A split infinitive is a grammatical construction specific to English in which an adverb (or adverbial phrase) appears within an infinitive phrase. The classic example is in the opening sequence of the Star Trek television series: "to boldly go where no man has gone before".
Split infinitives have long been deprecated as incorrect, or at least avoidable, despite their frequent use in the vernacular. Since the 19th century linguistic prescriptivists have sought to categorically disallow split infinitives, but recent editions of English usage guides have largely dropped their objection.
History of the construction Old and Middle English In Old English, infinitives were single words ending in -n or -an (comparable to modern Dutch and German -n, -en). Gerunds were formed using to followed by a verbal noun in the dative case, which ended in -anne or -enne (e.g., tō cumenne = "coming, to come"). In Middle English, the bare infinitive and the gerund coalesced into the same form ending in -(e)n (e.g., comen "come"; to comen "to come"). 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 (early 13th century):
and he cleopede him to; alle his wise cnihtes. for to him reade;Nagle (1994). Nagle takes his historical data from And he called to him all his wise knights to him advise;
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 (14th century), who often split infinitives: For this was gret unkyndenesse, to this manere treten there brother.Quoted by ; Strunk, William & White, E.B., The Elements of Style, fourth edition, Longman, 2000, p. 58, also speak of 14th-century examples. For this was great unkindness, to in this manner treat their brother.
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.Some have suggested that another sentence in Shakespeare, from Coriolanus, Act I, scene 2, contains a split infinitive: "Whatever hath been thought on in this state, / That could be brought to bodily act, ere Rome / Had circumvention?" , Others say that "bodily" here is an adjective and "act" is a noun, as Vizetelly and Johnson's Dictionary do. The uncontroversial example appears to be a syntactical inversion for the sake of meter: Root pity in thy heart, that when it grows Thy pity may deserve to pitied be (Sonnet 142). 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.Hall (1882) 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: Who dared to nobly stem tyrannic pride. ("The Cottar's Saturday Night")
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. not.doc .doc version
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: She gradually got rid of her stutter. and She will gradually get rid of her stutter. one may, by analogy, wish to say: She wants to gradually get rid of her stutter. 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: Child: I accidentally forgot to feed the hamster. Parent: Well, you'll have to try harder not to "accidentally forget", won't you? This is an example of an adverb being transferred into split infinitive position from a parallel position in a different construction.
Transformational grammar Transformational grammarians 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: I need you all to really pull your weight. I'm gonna (going to) totally pulverise him.
Sometimes it is a negation, as in the self-referential joke:
Writers should learn to not split infinitives.
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 (really-pull, not-split).
Compound split infinitives, i.e., infinitives split by more than one word, usually involve a pair of adverbs or a multi-word adverbial: We are determined to completely and utterly eradicate the disease. He is thought to almost never have made such a gesture before. This is a great opportunity to once again communicate our basic message.
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: It was their nature to all hurt one another.Quoted from P. Carey (1981) in and may even be combined with an adverb: I need you to all really pull your weight. 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: *And he called to him all his wise knights to him advise.
While, structurally, acceptable as poetic formulation, this would result in a garden path sentence, particularly evident if the indirect object is omitted:
SentenceInitial likely partial parseFinal parse*And he called all his wise knights to him advise.And he called all his knights to come to him, and adviseAnd 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 (to pitied be, cited above), 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..." (Shakespeare, Henry V, Act II, scene 9) and "...she is determined to be independent, and not live with aunt Pullet" (George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss, volume VI, chapter I).
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;OED 1900; OEDS. A Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary. 1972–86. Ed. R. W. Burchfield; Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition (2005–2006), "split infinitive". 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,Richard Lederer, A Man of My Words: Reflections on the English Language, St. Martin's Press, 2003, , p. 248: "The prohibition of that practice was created in 1762 by one Robert Lowth, an Anglican bishop and self-appointed grammarian." Similarly Peter Stockwell, Sociolinguistics: A Resource Book for Students, Routledge, 2002, , p. 98. 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 waitnot 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: