it's not unanimous? More importantly, isn't it true that dictionaries, I mean the good ones, are carefully maintained by careful people? Aren't these your ordinary people too? English is a strange language. It has no central organization to control the usage. Each speaker can have a unique copy of their own. So, here is my important take home question (no need to reply): on what criteria should we label a specific instance of usage as correct or incorrect? – Damkerng T. Jun 05 '15 at 11:35
  • @Damkerng )) 1) Dictionary entries are kept by ordinary people and regularly updated but not every second (who knows how often updates occur ) as opposed to daily English in real life 2) As for the criteria, you gather opinions from ordinary people. The more, the better. Then you make a conclusion based on the majority. That's all! –  Jun 05 '15 at 14:57
  • @DamkerngT. I'm very confused by this string of comments. In the first one, it sounds like you want me to endorse sentence one as a normal British usage, then in the others you argue that sentence one is 'incorrect', which is much stronger than anything I've said here. I say that I would understand the first one, partially because the literal meaning is silly enough that I can infer the intended one – DCShannon Jun 11 '15 at 21:50
  • @DCShannon It'd be clear if you read it like this: my comments with @AmD are my replies to the OP's messages that addressed me directly, and the rest are the evidence I found around the web. About the endorsement, no endorsement is necessary (or was expected). My main point was that "This sentence's literal meaning is silly in most situations for me as an American speaker" would read better and more correct. I've never argued that sentence 1 is 'incorrect' (in fact, I'd argue that it's 'correct'), but obviously some people on the web think it's incorrect, and so your answer seems to say. – Damkerng T. Jun 11 '15 at 23:15
  • @DamkerngT. I'm definitely not saying it's incorrect, it's just not the best. I edited my answer to make this clearer. Do you still feel the answer is saying it's incorrect? I mean, I say that it would be understood. – DCShannon Jun 11 '15 at 23:17
  • @DamkerngT. Thinking that it would be silly to say that "out of all the people who could book your flight early, you would be the best one to do so" has nothing to do with being an American speaker. – DCShannon Jun 11 '15 at 23:18
  • I'm sorry, but it still looks wrong to me. If you have Fowler's Modern English Usage, you can look it up and you'll see that "recommend someone to do something" is there. I know that this construction is awkward for American speakers, because the usual usage of "recommend" in AmE is "recommend something". – Damkerng T. Jun 11 '15 at 23:21
  • @DamkerngT. You most certainly can recommend someone to do something. That means that you think that they should be the person to do the thing. This is the usage referred to in my answer. I added a note on usages found in dictionaries. If you still disagree, but can't present any evidence, then I'm going to conclude that you are wrong. – DCShannon Jun 11 '15 at 23:45
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    @DCShannon I'm sorry, but I still see that it's wrong. The real problem is that recommend someone to do something can mean either a) recommend someone (to someone else) for doing something and b) recommend that someone do something, but your answer denies the existence of b). An ELL user kindly provided this part of Fowler's Modern English Usage (as a screenshot) in our chat room: http://chat.stackexchange.com/transcript/22937?m=22031360#22031360 – Damkerng T. Jun 12 '15 at 00:02
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    Sorry again. I can see the part you mentioned in your last revision now. I think it's better to include that part in your answer: "You can also recommend someone to do something. Although they have eight children, they do not recommend other couples to have* families of this size.* Some people consider this use to be incorrect, and say that you should say 'Although they have eight children, they do not recommend that other couples should have families of this size'." --Collins COBUILD English Usage © HarperCollins Publishers 1992, 2004, 2011, 2012 – Damkerng T. Jun 12 '15 at 00:06