• The Journal of the Convergence on Culture Technology
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• v.6 no.3
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• pp.245-251
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• 2020

From the perspectives of grammaticalization and corpus, the purpose of this study is to examine the motivation of the emergence of the split infinitives in American English and to discuss the justification of the split infinitives based on the corpus empirical data such as COHA and COCA. The formerly ungrammatical split infinitives in the form of [to + adverb + verb] are now definitely grammatical forms in Present Day English (PDE). The corpus-based data confirms the legitimacy of the split infinitives with the empirical reasons like clarifying sentences (i.e., disambiguation) or strongly focused readings. In addition, the split infinitives are natural consequences caused by the grammaticalization of an infinitival particle to and most crucially by the loss of verb movement. When verb movement to T position does not occur in infinitival clauses, the word order results in [to + AdvP + V], thus forming the split infinitives. The split infinitives are no longer a matter of discussion and will continue to increase in both formal and informal contexts as being definitely grammatical forms.