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Infinitive
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Infinitive is a grammatical term used to refer to certain verb forms that exist in many languages. As with many linguistic concepts, there is not a single definition applicable to all languages. In traditional descriptions of English, the infinitive is the basic dictionary form of a verb when used non-finitely, withor without the particle to. Thus to go is an infinitive, as is go in a sentence like I must go there (but not in I go there). The latter is called the bare infinitive, the former the full infinitive or to-infinitive. In many other languages the infinitive is a single word, often with a characteristic inflective ending, such as manger ("(to) eat") in French, portare ("(to) carry") in Latin, lieben("(to) love") in German, etc.
Some languages do not have any forms identifiable as infinitives. Many Native American languages and some languages in Africa and Australia do not have direct equivalents to infinitives or verbal nouns. In their place they use finite verb forms in ordinary clauses or various special constructions.
Forms identified as infinitives are generally non-finite verbs in mostuses. They may function as other lexical categories, such as nouns, within the clauses that contain them, for example by serving as the subject, object or complement of another verb or preposition. As non-finite verbs, they are generally used without a stated subject, and as a rule they are not inflected to agree with any subject; nor do they normally inflect for other categories such as tense,aspect, mood or voice (although such inflection sometimes occurs to a certain degree, for example Latin has distinct active and passive infinitives).
Other non-finite verb forms which often share many of the above properties (but are not classed as infinitives) include participles, gerunds and gerundives.
Contents[hide] * 1 English * 1.1 Bare * 1.2 Full * 1.3 Auxiliary verbs* 1.4 Defective verbs * 1.5 Impersonal constructions * 2 Other Germanic languages * 3 Latin and Romance languages * 4 Hellenic languages * 4.1 Ancient Greek * 4.2 Modern Greek * 5 Balto-Slavic languages * 6 Biblical Hebrew * 7 Finnish * 8 Seri * 9 Translation to languages without an infinitive * 10 See also * 11 Notes |
[edit] English
English language hasthree non-finite verbal forms, but by long-standing convention, the term "infinitive" is applied to only one of these. (The other two are the past- and present-participle forms, where the present-participle form is also the gerund form.) In English, a verb's infinitive is its unmarked form, such as be, do, have, or sit, often introduced by the particle to. When this particle is absent, theinfinitive is said to be a bare infinitive; when it is present, it is generally considered to be a part of the infinitive, then known as the full infinitive (or to-infinitive), and there is a controversy about whether it should be separated from the main word of the infinitive (see Split infinitive). Nonetheless, modern theories typically do not consider the to-infinitive to be a distinct constituent,instead taking the particle to for operating on an entire verb phrase; so, to buy a car is parsed as to [buy [a car]], not as [to buy] [a car].
The bare infinitive and the full infinitive are mostly in complementary distribution. They are not generally interchangeable, but the distinction does not generally affect the meaning of a sentence; rather, certain contexts call almost exclusively for thebare infinitive, and all other contexts call for the full infinitive.
Huddleston and Pullum's Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (CGEL), published in 2002, does not use the notion of the infinitive, arguing that English uses the same form of the verb, the plain form, in infinitival clauses that it uses in imperative and present-subjunctive clauses.
[edit] Bare
The bare infinitive is not...