how to analyze this sentence?

[liang]

dear friends:

how to analyze this sentence

he is always late and the last one to get to the classroom.

May i use getting here to instead to get , if it is not right ,can you tell me why?

[Pete]

dear friends:

how to analyze this sentence

he is always late and the last one to get to the classroom.

May i use getting here to instead to get, if it is not right, can you tell me why?
The infinitive form, "to get", definitely sounds better to me here than the participle form, "getting". I'm not able to come up with a concrete rule that covers this sentence, however. Both infinitives and participles can be used to modify a phrase like "the last one".

Here are a couple of thoughts on this particular case. First, we tend to use infinitives to talk about abstract concepts and participles to talk about concrete actions, specific occurrences. Here, "always the last one" is definitely abstract, not a particular action. That makes the infinitive seem proper.

Even when you have a particular action in mind, there are differences in the two constructions. Look at the following pair of sentences; both are correct and natural, but the meanings are different.
- Pat was the last one to eat.
- Pat was the last one eating.

In the first sentence, the infinitive has you look at eating as a completed activity. It says that a number of people ate, each at a specific time, and Pat was the last one to do that.

In the second sentence, we imagine that a number of people were eating at the same time, but some stopped eating while others continued. When all of the others had stopped, Pat was still in the process of eating.

So with this distinction, the infinitive shows a completed act, and the participle shows an ongoing process. If you used "getting" in your original sentence, I think it would sound as if "getting" referred to an ongoing process rather than a completed event, which is not what is meant.

[arshaikh]

dear friends:

how to analyze this sentence

he is always late and the last one to get to the classroom.

May i use getting here to instead to get , if it is not right ,can you tell me why?

dear

here is got is right because the sentence is showing past tense

[Rusty]

dear

here is got is right because the sentence is showing past tense
Arshaikh, the sentence is in the present tense:
" he is always late and the last one to get to the classroom."
This means that he is habitually late. The present tense is used for things that are habitual.