Split infinitives in english: A corpus-based investigation

Abstract

The focus of this paper is to investigate the corpora of split infinitives. In English, some adverbs occur between the infinitive marker to and the verb, which has been called split infinitives. To split or not to split infinitive has been an issue in English grammar. Modern English, however, witnesses a burst-out of the usage of split infinitives, as has been investigated by numerous works in the literature. In this paper, we have investigated the phenomenon using corpus data such as the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) and Time Magazine Corpus and we reached a conclusion that split infinitives are being used more often than before. We also tried to analyse various types of split infinitives. It appears that only a limited number of adverbs can split the infinitives and only a number of verbs can be split by these adverbs. There is a big difference between the distribution of adverbs in a finite clause and that of an infinitival clause.