A split infinitive is a controversial grammatical construction specific to English in which an adverb or adverbial phrase appears in a to-infinitive phrase between the "to" and the bare infinitive verb of the infinitival phrase "to verb", as "to adverb verb". The adverb is said to "split" the infinitive. The to-infinitive is also known as the full infinitive. An example is in the opening sequence of the Star Trek television series: "to boldly go where no man has gone before", where the adverb boldly splits the to-infinitive, to go. Multiple words may also separate the elements of a to-infinitive (such as in "population is expected to more than double by 2050"), forming a compound infinitive. In English grammatical usage and language aesthetics, split infinitives have often been deprecated or avoided, perceived as incorrect, ambiguous, or at least avoidable. This is despite the ongoing use of some split infinitives in the colloquial speech of various communities of English speakers. In the 19th century, some linguistic prescriptivists sought to categorically disallow split infinitives, and the resulting conflict had considerable cultural importance — accompanied as it was by claims of classism or educational elitism. The construction still provokes disagreement, but recent editions of English usage guides have largely dropped their objection to it. The split infinitive terminology is no longer 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 (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; 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. 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. 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. 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.
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:
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