Giving reasons

Take a look at these snippets.

What kind of meaning do the supporting clauses create? Is there a specific word that gives that meaning away?

Lorraine had to skip a bit to catch up.

Mosquito Advertising: The Blade Brief(2011)

"I used it to hold fake flowers."

The Old, Dead Nuisance(2011)

The twisting limbs were worked into bridges to move between buildings and over waterways.

Augie & the Green Knight(2015)

They all give a reason or purpose for the main action.

Notice how:

The verbs are all in the infinitive form (‘to catch up’, ‘to hold’, ‘to move’).
All the supporting clauses have implied subjects.

Write your own complex sentence giving the reason or purpose for an action, using a 'to X' pattern as in the snippets above.

Here is a situation in which this pattern gets a little more tricky.

The snippet below gives a reason for performing an action, but the supporting clause has an explicit subject ('me'),

She motions with her hand for me to join them.

Written in the Stars(2015)

The "for X to Y" pattern is a bit idiomatic (unusual, one-off). You could think of it like a special kind of prepositional phrase (the preposition for is often used to give reasons—e.g. "I bought flowers for my mother's birthday").

If you want to leave it there, that's fine. If you're curious about why we think this pattern is weird, read on.

In -ing and -ed clauses, you can use an implicit or explicit subject

With an implicit subject:

A plank of wood lay by the track, roughly fashioned in the shape of an arrow.

(The plank of wood is carried through from the main clause to the supporting clause.)

With an explicit subject:

Aisha was now finishing the spice cake, her eyes firmly cast down.

(The eyes are new, so have to be included in the supporting clause.)

Fairly straightforward—if the subject is the same as the main clause, we leave it out, and if it's different we just add it in.

But for whatever reason, it works slightly differently for infinitive clauses

Here's a back-to-back example of an infinitive clause with an implicit and explicit subject.

With an implicit subject:

Lorraine had to skip a bit to catch up.

(Lorraine is carried through from the main clause to the supporting clause.)

With an explicit subject:

Lorraine had to slow down for me to catch up.

(The narrator is new, so has to be added explicitly to the supporting clause, but we have to use this special "for" because of the weird way that infinitive clauses work.)

We're not sure why infinitive clauses work like this. They just do 🤷

Write a similar complex sentence using the 'for...to...' pattern.

Complex sentences