The Syntax of Early English - Cryptm.org

232 The syntax of early Englishmatrix subject position and appears right in front of the infinitive (as in thelast two examples of (24c) and the last of (24d)) that the passive infinitive hasbecome obligatory.From these brief observations, it can be concluded that the form of theinfinitive depends heavily on the position of the NP object of the infinitivalverb, and that therefore the cause of the change must once again be sought inword order changes as described above. From Middle English onwards, as theSVO order became fixed in every clause type, a NP–V sequence became as itwere automatically interpreted as subject–verb. We will now return to ourearlier concern, the AcI construction.7.2.4 The AcI and the passive infinitiveIn the previous section, it became clear that the so-called objectinfinitivals,i.e. the (b) structures in (21), must have become more and moreopaque to learners who were increasingly confronted in the surrounding datawith SVO surface structures. This is corroborated by the data emerging fromthe corpus, which was investigated with a view to discovering the spread of theAcI in English. Table 7.1 shows clearly that object-infinitivals decreased fast:in the corpus sixty-two examples are found, 12 but they are mainly from earlytexts. By contrast, subject-infinitivals continue to be highly frequent (2,056examples were found). The investigation of the data also shows that there werevarious ways of avoiding the increasingly ‘awkward’ object-infinitival, as listedand discussed below.(i) First, instead of an infinitival construction, a that-clause could be used.This was an option with all verbs except with some of the causatives, notablylet. There are, however, some problems with this option. First of all, let wasone of the most frequent verbs in the object-infinitival. Second, if the thatclausecontained an active verb, the agent of the activity would have to bemade explicit with some verbs (see iii below). Third, that-clauses andinfinitives are not always semantically equivalent (cf. van der Leek 1992).Fourth, we saw above that there was a substantial increase in the number ofinfinitives in Middle English accompanied by a decrease in that-clauses.(ii) In order to resolve the ambiguity of the NP object between its functionas an object of the infinitive and of the matrix verb, a speaker used to12In table 7.1 only object-infinitivals that showed surface V finNP oV infword order havebeen counted. Structures where the NP has been moved were not included becauseit is not clear what position they have been moved out of, i.e. pre- or postinfinitivalposition.