The Syntax of Early English - Cryptm.org

234 The syntax of early English(27) He [Sir Cadore] alyght off his horse and toke hym in his armys and therecommaunded knyghtes to kepe well the corse.‘He dismounted from his horse and took him in his arms and commandedknights to guard his corpse well there.’ (Malory Works 215.6)The possibility of leaving the agent implicit indeed may have been one of thereasons why the object-infinitival was used in the first place.(iv) A fourth method of avoiding the use of the object-infinitival was alexical one, and was restricted to only a small number of verbs that could bereinterpreted as intransitive, with the pre-infinitival object reinterpreted as asubject. An example of this is (25a). In Old English blawan was intransitiveonly if the subject was animate. This changes in Middle English, a developmentwhich may well have been helped along by the frequent occurrence oforiginal object-infinitivals such as He heard the horns blow. Another examplecomes from Chaucer:(28) And now to loke on every side,/ A man may se the world divide, The werresben so general . . .‘And now a man only has to look around him and he will see the worlddivide/be divided, wars being so general . . .’ (Chaucer Gen.Prol. 895)According to the OED the intransitive (reflexive) meaning of divide onlybecame available from 1526 onwards, so this may be either a late example of theold object-infinitival or a very early instance of the intransitive use of this verb.(v) A final option was the use of a passive infinitive. This had some advantagesover the others in that the possibility was not restricted to a smallnumber of verbs, as in (iv); an agent subject need not be added, as in (iii); itavoided the V fin–V inforder of (ii) because the original object, now a subject,intervened between the two verbal forms; and finally it could be used with allverbs and was semantically closer to the active infinitive than the that-clause,cf. (i). The use of a passive infinitive may have represented a somewhat moreformal style, but it must be noted that the passive infinitive occurs in all thetexts of the corpus. Some examples are given in (29).(29) a. a lette he his cnihtes; dæies & nihtes. æuere beon iwepned‘then he made his knights always be armed day and night’(Layamon Brut (Clg)8155)b. I prey yow let them be sealyd and sent me by Radley wyth the deedysther-in‘I pray you let them be sealed and sent to me via Radley with the deedscontained in it’ (Paston Letters 349.8)c. That with his doghter scholden go,/ To se the Souldan be converted‘Who should accompany his daughter to witness the conversion of theSultan’ (Gower Confessio Amantis 2.637)