to

The word to has a number of uses in English, but in this lecture I wish to concentrate on its use in forming part of an infinitive. The critical question is whether the infinitive form of an English verb is the two-word combination including a to. If so then nserting additional words between the to and the other word is a vicious act of wordicide and should be avoided. The alternative view is that there is no infinitive as such in English, and so the to is just a label. I personally have great troubles reading text with split infinitives. I was reading a business plan the other day in which there were so many demonstrations of this criminal art that I assumed that the company being promoted was run by uneducated people on the make, and it gave me no confidence. Worse, it was a university spin-off, whose current Board are academics or senior company directors.

jpff@cs.bath.ac.uk

Last modified: Sun Apr 6 18:29:59 BST 2003