To Split or to Not Split

Abstract

This article reviews the history of the proscription of the English split infinitive and presents a corpus-based investigation of its present usage and distribution across registers in American English. Using archival research, the article traces the history of the proscription and offers historical examples of its use. Contrary to popular belief, the historical review of prescriptive sources reveals not a Latin origin for the proscription but a German one. Thus, an ideology of Teutonic kinship seems to have at least partially driven the proscription of the split infinitive. Latin-based proscriptions seemed not to have existed in written form, or if they did, they did not survive. The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) was used to investigate the presence of multiword lexical items including the split infinitive. Combinations of “to + adverb” were identified in the different COCA registers. Distinct bigrams and trigrams emerge in the different registers of the COCA, but it does not seem to be the case that oral registers, where the force of the proscription would be less strong, influence the emergence of split infinitive patterns in written registers. The results are discussed within the framework of prescriptivist ideology, grammaticalization, and idiomaticity.