I always believed that the verb “allow” requires a direct object after itself, but someone alerted me to the fact that there are usages of this verb with no direct object following it. If you type
“allows to determine” site:uk
in your Google search box, you’ll get a few thousand results.
Is it OK to use this verb without a direct object in some cases?
All the “allows to determine” hits that I can see are bad English, in my opinion. Almost all of them should be “allows us to determine”, “allows one to determine”, or similar. I should say that I’m a BrE speaker, and I’m not certain whether usages like “allows to determine” might be more acceptable in AmE.
Beware that Google page hit counts often bear no relation to the actual number of results available and appear not to be reliable usage indicators. In the case of “allows to determine” site:uk, Google reports “About 17,000 results”, yet I see only 289 when I page through to the end.