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  • About
  • The Global ETD Search service is a free service for researchers to find electronic theses and dissertations. This service is provided by the Networked Digital Library of Theses and Dissertations.
    Our metadata is collected from universities around the world. If you manage a university/consortium/country archive and want to be added, details can be found on the NDLTD website.
1

Thou Shalt Not Split...? : A Corpus-Based Study on Split Infinitives in American English

Johansson, Simon January 2015 (has links)
This essay aims to shed light on the prevalence of the to + adverb + verb and to not + verb split infinitives in American English, both in a historical perspective and in present day usage, and how it varies in different contexts where different levels of formality are expected. Although students are taught to avoid splitting constructions, numerous grammarians and linguists question this prescriptive viewpoint. Two extensive corpora, the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), were used to gather data. The results revealed how the frequency of the split infinitive was, and still is, rising rapidly, and becoming more and more a standard and accepted feature in American English. The most common context in which to find a split infinitive was that of informal spoken language. However, it was in the most formal of settings, that of academic texts, where the largest increase in prevalence of the split infinitive was seen.

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