In:
NOWELE, John Benjamins Publishing Company, Vol. 68, No. 2 ( 2015-7-21), p. 227-250
Abstract:
A split infinitive construction denotes a type of syntactic tmesis in which a word or a phrase, especially an adverb, occurs between the infinitive marker to and the verb. The early instances of the split infinitive in English date back to the 13th century, when a personal pronoun, an adverb or two or more words could appear in such environments (Visser 1963-1973 II: 1038-1045). This paper investigates the split infinitive in Middle English with the following objectives: a) to trace the origin and development of the construction; b) to analyse the nature of the splitting adverb in terms of its etymology and lexico-grammatical features; and c) to examine the prosodic patterns contributing to the acceptance of particular splitting combinations. The source of evidence comes from the following corpora: Helsinki Corpus of English Texts, Innsbruck Corpus of Middle English Prose, Penn-Parsed Corpora of Historical English, Middle English Medical Texts, Middle English Grammar Corpus, and the Malaga Corpus of Late Middle English Scientific Prose .
Type of Medium:
Online Resource
ISSN:
0108-8416
,
2212-9715
DOI:
10.1075/nowele.68.2.05cal
Language:
English
Publisher:
John Benjamins Publishing Company
Publication Date:
2015
detail.hit.zdb_id:
2693621-5
SSG:
7,11
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