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In BBC's The Flatmates program, a dialogue goes like:

We are not allowed pets in the flat.

Is it appropriate to drop "to keep" after "allowed"?

Brian Tompsett - 汤莱恩
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Clouma
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  • If you want to drop it, you can rephrase it as pets are not allowed in the flat. – Schwale Mar 06 '16 at 11:46
  • @Ustanak right. Just wondering if that particular way of dropping (in BBC's) is some popular collocation used by native speakers. – Clouma Mar 06 '16 at 12:03

2 Answers2

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We are not allowed pets in the flat.
We are not allowed to keep pets in the flat.
We are not allowed to have pets in the flat.

These sentences are correct and have the same meaning to express pets being forbidden.

To keep / to have are implicit and understood.

Other ways of expressing might be

Pets are not allowed (in the flat).
We can't have pets.
Pets are forbidden.

Peter
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  • can you give another example like this , that a native speaker would use in everyday conversation? – Clouma Mar 06 '16 at 11:34
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The original quoted sentence is not North American idiom. It's probably UK idiom, it may be idiomatic only in a subset of UK usage, as it sounds a bit posh to me. "We aren't allowed to to have pets" would be more usual in North America.

But it is certainly grammatical and correct to put a noun right after allowed. "Am I allowed a phone call?" It's just kind of formal.

CCTO
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  • The question is clearly referring to UK English, with an example from the BBC set in the UK. "... not North American idiom"?! "Probably UK idiom"?! –  Mar 08 '17 at 05:35