Infinitive Marker Research Articles

THE MAIN FEATURES OF THE PARTİCLES IN THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE

Summary. In grammar, a particle is a range of words that fall outside the traditional eight parts of speech – noun, verb, pronoun, adjective, preposition, adverb, interjection, conjunction, yet there is no doubt about its value in language. So, what is a particle in English? The best way to look at it is as a function word, or word that must be associated with another to give meaning. An example would be the ‘to’ in the verb ‘to run’. Although to can be used as a preposition, with verbs like to run, to love, or to talk, it acts as something called an infinitive marker, and it doesn’t really have any meaning on its own. The broad term for words like this is particle. In English, for example, the phrase "oh well" has no purpose in speech other than to convey a mood. The word 'up' would be a particle in the phrase to 'look up' (as in the phrase "look up this topic"), implying that one researches something, rather than literally gazing skywards. Many languages use particles, in varying amounts and for varying reasons. In Hindi, they may be used as honorifics, or to indicate emphasis or negation. Key words: habit, word, meaning, expression, sentence, infinitive, function

Control in a Norwegian grammar maze

AbstractCoreference processing of Control constructions and their pronoun-containing counterparts can be studied experimentally using priming or interference paradigms. We replicate findings in a priming study on non-finite Control constructions in Norwegian (Larsen & Johansson, 2020) and contrast them with their finite counterparts using interference effects in a grammatical maze (G-maze) design. We asked participants to read sentences word-by-word and to select the grammatically correct continuation from two options. When the ungrammatical option was a potential antecedent from within the sentence, we predicted interference, i.e., longer reaction times compared to an unrelated baseline. We observed a trend towards significant interference effects when a participant was presented with either of the potential noun phrase (NP) antecedents of PRO in competition with the infinitive marker (test position zero) during the processing of a Control sentence. This indicates reactivation of potential antecedents at the infinitive marker, and a reactivation position (PRO) near or at the infinitive marker. We also observed significant differences between Control constructions and their pronoun counterparts. A significant interference effect was recorded for Subject Pronoun constructions when either potential NP antecedent of the pronoun was presented in competition with the pronoun itself. A similar trend was recorded for Object Pronoun sentences.

An analysis of listening errors by Korean EFL learners from self-paced passage dictation

In this study, listening errors by Korean EFL learners are comprehensively analyzed from self-paced passage dictation tasks. Fifty-five Korean EFL learners participated in the study. Listeners were asked to write down dictation passages as accurately as possible, while listening to the audio as much as they needed. The results show that (i) low-proficiency learners tend to misperceive longer phrases than high-proficiency learners, (ii) function words are more often omitted or misheard than content words, and (iii) low-proficiency learners have more difficulties with content words than high-proficiency learners do. Most frequent suffix errors were omissions of past or plural suffixes. Among the function words, the most frequent errors were found with auxiliary contractions, infinitive marker to, and articles, mostly in the environment of linking and elision. It is also shown that C-V linking, C-C linking, and elision are the primary sources for the most frequent errors. C-V linking led to errors in correctly locating the word boundary, while C-C linking and elision resulted in omission. These errors show that Korean EFL listeners have difficulties in detecting fine-grained phonetic details to the extent that native speakers can do.

Verb Complementation Patterns in Nigerian English: A Corpus-based Study

This paper investigates innovative patterns of verb complementation in Nigerian English in terms of whether such patterns are different from those in British English, focusing on the patterns of the ditransitive verbs and to- infinitive marker in Nigerian English. The data is drawn from the Nigerian component of the International Corpus of English (ICE), while the British component of ICE is used as the reference corpus. The results of the study show that Nigerian users of English use the prepositional dative pattern more often than British English users. Also, while there is evidence that Nigerian users of English sometimes omit to-infinitive in words that generally have it in native English varieties, this feature is not radically marked in Nigerian English, as claimed in earlier non-corpus-based studies.

A Study on the Use and Understanding of Infinitive Clause’ Usage

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the difference of terms between English infinitive and infinitive clauses and to find ways to use them through a questionnaire. Students were asked how they understand terms infinitive and infinitive clause. 71.7% of the respondents regarded them as different form each other. When asked how infinitive clause is used, 81.8% showed a positive response. When asked whether to know the types of infinitive clause, 98.7% showed a negative response. The type of infinitive clauses is not a part that Korean students in EFL can easily identify and use. In the question of understanding the difference between the infinitive marker to and the preposition to, 60.6% of the students understand it. However, many students only understand to as a preposition. grammar education is certainly necessary, but it should be improved in the way of teaching and acquiring it. Also, English teachers must teach in correct terms. Teaching only with entrance-level grammar will result in incomplete understanding. In conclusion, it is important and necessary to understand the term infinitive clauses and to clearly understand how to use them.

The morphosyntactic status of zamu- and ku- in Malawian Tonga

Tonga is a language that is spoken in many Bantu communities. This paper, however, focuses on the Malawian Tonga, a southern Bantu language spoken mainly in Nkhata Bay, a lakeshore district in northern Malawi. The paper investigates the morphosyntactic status of the morpheme zamu- (commonly viewed as a future tense marker), and the morpheme ku- which is found only between zamu- and monosyllabic verb stems or vowel-initial verb stems or object markers in the distant future and not in any other verb tense/aspect (e.g. the simple past, the present perfect and the distant past verb formations) within the verbal morphosyntax. This type of ku- has been analysed previously as an epenthetic syllable [ku]. This paper makes three fresh suggestions: (1) that the distant future morpheme zamu- is an auxiliary verb, rather than a tense marker; (2) that the morpheme ku- is an infinitive marker, rather than an epenthetic syllable; and (3) that zamu- subcategorises for an infinitival complement, rather than it being selected for by ku-. The fact that ku- is an infinitive marker is supported by a number of factors. The suggested analysis also solves the problem of what appears to be bidirectional dependencies by ku-, which is untypical of affixes.

English

This study focuses on the inclusion of canonical forms of idioms in different online dictionaries, and occasionally a parallel is drawn to canonical forms in print dictionaries used in the compilation of our database, which contains 141 idioms originating from literary works, ancient legends, fables and the Bible. In the foreground are dictionary users, especially learners of English, who may face a range of problems concerning canonical forms. However, we have to limit ourselves to a certain extent, which means that attention is paid mostly to the following: the use of the article preceding a noun that is the first constituent element in the idiom, the way of including information on possessives in idioms, the use of the infinitive marker, which is obligatory in some idioms beginning with a verb, the way of indicating variations in idioms, differences in the use of the apostrophe, the inclusion of similes with the comparison marker as , and lower- or upper-case initial letter. Analysis of the idioms from our database shows that the canonical forms may pose problems for lexicographers, who may not be sufficiently consistent, as well as to dictionary users, who may find it difficult to interpret the idiom correctly and consequently use it correctly. A possible variation should be indicated unambiguously and clearly, so as to make dictionary users aware that some idioms allow some flexibility in their form. If the comparison of the way a particular idiom is included in different dictionaries shows any differences, these are discussed and commented upon, suggestions are made and guidelines are proposed for improving the level of consistency, thus resulting in a more consistent as well as uniform and possibly more user-friendly inclusion of idioms. DOI: http://doi.org/10.17576/gema-2016-1602-01

The theoretical status of ren’yoo (stem) in Japanese verbal morphology

This paper contributes to the debate over the necessity of autonomous morphology in the sense of Aronoff (1994) by discussing Japanese verbs. The issue centers on the theoretical status of the so-called ren’yoo form, which the traditional approach says is selected morphologically by particular suffixes. I claim that there is no need to resort to morphological selection to obtain the correct form of Japanese verbs. Instead, the presence of [i], which appears in the ren’yoo form, is predicted either phonologically (as an epenthesis) or syntactically (as the infinitive marker). The evidence comes form modern Japanese as well as from premodern Japanese, and I argue that in diachrony as well, there is no evidence that autonomous morphology is playing active roles.

The Role of Zero-Derivation in Lexical Processing

The Role of Zero-Derivation in Lexical Processing

The Split Infinitive in Middle English

A split infinitive construction denotes a type of syntactictmesisin which a word or a phrase, especially an adverb, occurs between the infinitive markertoand 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.

On the Use of the Split Infinitive in the Asian Varieties of English<sup>1</sup>

A split infinitive consists of a particular type of syntactic tmesis in which a word or phrase, especially an adverb, occurs between the infinitive marker to and the verb. The earliest instances of the split infinitive in English date back to the 13th century, in which a personal pronoun, an adverb or two or more words could appear in such environments (Visser 1963-1973, II: 1038-1045). Even though its use dropped throughout the 16th and the 17th centuries, it began to gain ground again from the 18th century, resisting the severe criticisms of grammarians from the first half of the 19th century (Calle-Martin and Miranda-Garcia 2009: 347-364; Perales-Escudero 2011: 316-319). Given the historical concerns about the construction, this paper analyses the attitudes towards the split infinitive in the Asian varieties of English, taking the British English practice as a point of departure. The paper has then been conceived with the following objectives: a) to compare the distribution of the construction in British English and some varieties of Asian Englishes; and b) to explore the phenomenon from a variationist perspective, considering any likely variation across speech and writing and across the spoken and written registers. The corpus used as a source of evidence is the International Corpus of English , both the British English and the Asian English components (i.e. India, Hong Kong, Singapore and The Philippines).

Split infinitives in English: A corpus-based investigation

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 ofverbs 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.

Corpus evidence of anti-deletion in Black South African English noun phrases

Black South African English (BSAfE) is now generally regarded as an independent variety of English rather than an interlanguage on the way to Standard English (Van Rooy, 2008: 274, 300 and in this issue). Mesthrie (2006: 115) demonstrates that many of the characteristic features of BSAfE can be ascribed to the overarching tendency of anti-deletion. Anti-deletion is a term coined by Mesthrie (2006: 115) to encompass three kinds of linguistic phenomena that are the opposite of deletion in generative analyses of English, namely undeletion, non-deletion and insertion. Undeletion ‘restores an element that is often assumed to be deleted or to have an empty node in generative analyses of English’ (Mesthrie, 2006: 125), e.g. She made me to go (Mesthrie, 2006: 111) in which the infinitive marker to is undeleted. Insertion entails the addition of grammatical morphemes, e.g. can be able (Mesthrie, 2006: 139–40). After examination of a number of undeletion phenomena in interviews with 12 mesolectal speakers of BSAfE, Mesthrie (2006: 129) arrives at the following principle: ‘If a grammatical feature can be deleted in [Standard English], it can be undeleted in [Black South African English] mesolect.’ He points out that such undeletions are not mandatory and adds the following corollary to the principle of undeletion: ‘If a grammatical feature can be deleted in StE, it can also be (variably) deleted in [Black South African English] mesolect, at a lower rate of frequency’ (Mesthrie, 2006: 129).

Diachronic aspects of borrowing aspect: the role of Old French in the development of the be going to + INF construction

This paper sheds new light on the provenance of the be going to + infinitive (INF) construction with future time reference, and more precisely on the question of whether it was borrowed from Old (OF), during the Middle English (ME) period. Although this assumption is debatable, several authors have claimed that a transfer of this construction from French to English is plausible and probable since the contact situation that arose between 1066 and 1400 was most intense and must have had an impact on ME. This paper focusses on the (structural) syntactic and semantic parallelism in the source and target languages, since they are a prerequisite for structural borrowing, even if form and meaning may be modified in this process. With respect to structure, the OF construction aler +INF can be considered a potential source of the ME constructions go +INF and go + to +INF, regardless of the presence of to , which can already be considered an infinitive marker we will shown in detail. The meaning of the constructions is ambiguous in both languages between a movement of going with a subsequent event and an aspectual interpretation, which is inchoative. This inchoative aspect is also a plausible interpretation for many occurrences of ME go +INF. The aspectual constellation also explains the fact that the Modern English construction only appears in the continuous form, which represents the event as if we put ourselves within the event and viewed it in its development. [...] The use of the progressive form represents the activity a state'' (Haegeman/Gueron 1988, 534f). This is what Jespersen calls a temporal frame around a given time. The development go +( to )+INF be going to INF therefore occurs for independent reasons and is bound to the obligation to use the continuous form in this particular aspectual context. On the basis of the investigation presented in this paper, we can make the following assertions about the development of the ModE be going to +INF construction: A. The aspectual meaning of go +( to )+INF is due to one or more of the following factors: a. language contact, i.e. OF (Anglo-Norman) aler +INF forms; b. grammaticalisation of a movement verb similar to OF processes, but independent of them; c. language-internal lexical influence: confusion of ME gan 'go' with 'begin'. B. The development of go +( to )+INF to the ModE be going to +INF is an independent process, posterior to the development of the ME construction.

Against the Movement Theory of Control: Another Argument from Icelandic

Against the Movement Theory of Control: Another Argument from Icelandic

Skandal im Verbkomplex. Betrachtungen zur scheinbar inkorrekten Morphologie in infiniten Verbkomplexen des Deutschen

Abstract In German infinite verbal complexes with three verbs we can observe a phenomenon which so far has been treated as an irregular exception, because in a particular order, so-called ‘312 order’, all three verbs seem to occur in a wrong form. Corpus research shows, however, that the putative exception has a systematic character and can be observed over a longer time in German. This article therefore tries to take a different perspective: the problem does not lie in the exceptional expressions, but rather in our theory of German grammar which so far has not been able to derive the structures as regular. We present an optimality theoretic account of sentence final verbal complexes in German which is able to derive all systematically occurring expressions. The account comes with the cost that some thus far widely shared assumptions have to be revised. These assumptions concern the role of the infinitive marker ‘zu’ as well as the role of participial and infinitival morphology.

Parameterization and change in non-finite complementation

Through the history of Nordic and Norwegian, the infinitive marker has undergone several syntactic and phonological changes. This article discusses the syntactic changes in terms of functionalist and generativist grammaticalization theory. The article starts with a brief review of the origin and use of the infinitive marker in Germanic, followed by a presentation of the syntactic characteristics of infinitive constructions in Old Norse, where the author offers arguments in support of analyzing the infinitive marker as a complementizer word. In Middle and Early Modern Norwegian, the infinitive marker is reanalyzed as a clitic adjoined to the verb. A later reanalysis in Modern Norwegian has resulted in the infinitive marker once again occupying the complementizer position. The history of the Norwegian infinitive marker thus exhibits different types of grammaticalization (lexical word > grammatical word, and word > clitic), degrammaticalization (clitic > word), and different kinds of realization of a functional category.

The Infinitive Marker across Scandinavian

In this paper I argue that the base-position of the infinitive marker in the Scandinavian languages and English share a common origin site. It is inserted as the top-most head in the VP-domain. The cross-linguistic variation in the syntactic distribution of the infinitive marker can be accounted for by assuming that it undergoes head movement. This movement is optional in Danish, English, Norwegian, and Early Modern Danish and is not feature-driven. In Faroese, Icelandic, and Swedish, on the other hand, it is triggered by φ-feature checking on Finº. In Icelandic and Swedish these φ-features are strong and induce obligatory vº→Finº movement, whereas they are weak in Faroese and do not induce vº→Finº movement.

The rise of lexical subjects in English infinitives

This paper attempts to account for the changing distribution of lexical subjects in English infinitives within the framework of the Minimalist Program, paying special attention to the role of the infinitival morpheme and the change in the category and formal features of the infinitive marker to. First, it is argued that from Old English to the 16th century, when the infinitival morpheme was present, the external argument of bare infinitives could be realized either as a lexical DP or the infinitival morpheme; then, the loss of the infinitival morpheme led to the situation that bare infinitives obligatorily have lexical subjects, as we see in bare infinitive complements to causative verbs in Present-day English. Next, focusing change in the category and formal features of the infinitive marker to, the following development of to-infinitives is proposed: (i) in Old English, to as a preposition had an inherent Case feature licensing the infinitival morpheme, which in turn functioned as the external argument of to-infinitives; (ii) in Early Middle English, to came to have a structural Case feature with the optional EPP feature, giving rise to to-infinitives with lexical subjects that are licensed by to; (iii) in Late Middle English, to began to lose its structural Case feature and have the feature specification with the EPP feature only as a functional category, giving rise to to-infinitives with lexical subjects that are licensed by the matrix v, as in the case Present-day English; (iv) this specification became the only possibility after the loss of the infinitival morpheme in the 16th century, at least for the types of to-infinitives investigated here.

Anti-deletions in an L2 grammar

This paper offers a unified account of the syntactic “deviations” found in a second language variety of English, viz. Black South African English (BlSAfE). Most writing on the topic has been content to supply lists of non-standard features which are thought to be diagnostic of the variety. This paper aims to characterise the syntax of the variety via its recurrent properties, rather than as a superset of unrelated features. In this regard I use the cover term “anti-deletion” for three relatable properties: (a) restoring a feature that tends to be deleted in modern standard English, e.g. the infinitive marker to in She made me to go; (b) retaining, rather than deleting elements that are known to be deleted in some (non-standard) varieties of English, e.g. retention rather than deletion of the copula; and (c) inserting additional grammatical morphemes into the standard English structure, e.g. cross-clausal double conjunctions like although… but. The concept of an anti-deletion allows one to characterise one of the two systems that underlie BlSAfE, the other being the standard syntax of the Target Language (TL). More generally, the notion of “anti-deletion” can be used fruitfully in characterising the syntax of individual second language varieties of English on a continuum.