The following sentence written in this way : "We heard the dog growl fiercely." Why we cannot say "growled"?

Question

The following sentence written in this way : "We heard the dog growl fiercely." Why we cannot say "growled"?

Answer 1

Because you already said heard. Some rules in English are, because it's not done that way. You have to remember them. Plus, there is no need to point out that you heard it. The dog growled fiercely is enough to say.

Answer 2

You can say it.  The two sentences mean different things.

The sentence as you wrote it: You heard the dog growl.  The growl was fierce.  That was a one-time event that started, happened, and stopped.

The sentence you asked about: You heard that the dog growled sometimes.  And its growl was fierce when it growled.  It was a continuing, on-going event lasted a while.

The difference would be more clear in Spanish which has multiple past tense verbs.

Answer 3

You cannot say that because you already have a verb in the past tense(heard). If you wanted to say "growled" then you would have to take out "heard" and change the sentence to "The dog growled fiercly."

Hope this makes it clearer!

Answer 4

You CAN say growled, but ONLY if you insert the word 'that' after 'heard'.

This changes the meaning of the sentence. As others have pointed out, once you establish the time frame of the primary action (what you heard, personally) as occurring in the past, the secondary action you are describing is written in present tense.  Adding 'that' changes the action to a passive one - you didn't hear the dog growl fiercely yourself, someone told you that the dog growled fiercely - so both actions are correctly told in past tense.

English is definitely a confusing language to learn.

Answer 5

because you are stating what the dog did at that time , not what he had done  

Answer 6

Once you establish the tense in a sentence you go back to the present time.  In this case, the word 'heard' establishes past tense.  Now the rest of the sentence uses present tense.  I think this is to avoid the complications of having tense be relative to previously established tenses, as in the case of negatives and double negatives.  It becomes too confusing to keep track of where you are.   So the convention is to establish tense once, then proceed in present tense for the rest of the sentence.