The Syntax of Early English - Cryptm.org

240 The syntax of early Englishaffected first. Lightfoot’s (1991: 94) own (made up) example of such acontrol structure is, I order S’[COMP S[PRO VP[grass cut]]], whichbecomes through reanalysis, I order S’[COMP S[grass ito [be cut e i]]]. InLightfoot’s account, however, it is not analogy that makes the new passiveconstruction possible after control verbs. Lightfoot (1991: 94) writes, ‘[s]inceorder is not a causative or perceptual verb which may take a headlesscomplement, case could be assigned to grass only indirectly; therefore, thecoalescence option was invoked and the to marker became necessary’. Hesuggests, in other words, that to came to be actively selected, in order totransmit government. The fact is, however, that when to is found in passiveinfinitive constructions like (31a) and in the above example with order, thisto was already there in the corresponding Old English active construction.The data in the Appendices show very clearly that active bare infinitivesacquire passive bare infinitives in Middle English, and active to-infinitivesacquire passive to-infinitives. So one cannot really maintain that to isselected, only perhaps that to came to be reanalysed as a result of the useof passive infinitives after object-control verbs. In other words, the parametershift involving to cannot be the cause of the change. As we see it, itwas the use of the passive infinitive, which in itself was caused by the wordorder changes, which promoted further change. In Lightfoot’s view, thepassive infinitive itself cannot play a causal role because the child has noaccess to this embedded infinitive. Therefore he sees the use of the passiveform of the infinitive as ‘an effect and not a cause of anything’ (Lightfoot1991: 94), whereas in our view, it is the use of the passive infinitive itself thatcauses the NP in constructions like (31a) to be reanalysed as part of theembedded clause: from an NP governed and -marked by the matrix verb,it becomes the lexical subject of the infinitive.A second problematic factor in Lightfoot’s analysis is the replacement ofthe bare infinitive by a to-infinitive. Lightfoot himself writes that his ‘coalescence’-analysisof to ‘is likely to involve understanding the conditions underwhich the to form of the infinitive came to take over from the plain form ofthe infinitive without the to marker’, adding that this is ‘a difficult matter andhas never been properly understood, despite being subjected to much energeticattention by generations of anglicists’ (Lightfoot 1991: 90). As we stated in theintroduction it was indeed the traditional belief that the increase of the toinfinitivein the Middle English period was due to the fact that the marker towas added to the bare infinitive in order to characterize it clearly as aninfinitive (the bare form had become opaque due to the general loss of inflections).However, evidence has been building up in the past few years that the