Re: Split Infinitives
Sorry to take so long to respond to your post, E.
Where split infinitives are concerned, what we have here, essentially, is a split between prescriptive grammarians, on the one hand, and descriptive linguists, on the other (between "rules" and actual usage).
But not even all prescriptive grammarians (e.g., Fowler) have insisted on the wickedness of splitting infinitives. Fact is, not until the 19th century was the ban on split infinitives made a "rule", and it was made a "rule" in order to bring it into closer conformity with Latin. (Don't forget that in English public schools, Latin and Greek were the major subjects of study; English grammar, as such, was not generally taught.)
Now, English is unique among all Indo-European languages in that its infinitive is normally composed of two words. Trying to fit it into a Procrustean Latin bed was a mistake, in the view of many grammar mavens (not to speak of descriptive linguists).
As the following example (from a college text entitled Discovering English Grammar) points out, you may not be able to convey the meaning you want UNLESS you split your infinitive:
Split Infinitives Exercise
Attempts to unsplit the infinite (to quietly enter) in the following sentence don't seem to succeed:
The queen told the page to quietly enter the chamber where the king was sleeping.
Consider the possibilities:
The queen told the page quietly to enter the chamber where the king was sleeping.
Ambiguous at best. The likely interpetation is that the queen was speaking quietly.
The queen told the page to enter quietly the chamber where the king was sleeping.
Pretty awkward. Adverbs do not usually go between verbs and their objects. Who ever says, "I entered quietly the
chamber"?
The queen told the page to enter the chamber quietly where the king was sleeping.
Solved one problem and created another. Now we've split a relative adverb ("where") from the noun it modifies
("the chamber").
The queen told the page to enter the chamber where the king was sleeping quietly.
Not even ambiguous. This will be interpreted to mean the king wasn't snoring for a change.
uncwil.edu
A more comprehensive discussion, from the alt.english.usage FAQ file:
Split infinitive. Sir Ernest Gowers wrote in The Complete Plain Words (HMSO, 1954): "The well-known [. . .] rule against splitting an infinitive means that nothing must come between 'to' and the infinitive. It is a bad name, as was pointed out by Jespersen [. . .]
'because we have many infinitives without to, as "I made him go". To therefore is no more an essential part of the infinitive than the definite article is an essential part of a nominative, and no one would think of calling the good man a split nominative.'
It is a bad rule too; it increases the difficulty of writing clearly [. . .]." ....
Fowler wrote (in the article Position of Adverbs, in MEU) that "to" + infinitive is "a definitely enough recognized verb-form to make the clinging together of its parts the natural and normal thing"; "there is, however, no sacrosanctity about that arrangement". There are many considerations that should govern placement of adverbs: there are other sentence elements, he said, such as the verb and its object, that have a stronger affinity for each other; but only avoidance of the split infinitive "has become a fetish".
Thus, although in "I quickly hid it", the most natural place for "quickly" is before "hid", "I am going to hide it quickly" is slightly
more natural than "I am going to quickly hide it". But "I am going to quickly hide it" is itself preferable to "I am going quickly to hide it" (splitting "going to" changes the meaning from indicating futurity to meaning physically moving somewhere), or to "I am going to hide quickly it" (separation of the verb from its object). And even separating the verb from its object may become the preferred place for the adverb if "it" is replaced by a long noun phrase ("I am going to hide quickly any trace of our ever having been here").
Phrases consisting of "to be" or "to have" followed by an adverb and a participle are not split infinitives, and constitute the natural word order. "To generally be accepted" and "to always have thought" are split infinitives; "to be generally accepted" and "to have always thought" are not.
Certain kinds of adverbs are characteristically placed before "to". These include negative and restrictive adverbs: "not" ("To be, or not to be"), "never", "hardly", "scarcely", "merely", "just"; and conjunctive adverbs: "rather", "preferably", "moreover", "alternatively". But placing adverbs of manner in this position is considered good style only in legal English ("It is his duty faithfully to execute the provisions . . .").
Clumsy avoidance of split infinitives often leads to ambiguity: does "You fail completely to recognise" mean "You completely fail to recognise", or "You fail to completely recognise"? Ambiguous split infinitives are much rarer, but do exist: does "to further cement trade relations" mean "to cement trade relations further", or "to promote relations with the cement trade"?
The most frequently cited split infinitive is from the opening voice-over of Star Trek: "to boldly go where no man has gone before". (Star Trek: The Next Generation had "one" in place of "man".) Here, "boldly" modifies the entire verb phrase: the meaning is "to have the boldness that the unprecedentedness of the destinations requires". If "boldly" were placed after "go", it would modify only "go", changing the meaning to "to go where no man has gone before, and by the way, to go there boldly".
Hardly any serious commentator believes that infinitives should never be split. The dispute is between those who believe that split infinitives should be avoided when this can be done with no sacrifice of clarity or naturalness, and those who believe that no effort whatever should be made to avoid them.
scripps.edu
And one final blast:
You might have heard many times in your life that it's wrong to split an
infinitive. Let me assure you right here and now that is no more than
unsubstantiated myth.
the-desk.com
My own position on split infinitives is that there are times when one should split them, and times when one should avoid doing so. It all depends on meaning. I have devised my own rule of thumb, which I'd like to pass on. Ask yourself: could the adverb I am using to split the infinitive be conceived of as an integral part of the verb? In other words, is some sort of new verb, with a slightly different meaning, being created? (In some agglutinative languages, for example, such adverbs are transformed into verbal prefixes or suffixes, inasmuch as they alter the very meaning of the verb.) If so, go ahead and split.
jbe
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