Please help me to complete this sentence:
This is a great track. It will get everybody _______.
Which one is better: dance or dancing?
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Either "dancing" or "to dance", but the first one sounds a bit less manipulative (as if everyone is doing it out of excitement, not because they are expected to).
There's lots of words in English that "take" other words as "parameters." Many English verbs take objects, for example, but there's other possibilities.
I ate the food (The food is an object of ate. I ate X - X would be the object.)
The dog is brown (brown is a subject complement of dog.)
Martha is a dancer (a dancer is a "predicate nominative" of Martha)
The plain/present-tense form of a verb cannot ever be "taken" by another word by itself, unless:
- -ing is tacked on to it,
- to is in front it,
- a relative pronoun is in front of it (words like who, which)
- something happens in the sentence where you can start the "Subject-Verb-Etc" pattern over again.
It will get everybody to dance.
It will get everybody who dances to have fun.
It will get everybody dancing.
We dance until the night falls.
