Split infinitive research paper

Document Type:Research Paper

Subject Area:Linguistics

Document 1

In this essay, we shall look into split infinitive in the 19th century. When it comes to split infinitive, the most common item that is interfered to make a construction is an adverb. A famous and typical example of a split infinitive construction is a quote known as the “Captain’s Oath” from the movie Star Trek. In the oath, the final line states “to boldly go” which is a classic example of the split infinitive. In this example, the word boldly interferes with the infinitive marker to, as well as, the verb go. According to Aarts, Chalker & Weiner (2014), the primary cause of argument against the split infinitive is based on the grammar of Latin, where it has been found that various portions of English prescriptive grammar were designed from.

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This is because in Latin all of the infinitives are single indivisible words, and hence you can never split an infinitive. Latin is a unique and well-developed language where there is no infinitive marker. For this reason, some of the grammarians argue that English should also follow the rule as in the Latin, and also endure that the infinitive is kept as a closed unit even when there are differences in structure. This was one of the base arguments for Robert Lowth, the Bishop of London, who raised his concerns against split infinitive constructions during the mid-18th century. According to them when a person tries to avoid split infinitive construction consciously, it might lead to awkward and vague expressions. In this essay, we shall go ahead and use the COHA corpus to analyze the use of different words over the 19th century.

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COHA allows a researcher to make queries based on these tags, for the corpora to include all the possible outcome of words that share the specified grammatical function. For example, [r*] function can be used for searching adverbs, and the numerous results can be sorted by relevance, alphabetically or by frequency. Therefore the function can be written as [r*] = adverbs. For this essay, we sort to conduct research using the search screen in COHA, in which we analyzed the frequency of certain split infinitives during the 19th century. This enabled us to obtain results that have been tabulated in tables 1 and 4. The search string to be used in the corpus comprised of tags meant to yield results that consist of ‘to’ plus an adverb and a verb.

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Therefore, the tag consisted of the following functions: to [r*] [v?i*]. Since this essay is meant to investigate split analysis in the 19th century, we limited our search period from 1810 through 1900. From the start of the table, we find there were 9. 31 per million words during the year 1810, and this number is almost similar to the figure of 1850 which got 12. 43 per million words. However, during the years 1820, 1830 and 1840, the number of split infinitive construction plummets down to a low figure in 1839 of 3. The other two years 1820 and 1840 recorded 4. 77 in the year 1860. The spectrum was experienced a sharp rise to almost double in the1870s reaching an all-century high at 32. However, the trend starts to decrease slightly as the data reached 1880. The trend continues to fall even more until it rounds up the century with a frequency of 26.

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62 per million words. The low numbers of frequency for the split infinitive could be due to the era it is researched from. According to historians, during the 1800s this kind of splitting alternative was not common and could practically be termed as non-existence. However, when compared to its non-splitting counterpart, the numbers have a huge difference. However, we can observe that split construction becoming more prevalent in the last four decades. Table 3. This essay intended to get a historical perspective of the construction of split infinitive through the corpus study. From the two sets of data obtained from the corpus study, we can be able to conclude that there are no signs from COHA that indicates that the increasing negativity pertaining the split infinitives in the 19th century continued with the adverse effect over the next century.

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This can be seen from the data tables where the frequency of the constructions tended to have an up and down fluctuation when looked on a decade to decade basis. In another analysis, we looked at all the split infinitives containing all types of adverbs. To search all kinds of adverbs, I used the search function ‘to [r*] [v?i*]’ whereby [r*] refers to adverbs and [v?i*] represents the infinitive verb form. Further analysis shows that from the 1940s the use of split infinitives experienced a sharp increase in the decades that followed. When comparing the data from the 19th century to the 20th century, we can see how common the split infinitives have increased over the decades — starting from the 1810s which only recorded 11.

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01 instances of split infinitives per million words. However, the frequency drastically increased to an all-time high of 97. 13 cases per million words in the 2000s. Use of adverbs in the 19th and 20th century. From the results of the table above, we can see that although the 19th century started well, then the frequency dropped in the next two decades. However, the use of split infinitives then begins to increase at a constant rate, until it reached the century peak of 22. 46 per million words. It is only the first quarter that experiences a decline in the frequency of split infinitive usage. The English style and elegance were adopted from those of classical Latin. Therefore, prescriptivism can be said to have started as early as the 19th century, and still exists until today.

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While Latin influence grew exponentially and even became widespread, so did the individuality of English diminish. More critics and writers came up to disapprove split infinitive, terming it as a faulty and incorrect grammar. However, the only evidence they relied upon was the Latin language grammar from which the English language was shaped. Another cause of the unstable trend of split infinitives is people’s preference. According to Fischer (2007), people’s choice also had a significant role in the frequency of split infinitives usage. This group of people constitutes people from all brackets, including writers, teachers, politicians, and even newsrooms. Even with the rise of grammarians opposing split infinitives and terming it as ‘incorrect’ people still preferred the use of split infinitive as they used it for another purpose.

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