2

  1. Add the grated cheese to the sauce.

  2. This latest incident will add to the pressure on the White House.

  3. He added enormously to the national forests in the West.

When I see "add", I think something is followed，then a target is intruduced by "to".

So, sentence 1 is easy to understand for me.

But for sentence 2, does it mean that "the incident" is added into "the pressure" so that "the pressure" is "bigger"(more pressure)?

And for sentence 3, it sounds very unnatural to me. Does it mean more forests or more acreage? Would be there any difference by replacing "added enormously to" by "enormously increase"?

By the way, why is it "added enormously to" instead of "enormously added to"?

Improve this question
3
  • 1
    In (2), more pressure is understood. I find (3) a rather odd sentence. Presumably it means that he increased the area of forested land.
    – Kate Bunting
    Commented Nov 23, 2022 at 13:31
  • What @KateBunting said (example #3 is "odd"). Perhaps He greatly / significantly extended the national forests in the West would be better, but that also very strongly implies increased the area [of forested land] rather than increased the number. I can't easily think of a succinct way of conveying the second meaning.
    – FumbleFingers
    Commented Nov 23, 2022 at 13:44
  • 3 could mean area or number, but I think from context we guess total area/acreage (although he probably didn't go around all the forests expanding the area of each forest, he just expanded some of them). "He added to the cars in the car park" means he put more cars in, it doesn't mean he made the cars bigger.
    – Stuart F
    Commented Nov 23, 2022 at 16:12

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
3

The verb "add" can either be transitive (it has a direct object) or intransitive (no direct object).

In sentence 1, it's transitive and "grated cheese" is the direct object.

In sentences 2 and 3, "add" is intransitive. It doesn't say what is added, only what the target of adding is. In both cases, the reader has to infer the direct object.

In Sentence 2, the inferred direct object is "pressure". We don't need to say it because it's already in the sentence. The incident increased the amount of pressure.

In Sentence 3, it's unclear in the context what "he" added. It may have been money, his career, volunteer labour, knowledge, political action, trees, or anything else. Only the rest of the context for that sentence would make it clear exactly what was added.

Improve this answer

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .