| 词组 | confess |
| 释义 | confess For reasons that are hard to guess, Copperud 1970 finds the intransitive confess followed by the preposition to "clumsy" and unidiomatic. He even invokes Evans 1957 as support, but he has misread Evans, who rejects confess to only when it is followed by a perfect infinitive ("I confess to have heard ... "). Evans and Shaw 1987 both note that confess to is often followed by a gerund: • ... I must confess to having done some flagrant cheating —Cornelia Otis Skinner, TV. Y. Times Mag., 23 Jan.1955 • ... will confess to having had at least one spontaneous apparently telepathic or clairvoyant experience —Antony Flew, A New Approach to Psychical Research, 1953 • ... no one had ever confessed to having locked it — William de Morgan, It Never Can Happen Again, 1909 • We must confess to being somewhat conservative — ita bulletin, Spring 1965 George Bernard Shaw even used of with the gerund: • ... no Irishman ever again confessed of being Irish —Back to Methuselah, 1921 We may tell you that confess to is also often followed by a noun: • ... and then confessed to the crime under the urgent moral persuasion of the company's chairman —C. R. Hewitt & Jenifer Wayne, London Calling, 19 Aug. 1954 • ... I confess to a certain reluctance —Herbert Read, The Philosophy of Modern Art, 1952 • Rhee confesses to 78 years and is probably older — Gerald W. Johnson, New Republic, 15 June 1953 • Let me begin by confessing to prejudice —Dudley Fitts, N. Y. Times Book Rev., 4 July 1954 • ... I confess to a firm belief in the tonic properties of crags —John Livingston Lowes, Convention and Revolt in Poetry, 1919 In short, there seems to be no real problem here. All of the examples are idiomatic and only GBS's is unusual. |
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