forbid

1. *Ellen Carstairs says to forbid weapons for ordinary people in general would not be useful or necessary.

When this sentence came up in class, my first reaction was to suggest to instead of for, but the expression still didn't sit well. On second thought, forbid fits more easily into a different syntactic structure:

2. Ellen Carstairs says it would not be useful or necessary to forbid ordinary people in general to have weapons.

Then someone asked about prohibit, which seemed to present the same problems in 1, although in 2 it sounds fine, albeit with from + -ing form instead of to + infinitive:

3. Ellen Carstairs says it would not be useful or necessary to prohibit ordinary people in general from having weapons.

I still wasn't clear about why 1 bothered me, though, because to forbid weapons is ok, with the prepositional phrase, as in The law forbids weapons. Furthermore, the preposition for:, not to, is usual in the passive construction:

4a. It is forbidden for people to carry concealed weapons.

4b. *It is forbidden to people to carry concealed weapons..

Then I check the OALD, which offers this example:

5a. My doctor has forbidden me sugar.

which with me expressed as a prepositional phrase would be

5b. My doctor has forbidden sugar to me.

and not

5c. *My doctor has forbidden sugar for me.

5c is the same structure as 1, and sounds odd in the same way.

The Columbia Guide (see my General Index) has this about forbid:

When combined with a preposition, forbid usually takes to plus an infinitive, as in They will forbid her to call him again, occasionally to plus a noun or pronoun, as in Their owner forbade the living room to the dogs, and once in a while from plus either a gerund or another noun, as in We had forbidden them from [attending] the meeting.

This is actually a mistake, since to in the first example is not a preposition (which would be followed by a noun phrase), but what is more accurately called the "infinitive marker" (since it is followed by the infinitive form of the verb). The second example is similar to 5. The third sounds odd to me, but is probably encouraged by analogy with prohibit (as in 3).