Split infinitive
A split infinitive is a grammatical construction specific to English in which an adverb or adverbial phrase separates the "to" and "infinitive" constituents of what was traditionally called the "full infinitive", but is more commonly known in modern linguistics as the to-infinitive.
In the history of English language aesthetics, the split infinitive was often deprecated, despite its prevalence in colloquial speech. The opening sequence of the Star Trek television series contains a well-known example, "to boldly go where no man has gone before", wherein the adverb boldly was said to split the full infinitive, to go.
Multiple words may split a to-infinitive, such as: "The population is expected to more than double in the next ten years."
In the 19th century, some linguistic prescriptivists sought to disallow the split infinitive forever, and the resulting conflict had considerable cultural importance. The construction still renders disagreement, but modern English usage guides have largely dropped the objection to it.
The split infinitive terminology is not widely used in modern linguistics. Some linguists question whether a to-infinitive phrase can meaningfully be called a "full infinitive" and, consequently, whether an infinitive can be "split" at all.
History of the construction
Old and Middle English
In Old English, infinitives were single words ending in -n or -an. Gerunds were formed using to followed by a verbal noun in the dative case, which ended in -anne or -enne. In Middle English, the bare infinitive and the gerund coalesced into the same form ending in -n. The "to" infinitive was not split in Old or Early Middle English.The first known example of a split infinitive in English, in which a pronoun rather than an adverb splits the infinitive, is in Layamon's Brut :
This may be a poetic inversion for the sake of meter, and therefore says little about whether Layamon would have felt the construction to be syntactically natural. However, no such reservation applies to the following prose example from John Wycliffe, who often split infinitives:
Modern English
After its rise in Middle English, the construction became rare in the 15th and 16th centuries. William Shakespeare used it at least once. The uncontroversial example appears to be a syntactical inversion for the sake of meter:Edmund Spenser, John Dryden, Alexander Pope, and the King James Version of the Bible used none, and they are very rare in the writing of Samuel Johnson. John Donne used them several times, though, and Samuel Pepys also used at least one. No reason for the near disappearance of the split infinitive is known; in particular, no prohibition is recorded.
Split infinitives reappeared in the 18th century and became more common in the 19th.
Daniel Defoe, Benjamin Franklin, William Wordsworth, Abraham Lincoln, George Eliot, Henry James, and Willa Cather are among the writers who used them. Examples in the poems of Robert Burns attest its presence also in 18th-century Scots:
In colloquial speech, the construction came to enjoy widespread use. Today, according to the American Heritage Book of English Usage, "people split infinitives all the time without giving it a thought." In corpora of contemporary spoken English, some adverbs such as always and completely appear more often in the split position than the unsplit.
Theories of origins
Although it is difficult to say why the construction developed in Middle English, or why it revived so powerfully in Modern English, a number of theories have been postulated.Analogy
Traditional grammarians have suggested that the construction appeared because people frequently place adverbs before finite verbs. George Curme writes: "If the adverb should immediately precede the finite verb, we feel that it should immediately precede also the infinitive…" Thus, if one says:one may, by analogy, wish to say:
This is supported by the fact that split infinitives are often used as echoes, as in the following exchange, in which the riposte parodies the slightly odd collocation in the original sentence:
This is an example of an adverb being transferred into split infinitive position from a parallel position in a different construction.
Transformational grammar
ians have attributed the construction to a re-analysis of the role of to.Types
In the modern language, splitting usually involves a single adverb coming between the verb and its marker. Very frequently, this is an emphatic adverb, for example:Sometimes it is a negation, as in the self-referential joke:
However, in modern colloquial English, almost any adverb may be found in this syntactic position, especially when the adverb and the verb form a close syntactic unit.
Compound split infinitives, i.e., infinitives split by more than one word, usually involve a pair of adverbs or a multi-word adverbial:
Examples of non-adverbial elements participating in the split-infinitive construction seem rarer in Modern English than in Middle English. The pronoun all commonly appears in this position:
and may even be combined with an adverb:
However an object pronoun, as in the [|Layamon example] above, would be unusual in modern English, perhaps because this might cause a listener to misunderstand the to as a preposition:
While, structurally, acceptable as poetic formulation, this would result in a garden path sentence, particularly evident if the indirect object is omitted:
| Sentence | Initial likely partial parse | Final parse |
| *And he called all his wise knights to him advise. | And he called all his knights to come to him, and advise | And he called all his knights, so that they might advise him |
Other parts of speech would be very unusual in this position. However, in verse, poetic inversion for the sake of meter or of bringing a rhyme word to the end of a line often results in abnormal syntax, as with Shakespeare's split infinitive, in fact an inverted passive construction in which the infinitive is split by a past participle. Presumably, this would not have occurred in a prose text by the same author.
When multiple infinitives are linked by a conjunction, the particle to tends to be used only once at the beginning of the sequence: to eat, drink, and be merry. In this case, the conjunction and any other words that fall between the to and the final infinitive have seldom been deemed to create a split infinitive, and almost always have been considered uncontroversial. Examples include "We pray you to proceed / And justly and religiously unfold..." and "...she is determined to be independent, and not live with aunt Pullet".
History of the term
It was not until the very end of the 19th century that terminology emerged to describe the construction. The earliest use of the term split infinitive on record dates from 1890. The now rare cleft infinitive is almost as old, attested from 1893; in the 1890s it was briefly the more common term but almost disappeared after 1905. "Splitting the infinitive" is slightly older, going back to 1887. According to the main etymological dictionaries, infinitive-splitting and infinitive-splitter followed in 1926 and 1927, respectively. The term compound split infinitive, referring to a split infinitive with more than one word between the particle and the infinitive, is not found in these dictionaries and appears to be very recent.This terminology implies analysing the full infinitive as a two-word infinitive, which not all grammarians accept. As one who used "infinitive" to mean the single-word verb, Otto Jespersen challenged the epithet: "'To' is no more an essential part of an infinitive than the definite article is an essential part of a nominative, and no one would think of calling 'the good man' a split nominative." However, no alternative terminology has been proposed.
History of the controversy
Although it is sometimes reported that a prohibition on split infinitives goes back to Renaissance times, and frequently the 18th century scholar Robert Lowth is cited as the originator of the prescriptive rule, such a rule is not to be found in Lowth's writing, and is not known to appear in any text before the 19th century.Possibly the earliest comment against split infinitives was by the American John Comly in 1803.
An adverb should not be placed between the verb of the infinitive mood and the preposition to, which governs it; as Patiently to wait—not To patiently wait.
Another early prohibition came from an anonymous American in 1834:
The practice of separating the prefix of the infinitive mode from the verb, by the intervention of an adverb, is not unfrequent among uneducated persons … I am not conscious, that any rule has been heretofore given in relation to this point … The practice, however, of not separating the particle from its verb, is so general and uniform among good authors, and the exceptions are so rare, that the rule which I am about to propose will, I believe, prove to be as accurate as most rules, and may be found beneficial to inexperienced writers. It is this :—The particle, TO, which comes before the verb in the infinitive mode, must not be separated from it by the intervention of an adverb or any other word or phrase; but the adverb should immediately precede the particle, or immediately follow the verb.
In 1840, Richard Taylor also condemned split infinitives as a "disagreeable affectation", and in 1859, Solomon Barrett Jr., called them "a common fault." However, the issue seems not to have attracted wider public attention until Henry Alford addressed it in his Plea for the Queen's English in 1864:
A correspondent states as his own usage, and defends, the insertion of an adverb between the sign of the infinitive mood and the verb. He gives as an instance, "to scientifically illustrate." But surely this is a practice entirely unknown to English speakers and writers. It seems to me, that we ever regard the to of the infinitive as inseparable from its verb. And, when we have already a choice between two forms of expression, "scientifically to illustrate" and "to illustrate scientifically," there seems no good reason for flying in the face of common usage.
Others followed, among them Bache, 1869 ; William B. Hodgson, 1889; and Raub, 1897.
Even as these authorities were condemning the split infinitive, others were endorsing it: Brown, 1851 ; Hall, 1882; Onions, 1904; Jespersen, 1905; and Fowler and Fowler, 1906. Despite the defence by some grammarians, by the beginning of the 20th century the prohibition was firmly established in the press. In the 1907 edition of The King's English, the Fowler brothers wrote:
The 'split' infinitive has taken such hold upon the consciences of journalists that, instead of warning the novice against splitting his infinitives, we must warn him against the curious superstition that the splitting or not splitting makes the difference between a good and a bad writer.
In large parts of the school system, the construction was opposed with ruthless vigour. A correspondent to the BBC on a programme about English grammar in 1983 remarked:
One reason why the older generation feel so strongly about English grammar is that we were severely punished if we didn't obey the rules! One split infinitive, one whack; two split infinitives, two whacks; and so on.
As a result, the debate took on a degree of passion that the bare facts of the matter never warranted. There was frequent skirmishing between the splitters and anti-splitters until the 1960s. George Bernard Shaw wrote letters to newspapers supporting writers who used the split infinitive and Raymond Chandler complained to the editor of The Atlantic about a proofreader who interfered with Chandler's split infinitives:
By the way, would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write in a sort of broken-down patois which is something like the way a Swiss-waiter talks, and that when I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will remain split, and when I interrupt the velvety smoothness of my more or less literate syntax with a few sudden words of barroom vernacular, this is done with the eyes wide open and the mind relaxed and attentive. The method may not be perfect, but it is all I have.
Follett, in Modern American Usage writes: "The split infinitive has its place in good composition. It should be used when it is expressive and well led up to." Fowler offers the following example of the consequences of refusal to split infinitives: "The greatest difficulty about assessing the economic achievements of the Soviet Union is that its spokesmen try absurdly to exaggerate them; in consequence the visitor may tend badly to underrate them". This question results: "Has dread of the split infinitive led the writer to attach the adverbs to the wrong verbs, and would he not have done better to boldly split both infinitives, since he cannot put the adverbs after them without spoiling his rhythm" ? Bernstein argues that, although infinitives should not always be split, they should be split where doing so improves the sentence: "The natural position for a modifier is before the word it modifies. Thus the natural position for an adverb modifying an infinitive should be just … after the to". Bernstein continues: "Curme's contention that the split infinitive is often an improvement … cannot be disputed." Heffernan and Lincoln, in their modern English composition textbook, agree with the above authors. Some sentences, they write, "are weakened by … cumbersome splitting," but in other sentences "an infinitive may be split by a one-word modifier that would be awkward in any other position."