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History of the Infinitive HISTORY OF THE INFINITIVE IN ENGLISH By Virginia E. Harper A Thesis Su bmitted to the Faculty of the College of Humanities In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Arts Florida Atlantic University Boca Raton, Florida December 1974 HISTORY OF THE INFINITIVE IN ENGLISH By Virginia E. Harper This thesis was prepared under the direction of the candidate's thesis advisor, Jl r. Mary Faraci, Department of English, and has been approved by the members of her supervisory committee. It was submitted to the Faculty of the College of Humanities and was accepted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Arts. SUPERVISORY COMMITTEE: ~ ~ ( Th~ Adv1SOT) College d Studies ii ABSTRACT Author: Virginia E. Harper Title: History of the Infinitive in English Institution: Florida Atlantic University Degree: Master of Arts Year: 1974 This thesis is a comparison of Old English infinitives with present day English infinitive forms. The comparisons in this thesis provide insight into historical differences and developments involving the infinitive. One of the most obvious differences between Old English and present day English is the variety of Old English word orders; the evidence shows different patterns of interrogative and declarative subject-verb inversions, as well as adverb, adjective and object placement when the infinitive without to was used. With the exception of the interrogatives, the tendency in present day English is to have lhe modal or verb follow the subject and precede the infinitive. In comparing the uses of Old English verbs that cannot take the to + infinitive with those of present day En ~ lish that must, it is evident that the to + infinitive structure is now much more common in sentences. One can assume that the present day preference for the to + infinitive after main verbs, with the exception of modal auxiliaries, has grown out of the Old English use of the inflected infinitive with to. iii TA BLE OF CONTENTS ABSTRACT iii INTRODUCTIO N 1 CHAPTER I. DEFI NITI ONS AND FUN CTI ON S OF THE INFI NITIVE II. VARIATI ON S I N STRU CTURE AND mEANI NG OF TH E I NFI NI TIVE 11 III. VARIATIO NS OF THE I NFI NITIVE 24 CONCLUSION 44 LIST OF WORKS CITED 47 iv INTRODUCTION This thesis has been undertaken to analyze the meanings, the word order, and the uses with to and without to of the infinitive in Old Englis h i n comparison with present day forms and uses. A present da y En glish infinitive construction is often identical to an Old En glis h pattern; whereas, in some instances, present day English no longe r preserves the Old English construction. Morgan Callaway's book The Infinitive in Anglo-Saxon is a comprehensive study of all the uses of the infinitive in all extant 1 Old English manuscripts. The book is valuable for its complete lists of main verbs and the meanings of the infinitives that follow them. Calla way's work however, does not contain any comparisons of the uses of Old English infinitives with those of Modern English. Although thorough, his details are not organized enough for an accurate picture of the infinitive in Old English. H~s treatment of the occurrences of to and the inflected infinitive is too diffuse to be useful. Throughout the volume, Calla way mentions that the infinitive form precedes the main verb, but he does not go into any detailed analysis of structural variation. He is not concerned with studying sentence pa tterns like the separation of infinitive forms and main verbs by objects and/or phrases; moreover, he does not discuss infinitive constructions when inversion, interrogatives or negation 1 morgan Cal lawa y, Jr., Th e Infinit ive in Ang lo-Sa xon. Carnegie Institution of washington, o.c., Publica tion No. 1670. (Cambridge, The Unive r sity Pres s, 1913 ). 1 2 occur. The reliability of the work is questionable because in at least one entry, he has misunderstood the relationship of the infinitive to the main verb. Most grammars of Old English give only a brief summary of the infinitive. Texts outlining the history of Old English grammar agree on certain forms of the infinitive, but there is no comparison of the uses of the infinitive forms with or without to in Old English. Furthermore, there is no study of the effects on Modern English forms. Their contributions, then, are rather slight. In his discussion of verbs in Old English Grammar, A. Campbell examines the infinitive endings. He also mentions the use of the Old English modal auxiliaries Willan 'will' and sculan 'shall' with the infinitive to show desire and 2 the future. Samuel Moore and Thomas A. Knott's grammar The Elements of Old English contains a cursory definition of the infinitive as a principal part of each verb class and of the inflected infinitive as a 3 gerund, but no description of the syntax of the infinitive. Charles Carlton's Descriptive Syntax of the Old English Charters provides a full study of the infinitive and the inflected infinitive or gerund in 4 the syntax of Old English but in the Charters ·only. 2 A. Campbell, Old English Grammar. (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1959), PP• 295, 299, 343-346. 3samuel Moore and Thomas A. Knott, The Elements of Old English rev. James R. Hulbert, lOth ed. (Ann Arbor, Michigan: The George Wahr Publishing Co., 1963) PP• 24-27, 182. 4 charles Carlton, Descriptive Syntax of the Old English Charters, Janua Linguarium Series Practica III (Paris: The Hague Press, 1970) P• 186. Only two works compare particular uses of the infinitive in both Old English and present day English. The History of English Syntax by Elizabeth Closs Traugott is useful in describing the meanings of Old English and present day English modal auxiliaries. Traugott, however, like the others does not deal with specific uses of the 5 infinitive without to nor with the inflected infinitive with to. G. L. Brook's A History of the English Language presents information on a few of the uses of infinitive forms, both in Old English and present day English. Brook outlines the historical development of Modern English infinitive forms without inflections. He also points out the increased use of the infinitive in present day English to replace a subordinate "that" clause. In addition, Brook has a brief analysis of the "split infinitive" and the use of to by ellipsis in present day English. 6 Except for Calla~ay, the aforesaid studies are valuable only for a general picture of Old English grammar that happens to include the infinitive. Because all works have ignored the approach most interesting to present day English speakers, this thesis will analyze the sources of the present day English infinitive. The evidence will be organized to clarify the meaning and structure of the Old English forms that shed light on the present day English infinitive. 5. Elizabeth Closs Traugbtt, A History of English Syntax: A Transfor- mational Approach to the History of En glish Sentence Structures, Transatlantic Series in Linguistics (New York: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston, Inc., 197l) . pp. 66-73, 168-172. 6 G. L. Brook, A History of the English Languaoe (New York: W. w. Norton & Co., Inc., 1958) PP• 162-164. 4 The Old English data for this thesis are a representative collection of infinitive structures from the 9th century manuscripts of King Alfred's 7 8 Drosius and King Alfred's Translation of Gregory's Cura Pastoralis. These manuscripts are important because they and the Old English Charters are accepted as the only extant examples of 9th century dialect. Both contain frequent and different uses of the infinitive. For the present day English structural comparisons, I have chosen 9 A Gramm a r of Contemporary English by Randolph Quirk. For aid in translating Old English, I have used the most recent Anglo-Saxon 10 dictionary: A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary by J. R. Clark-Hall. Although for the most part the translations are mine, I have checked J. E. Giles translation of Orosius in The Whole Works of King Alfred the Great~ 1 and Sweet's translation of King Alfred's Translation of 12 Cura Pastoralis for the meanings of the more difficult passages. 7 orosius, Paulus, King Alfred's Orosius, ed. Henry Sweet (London: E. 8. Trubner, 1883). 8King Alfred's West-Sa xon Version of Greagory's Pastoral Care, trans. and ed. Henry Sweet, Publications of the Early English Text Society (London: E. B. Trubner & Co., 1871). 9 . Randolph Quirk, et al., A Grammar of Contemporary English (London: Longman Group Limited, 1972). 10 J. R. Clark-Hall, A Concise Anglo-Saxon Dictionary (Cambridge: The University Press, 1970). 11 J. E. Giles, The Whole Works of King Alfred the Great: An Englis~ Translation of the Anglo-Sa xon Version of the Historian Orosius, Vol, : II (1885~ rpt. New York: AMS Press, Inc., 1969). 12 Sweet, Gregory's Pastoral Ca re. 5 The text of the thesis concentrates on the Old English examples. For comparison, data have been filed by categories relating to contemporary English usage. Old English passages are immediately followed by contemporary English translation. The Old English infinitive constructions under discussion are underlined. The following Old English letters are normalized to their Modern English equivalents: pas~~ '£-as~')' -f), andt as l!J.• Examples from Cura Pa s t oralis are denoted by (CP), those from King Alfred's Orosius as (0). DEFINITION AND FUNCTIONS OF THE INFINITIVE It is necessary to define the present day English infinitive forms and analyze their functions before comparing them with their Old English counterparts.
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