1367260110.5528Understanding Syntax

80Understanding syntaxwith an auxiliary, or by adding an independent word. These alternative meansof expressing information (via separate words or via affixes) recur throughoutgrammars, not just in the verbal systems, and I will indicate other examples fromtime to time.Major ways to express grammatical categories for verbs∑ Via inflections on the main verb itself. See (2), (3), (9), (10), (11).∑ Via a separate word or particle; an independent grammatical word. See (4); alsoEnglish not as described earlier.∑ Via an auxiliary. See (6), (8), (12).3.1.5 Non-finite verbsNon-finite verbs in English are not marked for tense, person/number agreementor any of the other grammatical categories associated with finite verbs, such asaspect or mood. This is very often true of other languages as well, but not all, aswe will see. I divide non-finite verbs into the two main types that occur crosslinguistically,infinitives and participles. English has an infinitive plus twodifferent participles.∑ InfinitivesIt is not easy to provide a satisfactory cross-linguistic definition of the term‘infinitive’, and forms corresponding to the English infinitive are not particularlycommon in other languages. Some languages mark the infinitive with specialinflections: for instance, French has the suffixes -er (as in dessin-er ‘to draw’), -ir(as in fin-ir ‘to finish’) and -re (as in vend-re ‘to sell’). In English, the infinitiveis the bare verb stem, with no inflections: examples are eat, relax, sing, identify,cogitate. As we’ve already seen in this chapter, however, this property is notsufficient to identify an infinitive in English, since finite verbs in the present tensealso have this same form: I sing, you sing and so on, apart from the third personsingular (sings).We can identify English infinitives instead by their distribution. Modal auxiliariesin English require a following infinitive, as in Kim must ___ (that). An infinitive alsooccurs after to in environments such as I had to ___ then; For you to ___ now wouldbe good. This to is an infinitival marker, not to be confused with the entirelydifferent to which is a preposition (and which is followed not by a verb, but by a nounphrase).A distributional test for English infinitives∑ Following a modal auxiliary or form of auxiliary do, e.g. must leave, could eat thatcake, can’t relax, does love chocolate.∑ Following the infinitival marker to: To err is human, We ought to be leaving, I haveto arrive on time, Kim wants Lee to sing.