English lyrics:"All I wanna do is love your body".Why isn't it "loving"?I guess it should be a noun?
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Answers · 15
2
Tatanya is right. This is what is sometimes known as a cleft sentence. It's a kind of sentence where two sentences are combined into one. Other sentences of this type are, for example:
What I'd like you to do is read this chapter and then discuss it.
The main thing to do is relax and keep calm.
As you can see, the verb following 'XX is..' is always the bare infinitive (infinitive form without 'to'), not the gerund. The sentence you have given us would be 'All I want to do is love your body' in more standard English, and the construction is exactly the same as the cleft sentences above: XX + verb to be + bare infinitive.
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Hi Shirleen,
That's a very good question. It might sound a bit confusing for a non-native speaker, but they tend to use a bare infinitive (that is an infinitive without infinitive particle to) in the following pattern(s):
All I want to do is love. (not to love or loving)
All they ever seem to do is complain.
All you have to do is read etc.
So, as you can see from the example sentences above, love, complain and read are all verbs (bare infinitives).
Hope that helps.
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Why do you think it is a noun? It is a verb.
All I want to do is love your body.
I want to kiss your lips.
I want to stroke your hair.
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Wanna is a slang version of "want to".
After the verb want we use infinitive form. For example "I want to eat" or "I want to sleep". Therefore after the form "wanna" we would use infinitive without TO because the TO part is already included in the "wanna", which is really just "WANT TO" pronounced differently.
So we would say I wanna do ,I wanna eat, I wanna sleep and so on.
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I want to love you.
I want to sing.
All I want to do is love you.
All I want to do is sing.
The structure has no gerund.
In the example sentence, "Loving your body is what I want to do", the sentence structure is different.
You can write this sentence more formally as, "As for loving your body, I want to do it." If you can put the "as for" in front of the verb, "As for dancing", "As for running", "As for singing", you can use the gerund. In the first examples, you can't use "as for", because the verb is directly attached to want. It doesn't stand by itself.
Hope this helps when you can distinguish the gerund and when you can't!
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