Abstract
The present article discusses why the particular phrase God forbid alone preserves subordinate clauses (i.e., God forbid that...), even in Present-day English, whereas forbid normally takes infinitives with to. Apparently, there was an interesting gap of usage between the God forbid type and the other uses of forbid from the beginning, which is most outstandingly illustrated by the absence of expletive negation after God forbid. However, the decline of expletive negation in general from the later Middle English period onward made the gap smaller. God forbid could have merged into the development of the other uses of forbid if the expansion of the use of infinitives after the ordinary type of forbid had occurred slightly earlier.
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