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A split infinitive is a grammatical construction specific to English in which an adverb or adverbial phrase separates the "to" and "infinitive" constituents of what was traditionally called the "full infinitive", but is more commonly known in modern linguistics as the to-infinitive (e.g., to go).
[11] [13] In his grammar book A Plea for the Queen's English (1864), Henry Alford claimed that because "to" was part of the infinitive, the parts were inseparable. [14] This was in line with a 19th-century movement among grammarians to transfer Latin rules to the English language. In Latin, infinitives are single words (e.g., "amare, cantare ...
Syntacticians might analyse the phrase "to be pitied" differently, but traditional grammar sees it as the infinitive of the auxiliary verb used with the participle to create a passive infinitive, i.e. "to be" is still an infinitive word-pair, and if anything else comes between them, it is a split infinitive.
The first published English grammar was a Pamphlet for Grammar of 1586, written by William Bullokar with the stated goal of demonstrating that English was just as rule-based as Latin. Bullokar's grammar was faithfully modeled on William Lily's Latin grammar, Rudimenta Grammatices (1534), used in English schools at that time, having been ...
Similarly, modern style and usage manuals allow split infinitives. African American Vernacular English speakers do not simply replace "is" with "be" across all tenses, with no added meaning. In fact, AAVE speakers use "be" to mark a habitual grammatical aspect not explicitly distinguished in Standard English.
1 why it is generally not acceptable to 'split' an infinitive with 'not' 2 falsity. 3 Problems. 4 comments. 4 Prescription vs. description. 5 biased "non split" POV ...