Re: Bostonites. *ZAP*

On Thu, 25 Mar 1999 13:13:18 -0500 Nik Taylor <fortytwo@...> writes:

>It's still not possible to split infinitives in English.  "to" isn't
>part of the infinitive, if it was, we'd have to say things like "I
>will
>to go" or "He can to swim".  "To" is merely a preposition that can
>precede the infinitive.  In English, it's the ONLY preposition allowed
>before an infinitive, which makes it LOOK like part of the infinitive.
This passage reminds me of an old story Mark Line used to tell of some
German missionary linguists trying to figure out the language of a tribe
in, I think, South America. The final reference grammar that they
produced said the following: "The language has four cases (nominative,
accusative, dative, genitive), just like German. The case-marking for N
and A is null; D and G are indicated by prepositions."

Can you not conceive of a language that has more than one infinitival
form? (Finnish has five!) No, "to" is not a preposition that *can*
precede the infinitive; it *must* precede the infinitive unless the
active verb is one of a special group: can, could, will, would, shall,
should, may, might... What good is it to call "to" a preposition in this
case? It's certainly not serving a prepositional function!

What does it matter what part of speech "to" originally belonged to?
Isn't the important thing how it's *used*? It's like saying that we must
still declare "pop" to be a verb even when it's used as a noun to mean
"soda" because that was its original part of speech. You might just as
well say that the "-ed" we use to form the past tense isn't really an
inflectional suffix, but rather an adverb meaning "in the past." Language
is what language is, Nik.

You say that the presence of the word "to" before infinitives makes it
LOOK like a part of the infinitive...kind of like how the fact that the
formation of the "dative" in the language of Mark Line's story makes it
LOOK like that language really doesn't have a dative case.

----------
Josh Brandt-Young <neonwave7@...>
http://geocities.com/Athens/Aegean/6073/
"After the tempest, I behold, once more, the weasel."
(Mispronunciation of Ancient Greek)

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