"Stopping to VERB"

I've been thinking about prepositions, prompted by this picture posted in that Facebook group I mentioned last month:

Seen in Tierra del Fuego

This seems an unlikely mistake on the face of it: Spanish por => English "for"; why complicate things by changing the preposition? Shouldn't "L1 interference" (the influence of the language learner's mother tongue) have prevented this slip? But it's the verb that does the damage: visitar => "to visit". (And "thanks to" does have a meaning; just not the right one.

 I wrote about this sort of thing here.

<pre_script>
One of the most striking things we did on the first day of my CELTA course.was....

<half_remembered_context>
I think we  may have been brain-storming a list of problems confronted by learners of English. (although maybe that's a false memory – the course had too tight a curriculum for that sort of thing; more likely chalk and talk or perhaps felt-tip and... umm THING 

<2022_afterthought>  

Interactive whiteboards were a thing of the future, or possibly they were just coming onto the market – in which case my trainers  would certainly not have forked out for new technology. 

</2022_afterthought>

).
</half_remembered_context>

...).Anyway, we got onto the subject of phrasal verbs, and English's tendency to string together a verb and something else (often a preposition, but the right-thinking Phrasal-Verb-ese buzzword is particle) to form a new meaning  leading to memory-taxing seeming-paradoxes like You cut a tree down before you cut it up. There were 14 students on the course, and that activity I found so striking was that we each in turn had to construct a sentence using the phrasal verb pick up  in a way different from all previous ones. We managed 14; my trusty Cobuild dictionary lists 15 (though I'm sure various one-off contexts could support new coinings).

<2022_EXAMPLE>
As I remember, among those 15 one was something like "receive a radio signal"; but this could easily have two separate meanings as between these two contexts:

• "We can't pick up Times Radio; we don't have a DAB set."

• "We can't pick up Five Live Sports Extra down here; the signal's too weak"

</2022_EXAMPLE>

I hadn't realized, until I started to  teach ESOL, what a big hurdle phrasal verbs were. Try Googling English Dictionary of Phrasal Verbs. You get (or at least I get – Heaven alone knows what customized search algorithms are at play) over 500,000 hits. That's a world of pain for ESOL students; who have to remember not only apparently-paradoxical meanings but a range of syntactic oddities. And to make things worse, we English-speakers keep inventing new ones.

</pre_script>

But, returning to the picture that started me down this avenue. It recalled for me a diagram (I won't say picture) that I used to use to show the difference between "stop + infinitive' (the right-thinking word in the ESOL world is "to-infinitive"...

<parenthesis>

(come to think of it if the teacher in the Tierra del Fuego tourist office had made the to-infinitive/bare-infinitive distinction maybe the writer of that sign wouldn't have been misled down the 'to visit' route)

</parenthesis>

... and "stop + gerund*"
):

And by chance I heard an example of this slip (with the same verb as I used in my diagram – "stop" is a real problem for users of English as a second language), on the radio last night: Moral Maze (about 10½ minutes in); a fluent speaker of academic English says "they [young people in Russia] have stopped to know what it means to live in an autocracy".

But I must stop writing for now.  (That's the problem; I'm always stopping to write😉)

b

Update: 2022.03.04 – Added footnote.

*

<eppur_si_muove>
[for which, incidentally, the approved CELTA-speak is "-ing form", which always seemed to me an over-simplification too far. A gerund behaves like {that is, is} a noun – as in "Eating is necessary", whereas a present participle is an adjective – as in "they were eating"; that is a distinction worth making, and it seems to me to be patronizing, insulting to the intelligence of the student, to act as if students of ESOL needn't be aware of it.]

</eppur_si_muove>