Split infinitive
A
split infinitive is a
grammatical construction in the
English language where a word or phrase, usually an
adverb or adverbial phrase, occurs between the marker
to and the bare
infinitive (uninflected) form of the
verb. The construction is particularly notable because of some controversy (see below) as to whether it is "grammatically correct".
One famous example is from the television series
Star Trek: "
to boldly go where no man has gone before." Here, the presence of the adverb
boldly between the parts of the infinitive,
to and
go, creates a split infinitive. The construction can often be avoided by placing the intervening words after the verb or before the
to marker: "to go boldly where no man has gone before" or "boldly to go where no man has gone before." However, these two rephrasings do not have identical meanings — the former attaches the boldness to the manner of going, while the latter attaches the boldness to the complete act of going "where no man has gone before."
Descriptively speaking, split infinitives are common in most varieties of English. However, their status as part of the
standard language is controversial. In the 19th century, some grammatical authorities sought to introduce a
prescriptive rule that split infinitives should not be used in English. Most experts on language from the last 100 years, however, agree that this rule was misguided, and indeed that the split infinitive construction can sometimes help to convey one's intended meaning more accurately (as in the case of "to boldly go").
It is likely that the split infinitive originally entered the English language under the influence of French; at any rate, it first appears in the time after the Norman Conquest when English was borrowing very widely from French. Germanic languages (including Old English) do not permit an adverb to fall between an infinitive and its preposition. Compare German::Ich beschließe, etwas
nicht zu tun.:I decide
not to do something.Romance languages, on the other hand, do separate infinitives from their prepositions, though grammarians of those languages do not normally use the term "split infinitive" to describe the phenomenon, since the preposition is not considered a part of the uninflected infinitive form. Compare French::Je décide
de ne pas faire quelque chose.:I decide
to not do something.
English writers have been splitting infinitives at least since
Layamon in 1250. However by the 16th century the construction was still rare in some of the most notable authors.
William Shakespeare used only one.
Edmund Spenser,
John Dryden,
Alexander Pope, and the
King James Version of the Bible used none. Notable authors who have used them at least once include
John Donne,
Samuel Pepys,
Daniel Defoe,
Benjamin Franklin,
Samuel Johnson,
William Wordsworth,
Abraham Lincoln,
George Eliot,
Henry James, and
Willa Cather.
[The American Heritage® Book of English Usage on split infinitives ]Split infinitives became more common in the 19th century, and general awareness seems to have started when
Henry Alford condemned them in
Plea for the Queen's English, published in 1866. Alford's condemnation was on the basis of common usage. By the end of the 19th century, the prohibition was firmly established in the press and popular belief. The first known use of the term "split infinitive" was in 1897.
The full infinitive as a prerequisite
In English grammar the bare infinitive
do is distinguished from the full infinitive
to do, and
to do is often used as the citation form. This is probably because the English infinitive lacks any distinctive inflection, in contrast to French and German, where the bare infinitive by itself is recognisable as such. This means that in English, the word
to is conceptualized as part of the infinitive, whereas in French and German,
à/de and
zu are not. The difference is subjective, as the constructions are parallel, but the perspective on this that begat the admonition not to split infinitives was a prerequisite for the idea that there is such a thing as a full infinitive which can be split.
The argument from classical languages
It is speculated that the rule against split infinitives developed around the beginning of the
English Renaissance, as English grammarians, trained to look to
Ancient Greek and
Latin as ideal languages, took a closer look at their own mother tongue. In Greek and Latin, it is impossible to split infinitives because these languages never use their infinitives together with a preposition. At a time when European intellectuals saw Classical culture and language as more perfect than their own, this represented a powerful precedent. Some language historians see this as the deciding factor. For example, the
American Heritage Book of English Usage (1996) states: "The only rationale for condemning the construction is based on a false analogy with Latin."
The argument from Germanic languages
Then there are those who dislike the split infinitive on the grounds that it is not a natural construction in a Germanic language. This is a weak argument today, as standard English has very many constructions which are novelties within the Germanic language family. However, in fairness to the renaissance grammarians, it must be said that the further we go back in English language history, the more English is typically Germanic, and it is possible that in the 14th century the split infinitive was still uncommon enough to sound foreign.
The descriptivist objection
Most English speakers use split infinitives. Some do not, and not because they follow a prescriptivist rule, but simply because it was not part of the language that they learned as children. One may, of course, speculate that they are influenced by prescriptivist thinking in the previous generation. Nonetheless, a complete picture of the debate must allow that there are those who are uncomfortable with the construction because their descriptivist observation of their own usage leads them to feel that it does not belong.
Some of those who avoid split infinitives differentiate according to type and register. Clearly, "I decided to not go" is not nearly as awkward as "I decided to by bus on Wednesday go"; that is, it makes a big difference what kinds of adverbials are inserted, and the boundaries of normality are subjective. Again, split infinitives are far more common in speech than in academic writing, and a sense of what makes proper formal style is likewise subjective. Thus an attempt to avoid the construction need not be based entirely on prescriptivist rules; it can draw simultaneously on a descriptivist observation that certain split infinitives are not usual in certain situations.
Just as the prohibition against the split infinitive was becoming part of popular culture, there was a reaction against it among leading writers and grammarians. For example, 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."
The reaction against this "superstition" was based on grammatical, historical, and stylistic considerations. Grammatically, the prohibition of split infinitives was thought to be a nonsensical application of Latin grammar to a
Germanic language. There are good grounds for arguing that
to is not part of the infinitive in English. Neither its
German cognate zu, nor its
Dutch cognate
te is considered part of the infinitive in their respective languages, although many sentences use them the same way as English uses
to. And while German and Dutch never allow an adverbial to fall between the preposition and the infinitive, Swedish does.
There was frequent skirmishing between the splitters and anti-splitters up until the 1960s.
George Bernard Shaw wrote letters to newspapers supporting writers who used the split infinitive, and
Raymond Chandler complained to his publisher about a
proofreader who changed Chandler's split infinitives:
"Would you convey my compliments to the purist who reads your proofs and tell him or her that I write 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 stay split and when I interrupt the velvety smoothness of my more or less literate syntax with a few sudden words of bar-room vernacular, that 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."
Even as some grammarians (Alford, cited above; Bache, 1869; Hodgson, 1889) were condemning the split infinitive, others (Brown, 1851; Onions, 1904; Jespersen, 1905; Fowler and Fowler, cited above) were endorsing it. In the present day, all reference texts of grammar deem simple split infinitives unobjectionable. (Compound split infinitives remain controversial; see
Special situations below.)
H. W. Fowler later wrote, in his 1926
Dictionary of Modern English Usage, that writers who avoid split infinitives are "bogy-haunted creatures". Curme's
Grammar of the English Language (1931) says that, not only is the split infinitive correct, but it "should be furthered rather than censured, for it makes for clearer expression".
The Columbia Guide to Standard American English (1993) notes that the split infinitive "eliminates all possibility of ambiguity", in contrast to the "potential for confusion" in an unsplit construction. The
American Heritage Book of English Usage quoted above also opposes the condemnation.
Nevertheless, many teachers of English still admonish students against using split infinitives. Because the prohibition has become so widely known, the
Columbia Guide (1993, above) recommends that writers "follow the conservative path [of avoiding split infinitives when they are not necessary], especially when you're uncertain of your readers' expectations and sensitivities in this matter". When, in a given situation, the only alternatives to a split infinitive are either awkward and unnatural-sounding or change the intended meaning, it is often possible to reformulate the sentence (perhaps by rephrasing it without an infinitive) and thus avoid the issue altogether.
Stylistically, the careful placement of another word between
to and the bare infinitive sometimes avoids ambiguity or ugliness. The old prohibition on split infinitives is particularly surprising when one observes that there are a number of expressions in English that are weakened considerably by avoiding the split infinitive.
An example
R.L. Trask uses this example:
*She decided to gradually get rid of the teddy bears she had collected.
Clearly, what is implied here is she took a decision to get rid of her teddy bears, and the disposal would happen over time. 'Gradually' splits the infinitive 'to get'. But if we were to move it, where would it go?. Consider the following:
*She decided gradually to get rid of the teddy bears she had collected.
This implies that the decision was gradual.
*She decided to get rid of the teddy bears she had collected gradually.
This implies that the collecting process was gradual.
*She decided to get gradually rid of the teddy bears she had collected.
This sounds awkward to most native speakers of English.
*She decided to get rid gradually of the teddy bears she had collected.
This is almost as awkward as its immediate predecessor.
Not only does the original example sound right to a native speaker, it is also the only semantically sound possibility.
The best way to avoid using split infinitives is usually via a change in lexical choices. However, in spoken language, phonetic stresses and timing is usually all that is needed for a sentence's actual implications to be understood.
In other instances, use of a split infinitive is for many people the most natural way to add certain kinds of emphasis in conversation::Student A: "I'm going to do better next year.":Student B: "I'm going to
really do better next year."
On a historical level, it is possible that years of attacks against split infinitives by prescriptive grammarians have cowed some people into needless reluctance to split other compound verb forms. For example, people will contort sentences to avoid placing an adverb in its usual position between the
auxiliary verb and the participle, leading to constructions such as, "The argument originally had been used…" instead of "The argument had originally been used", which is more natural for most speakers.
It is probably not possible to disentangle this argument from the modality of English grammar. Typically, in a phrase such as "I am going to", the verbal construct "to be going to" acts as a modal verb, analogous to other standard modal verbs "will", "could", "can" etc. In this sense, it becomes apparent that the preposition 'to' does not belong to the infinitive verb, but rather to the modal verb. In this case, it becomes impossible to split an infinitive.
Compound split infinitives (where more than one adverb is employed) and other multi-word insertions are still contentious; as recently as 1996 the usage panel of
The American Heritage Book of English Usage were evenly divided for and against such sentences as "I expect him
to completely and utterly fail." More than three-quarters of the panel rejected "We are seeking a plan
to gradually, systematically, and economically relieve the burden." On the other hand, 87% of the panel deemed acceptable the multi-word adverb in "We expect our output
to more than double in a year."
Here the problem appears to be the breaking up of the verbal phrase "to be seeking a plan to relieve". By placing part of the head verbal phrase so far away from the rest of it, the brain has to work harder to understand the sentence. The rule of thumb should always be to make it easier for the reader or listener to understand.
Splitting infinitives with
negations, as in the phrase "I want to not see you any more", is one of the trickiest areas of contention. Some people who are generally tolerant towards split infinitives draw the line at those split by negation, calling them awkward or ungrammatical. However, the relative inflexibility of negation makes it hard to reformulate such sentences: while "I want to happily run" can easily be altered to "I want to run happily", "I want to see you not" is not modern English. The possibilities are moving up the "not" to immediately before the
to-infinitive ("I want not to see you any more"), which sounds awkward to most people; or negating the verb rather than the desire ("I don't want to see you anymore") — which, some might object, entirely alters the meaning of the sentence; or simply "I want to see you no more."
There are rare examples of non-adverbial phrases participating in the split infinitive construction, as in Shakespeare's split infinitive, a poetic inversion: "Thy pity may deserve
to pitied be" (Sonnet 142, emphasis added). Modern examples are "It was their nature
to all hurt one another" or "It was her destiny
to one day assume the throne". These have endured the same shifts of opinion and gradual acceptance as adverbs.
*
Huddleston, Rodney D. and
Pullum, Geoffrey K. (2002).
The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language, Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521431468. (
See especially pp. 581–582.)
* Trask, R.L. (2001)
Mind The Gaffe, Penguin Books. ISBN 0140514767. (
See pp269-70)
*
alt.english.usage FAQ entry on split infinitives *
The Columbia Guide to Standard American English ditto *
Am I a Bad Person if I Split an Infinitive?
