In
grammarIn linguistics, grammar is the set of logical and structural rules that govern the composition of sentences, phrases, and words in any given natural language. The term refers also to the study of such rules, and this field includes morphology and syntax, often complemented by phonetics, phonology,...
,
infinitive is the name for certain verb forms that exist in many languages. In the usual (traditional) description of
EnglishEnglish is a West Germanic language that developed in England during the Anglo-Saxon era. As a result of the military, economic, scientific, political, and cultural influence of the British Empire during the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries, and of the United States since the mid 20th century,...
, the infinitive of a verb is its basic form with or without the
particleA particle, in grammar, is a function word that is not assignable to any of the traditional grammatical word classes . The term is a catch-all term for a heterogeneous set of elements and lacks a precise universal definition...
to: therefore,
do and
to do,
be and
to be, and so on are infinitives. As with many linguistic concepts, there is not a single definition of
infinitive that applies to all languages. Many
Native American languagesIndigenous languages of the Americas are spoken by indigenous peoples from the southern tip of South America to Alaska and Greenland, encompassing the land masses which constitute the Americas. These indigenous languages consist of dozens of distinct language families as well as many language...
and some languages in Africa and Aboriginal Australia simply do not have infinitives or
verbal nounA verbal noun is a noun formed directly as an inflexion of a verb or a verb stem, sharing at least in part its constructions. This term is applied especially to gerunds, and sometimes also to infinitives and supines ....
s. In their place they use
finite verb forms used in ordinary clausesIn linguistics, balancing and deranking are terms used to describe the form of verbs used in various types of subordinate clauses and also sometimes in co-ordinate constructions....
or special constructions.
In languages that have infinitives, they generally have most of the following properties:
- In most uses, infinitives are non-finite verb
In linguistics, a non-finite verb is a verb form that is not limited by a subject and, more generally, is not fully inflected by categories that are marked inflectionally in language, such as tense, aspect, mood, number, gender, and person...
s.
- They function as other lexical categories
In grammar, a lexical category is a linguistic category of words , which is generally defined by the syntactic or morphological behaviour of the lexical item in question. Common linguistic categories include noun and verb, among others...
— usually nounIn linguistics, a noun is a member of a large, open lexical category whose members can occur as the main word in the subject of a clause, the object of a verb, or the object of a preposition....
s — within the clauses that contain them, for example by serving as the subject of another verb.
- They do not represent any of the verb's arguments
In linguistics, a verb argument is a phrase that appears in a syntactic relationship with the verb in a clause. In English, for example, the two most important arguments are the subject and the direct object....
(as employer and employee do).
- They are not inflected
In grammar, inflection or inflexion is the way language modifies word forms to handle grammatical relations and relational categories such as tense, mood, voice, aspect , person, number , gender, case . Beside conjugation and declension there is comparison with its maximum category number of two In...
to agree with any subject
- They cannot serve as the only verb of a declarative sentence.
- They do not have tense
Grammatical tense is a temporal linguistic quality expressing the time at, during, or over which a state or action denoted by a verb occurs.Tense is one of at least five qualities, along with mood, voice, aspect, and person, which verb forms may express....
, aspectIn linguistics, the grammatical aspect of a verb defines the temporal flow in the described event or state...
, moodsGrammatical mood is one of a set of distinctive verb forms that are used to signal modality.It is distinct from grammatical tense or grammatical aspect, although these concepts are conflated to some degree in many languages, including English and most other modern Indo-European languages, insofar...
, and/or voice, or they are limited in the range of tenses, aspects, moods, and/or voices that they can use. (In languages where infinitives do not have moods at all, they are usually treated as being their own non-finite mood.)
- They are used with auxiliary verb
In linguistics, an auxiliary is a verb functioning to give further semantic or syntactic information about the main or full verb following it...
s.
However, it bears repeating that none of the above is a defining quality of the infinitive; infinitives do not have all these properties in every language, as it is shown below, and other verb forms may have one or more of them. For example, English
gerundIn linguistics, "gerund" is a term used to refer to various non-finite verb forms in various languages:* As applied to English, it refers to the usage of a verb as a noun...
s and
participleIn linguistics, a participle is a derivative of a non-finite verb, which can be used in compound tenses or voices, or as a modifier...
s have most of these properties as well.
Infinitives in English
EnglishEnglish is a West Germanic language that developed in England during the Anglo-Saxon era. As a result of the military, economic, scientific, political, and cultural influence of the British Empire during the 18th, 19th, and early 20th centuries, and of the United States since the mid 20th century,...
has three non-finite verbal forms, but by long-standing convention, the term "infinitive" is applied to only one of these. (The other two are the past- and present-
participleIn linguistics, a participle is a derivative of a non-finite verb, which can be used in compound tenses or voices, or as a modifier...
forms, where the present-participle form is also the
gerundIn linguistics, "gerund" is a term used to refer to various non-finite verb forms in various languages:* As applied to English, it refers to the usage of a verb as a noun...
form.) In English, a verb's infinitive is its unmarked form, such as
be,
do,
have, or
sit, often introduced by the
particleA particle, in grammar, is a function word that is not assignable to any of the traditional grammatical word classes . The term is a catch-all term for a heterogeneous set of elements and lacks a precise universal definition...
to. When this particle is absent, the infinitive is said to be a
bare infinitive; when it is present, it is generally considered to be a part of the infinitive, then known as the
full infinitive (or
to-infinitive), and there is a controversy about whether it should be separated from the main word of the infinitive. (
See Split infinitiveA split infinitive or cleft infinitive is an English-language grammatical construction in which a word or phrase, usually an adverb or adverbial phrase, comes between the marker to and the bare infinitive form of a verb...
.) Nonetheless, modern theories typically do not consider the to-infinitive to be a distinct
constituentIn syntactic analysis, a constituent is a word or a group of words that functions as a single unit within a hierarchical structure.Phrases are usually constituents of a clause, but clauses may also be embedded into a bigger structure...
, instead taking the particle
to to operate on an entire verb phrase; so,
to buy a car is parsed as
to {buy {a car}}, not as
{to buy} {a car}.
The bare infinitive and the full infinitive are mostly in
complementary distributionComplementary distribution in linguistics is the relationship between two different elements, where one element is found in a particular environment and the other element is found in the opposite environment. It often indicates that two superficially different elements are in fact the same...
. They are not generally interchangeable, but the distinction does not generally affect the meaning of a sentence; rather, certain contexts call almost exclusively for the bare infinitive, and all other contexts call for the full infinitive.
HuddlestonRodney D. Huddleston is a linguist and grammarian specializing in the study and description of English.Huddleston is the primary author of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language , which presents a comprehensive descriptive grammar of English.He earned his PhD from the University of Edinburgh...
and
PullumGeoffrey K. Pullum is a linguist specialising in the study of English. He is Professor of General Linguistics at the University of Edinburgh.- Biography :...
's recent
Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (CGEL) does not use the notion of the
infinitive, arguing that English uses the same form of the verb, the
plain form, in infinitival clauses that it uses in
imperativeImperative can mean:*Imperative mood, a grammatical mood expressing commands, direct requests, and prohibitions * A morphological item expressing commands, direct requests, and prohibitions...
and present-subjunctive clauses.
Uses of the bare infinitive
The bare infinitive is not used in as many contexts as the full infinitive, but some of these are quite common:
- The bare infinitive is used as the main verb after the dummy auxiliary verb do, or most modal auxiliary verbs (such as will, can, or should). So, "I will/do/can/etc. see it."
- Several common verbs of perception, including see, watch, hear, feel, and sense take a direct object and a bare infinitive, where the bare infinitive indicates an action taken by the main verb's direct object. So, "I saw/watched/heard/etc. it happen." (A similar meaning can be effected by using the present participle instead: "I saw/watched/heard/etc. it happening." The difference is that the former implies that the entirety of the event was perceived, while the latter implies that part of the progress of the event was perceived.)
- Similarly with several common verbs of permission or causation, including make, bid, let, and have. So, "I made/bade/let/had him do it." (However, make takes a to-infinitive in the passive voice: "I was made to do it.")
- With the verb help. So, "He helped them find it."
- With the word why. So, "Why reveal it?"
- The bare infinitive is the dictionary form of a verb, and is generally the form of a verb that receives a definition; however, the definition itself generally uses a to-infinitive. So, "The word 'amble' means 'to walk slowly.'"
- The bare infinitive form is also the present subjunctive
In grammar, the subjunctive mood is a verb mood typically used in dependent clauses to express wishes, commands, emotion, possibility, judgment, opinion, necessity, or statements that are contrary to fact at present. It is sometimes referred to as the conjunctive mood, as it often follows a...
form and the imperativeThe imperative mood is a grammatical mood that expresses direct commands or requests. It is also used to signal a prohibition, permission or any other kind of exhortation.- Morphology :...
form, although most grammarians do not consider uses of the present subjunctive or imperative to be uses of the bare infinitive.
Uses of the full infinitive
The full infinitive (or to-infinitive) is used in a great many different contexts:
- Outside of dictionary headwords, it is the most commonly used citation form
In linguistics the citation form of a word can mean:* its canonical form or lemma: the form of an inflected word given in dictionaries or glossaries, thus also called the dictionary form....
of the English verb: "How do we conjugate the verb to go?"
- It can be used like a noun phrase, expressing its action or state in an abstract, general way. So, "To err is human"; "To know me is to love me". (However, a gerund
In linguistics, "gerund" is a term used to refer to various non-finite verb forms in various languages:* As applied to English, it refers to the usage of a verb as a noun...
is often preferred for this — "Being is doing" would be more natural than the abstract and philosophical sounding "To be is to do.")
- It can be used like an adjective or adverb, expressing purpose or intent. So, "The letter says I'm to wait outside", or "He is the man to talk to", or "[In order] to meditate, one must free one's mind."
- In either of the above uses, it can often be given a subject using the preposition for: "For him to fail now would be a great disappointment"; "[In order] for you to get there on time, you'll need to leave now." (The former sentence could also be written, "His failing now would be a great disappointment.")
- It can be used after many intransitive verbs; in this case, it generally has the subject of the main verb as its implicit subject. So, "I agreed to leave", or "He failed to make his case." (This may be considered a special case of the noun-like use above.) With some verbs the infinitive may carry a significantly different meaning from a gerund: compare I stopped to talk to her with I stopped talking to her, or I forgot to buy the bread with I forgot buying the bread.
- It can be used after the direct objects of many transitive verbs; in this case, it generally has the direct object of the main verb as its implicit subject. So, "I convinced him to leave with me", or "He asked her to make his case on his behalf." However, in some cases, the subject of the main clause is also subject of the infinitival clause, as in "John promises Mary to cook", where the cook is John (the subject of the main sentence), and not Mary (the object).
- As a special case of the above, it can often be used after an intransitive verb, together with a subject using the preposition for: "I arranged for him to accompany me", or "I waited for summer to arrive."
When the verb is implied, some dialects will reduce the to-infinitive to simply
to: "Do I have
to?"
The infinitive with auxiliary verbs
The auxiliary verb
do does not have an infinitive — even though
do is also a main verb and in that sense is often used in the infinitive. One does not say *
I asked to do not have to, but rather, either
I asked not to have to or
I asked to not have to (but
see split infinitiveA split infinitive or cleft infinitive is an English-language grammatical construction in which a word or phrase, usually an adverb or adverbial phrase, comes between the marker to and the bare infinitive form of a verb...
). Similarly, one cannot emphasize an infinitive using
do; one cannot say, "I hear him do say it all the time."
Nonetheless, the auxiliary verbs
have (used to form the
perfect aspectIn linguistics, the perfect aspect is variously considered either an aspect or tense that calls a listener's attention to the consequences generated by an action, rather than just the action itself...
) and
be (used to form the passive voice and continuous aspect) both commonly appear in the infinitive: "It's thought
to have been a ceremonial site", or "I want
to be doing it already."
Defective verbs
The modal auxiliary verbs,
can,
may,
shall,
will and
must are
defectiveIn linguistics, a defective verb is a verb with an incomplete conjugation. Defective verbs cannot be conjugated in certain tenses, aspects, or moods.- Defective verbs in English :...
in that they do not have infinitives; so, one cannot say, *
I want him to can do it, but rather must say,
I want him to be able to do it. The
periphrasesIn linguistics, a compound verb or complex predicate is a multi-word compound that acts as a single verb. One component of the compound is a light verb or vector, which carries any inflections, indicating tense, mood, or aspect, but provides only fine shades of meaning...
to be able to,
to have to and
to be going to are generally used in these cases.
Impersonal constructions
There is a specific situation in which the infinitive is used like an "impersonal future tense", replacing "will". This is done through the construction:
-
- to be + "to" + bare infinitive
Grammatically, this is identical to the instructional "I am to wait outside" construction (above), but
does not signify somebody having been issued an instruction; rather, it expresses an intended action, in the same way as "will". This "tense" is used extensively in news reports, eg. –
- The Prime Minister is to visit the West Bank (active)
- Aid is to be sent to war-torn Darfur (passive) '
This "future infinitive" construction is interesting in that it only has a future aspect to it in situations where the speaker is significantly distanced from the event. In cases where the subject of the sentence is not quite as distanced from the speaker, then the same construction takes on a sense of instruction
or necessity (as in "he is to wait outside", or "he is to go to hospital").
The same construction can be used in conditional clauses -
If you are to go on holiday, then you need to work hard (or, conversely,
if you want to...then you are to...).
The impersonality aspect comes from the fact that the emotionless verb
to be is used in the place of the more usual modal verbs which would normally connect the speaker to the statement. In this way, statements are given weight (as if some external force, rather than the speaker, is governing events).
Conversely, however, the construction also provides an uncertainty aspect, since it frees the speaker from responsibility on their statement – in the phrase "John will go", for example, the speaker is almost advocating their certainty that John will, in fact, go; meanwhile, "the Prime Minister is to go" simply states the knowledge that the PM's going is in some way foreseen. (If John ends up not going, for example, the "will go" construction is negated, while the PM's "to go" construction would still hold true, since all it expresses is an
expectation). In both cases, the knowledge is simply being reported (or pretends to be) from an independent source. In this sense, this impersonal
to + verb construction can almost be seen as a fledgeling renarrative mood.
.
Germanic languages
The original Germanic suffix of the infinitive was
-an, with verbs derived from other words ending in
-jan or
-janan. In
GermanGerman is a West Germanic language, thus related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. It is one of the world's major languages and the most widely spoken first language in the European Union. Around the world, German is spoken by approximately 105 million native speakers and also by...
it is
-en ("sagen"), with
-eln or
-ern endings on a few words based on -l or -r roots ("segeln", "ändern"). The use of
zu with infinitives is similar to English
to, but is less frequent than in English. German infinitives can function as nouns, often expressing abstractions of the action, in which case they are of neuter gender:
das Essen means
the eating, but also
the food. In
DutchDutch is a West Germanic language spoken by over 22 million people as a native language, and over 5 million people as a second language.
"1% of the EU population claims to speak Dutch well enough in order to have a conversation." Outside the European Union the number of second language...
infinitives also end in
-en (
zeggen —
to say), sometimes used with
te similar to English
to, e.g. "Het is niet moeilijk te begrijpen" → "It is not difficult to understand." The few verbs with stems ending in
-a have infinitives in -n (
gaan —
to go,
slaan —
to hit). In Scandinavian languages the
n has dropped out and the infinitive suffix has been reduced to
-e or
-a. The infinitives of these languages are inflected for passive voice through the addition of
-s to the active form.
AfrikaansAfrikaans is an Indo-European language derived from Dutch and thus classified as Low Franconian West Germanic. It is mainly spoken in South Africa and Namibia, with smaller numbers of speakers living in Botswana, Angola, Swaziland, Zimbabwe, Lesotho, Zambia, Australia, New Zealand, the United...
has lost the distinction between the infinitive and present forms of verbs, with the exception of the verbs "wees" (to be), which admits the present form "is", and the verb "hê" (to have), whose present form is "het".
Latin and Romance languages
The formation of the infinitive in the
Romance languagesThe Romance languages are a branch of the Indo-European language family comprising all the languages that descend from Latin, the language of ancient Rome...
reflects that in their ancestor,
LatinLatin is an Italic language originally spoken in Latium and Ancient Rome. Through the Roman conquest, Latin spread throughout the Mediterranean and a large part of Europe...
, almost all verbs had an infinitive ending with
-re (preceded by one of various thematic vowels). For example, in
SpanishSpanish or Castilian is a Romance language in the Ibero-Romance group that originated in northern Spain and gradually spread in the Kingdom of Castile, evolving into the principal language of government and trade in the Iberian peninsula...
, infinitives end in
-ar,
-er, or
-ir, while similarly in
FrenchFrench is a Romance language globally spoken by about 65 million people as a first language , by 50 million as a second language, and by about another 200 million people as an acquired foreign language, with significant speakers in 57 countries. Most native speakers of the language live in France,...
they typically end in
-re,
-er, and
-ir. In
RomanianRomanian or Daco-Romanian is a Romance language spoken by around 24 to 28 million people, primarily in Romania and Moldova. It has official status in Romania, Republic of Moldova, and the Autonomous Province of Vojvodina in Serbia...
the so-called "long infinitives" end in
-are, -ere, -eare, -ire, but in modern speech these are used exclusively as verbal nouns. The "short infinitives" used in verbal contexts (e.g. after an auxiliary verb) have the endings
-a,
-ea,
-e, and
-i. In Romanian, the infinitive is usually replaced by a clause containing the preposition sǎ plus the subjunctive mood. The only verb that is modal in common modern Romanian is the verb
a putea, to be able to. But in popular speech, the infinitive after a putea is also increasingly replaced by the subjunctive.
In all Romance languages, infinitives can also be used as nouns.
Latin infinitives challenged several of the generalizations about infinitives. They did inflect for voice (
amare, "to love",
amari, to be loved) and for
aspectIn linguistics, the grammatical aspect of a verb defines the temporal flow in the described event or state...
(
amare, "to love",
amavisse, "to have loved"), and allowed for an overt expression of the subject (
video Socratem currere, "I see Socrates running").
Romance languages inherited from Latin the possibility of an overt expression of the subject. Moreover, the "
inflected infinitive" (or "personal infinitive") found in
PortuguesePortuguese is a Romance language that originated in what is now Galicia and northern Portugal. It is derived from the Latin spoken by the romanized Pre-Roman peoples of the Iberian Peninsula around 2000 years ago...
,
GalicianGalician is a language of the Western Ibero-Romance branch, spoken in Galicia, an autonomous community located in northwestern Spain, as well as in small bordering zones in the neighbouring autonomous communities of Asturias and Castile and León and in Northern Portugal.Galician and Portuguese...
, and (some varieties of)
SardinianSardinian is, after Italian, the main language spoken on the island of Sardinia, Italy. It is considered the most conservative of the Romance languages in terms of phonology and is noted for its Paleosardinian substratum....
inflects for person and number. These are the only
Indo-European languagesThe Indo-European languages are a family of several hundred related languages and dialects, including most major languages of Europe, Iran, and northern India, and historically also predominant in Anatolia and Central Asia...
that allow infinitives to take person and number endings. This helps to make infinitive clauses very common in these languages; for example, the English finite clause
in order that you/she/we have... would be translated to Portuguese as
para teres/ela ter/termos... (it is a null-subject language). The Portuguese personal infinitive has no proper tenses, only aspects (imperfect and perfect), but tenses can be expressed using
periphrasticIn linguistics, periphrasis is a device by which a grammatical category or relationship is expressed by a free morpheme , instead of being shown by inflection or derivation...
structures. For instance,
even though you sing/have sung/are going to sing could be translated to
apesar de cantares/teres cantado/ires cantar.
Other Romance languages (including Spanish, Romanian, Catalan, and some Italian dialects) allow uninflected infinitives to combine with overt nominative subjects. For example, Spanish
al abrir yo los ojos ("when I opened my eyes") or
sin yo saberlo ("without my knowing about it").
Balto-Slavic languages
The infinitive in
RussianRussian is the most geographically widespread language of Eurasia, the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages, and the largest native language in Europe...
usually ends in
-t’ (ть) preceded by a thematic vowel; some verbs have a stem ending in a consonant and change the
t to
ch, such as
*mogt’ → moč’ (*могть → мочь) "can".
Some other
Balto-Slavic languagesThe Balto-Slavic language group consists of the Baltic and Slavic languages, belonging to the Indo-European family of languages. Having experienced a period of common development, Baltic and Slavic languages share several linguistic traits not found in any other Indo-European branch, which points...
have the infinitive typically ending in, for example,
-ć (sometimes
-c) in
PolishPolish is a West Slavic language and the official language of Poland. Its written standard is the Polish alphabet which corresponds basically to the Latin alphabet with a few additions...
,
-t’ in
SlovakThe Slovak language , is an Indo-European language that belongs to the West Slavic languages ....
,
-t (formerly
-ti) in
CzechCzech is a West Slavic language with about 12 million native speakers; it is the majority language in the Czech Republic and spoken by Czechs worldwide. Czech is similar to and mutually intelligible with Slovak and, to a lesser extent, to Polish and Sorbian. - Official status :Czech is widely...
and
LatvianLatvian is the official state language of Latvia. It is also sometimes referred to as Lettish. There are about 1.4 million native Latvian speakers in Latvia and about 150,000 abroad. The Latvian language has a relatively large number of non-native speakers, atypical for a small language...
(with a handful ending in -s on the latter),
-ty (-ти) in
UkrainianUkrainian is a language of the East Slavic subgroup of the Slavic languages. It is the official state language of Ukraine. Written Ukrainian uses the Cyrillic alphabet....
, -ць (-ts) in
BelarusianThe Belarusian language, or Belorussian is the language of the Belarusian people and is spoken in Belarus and abroad, chiefly in Russia, Ukraine, and Poland...
. Serbian officially retains the infinitive -ti or -ći, but is more flexible than the other Slavs in breaking the infinitive through a clause, especially in Serbian variant, but nevertheless the infinitive is always found in dictionaries and in language textbooks. Slovennian and Lithuanian infinitives also end in -ti like
SerbianSerbian is a South Slavic language, spoken chiefly in Serbia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Croatia, and in the Serbian diaspora...
.
BulgarianBulgarian is an Indo-European language, a member of the Slavic linguistic group.Bulgarian demonstrates several linguistic innovations that set it apart from all other Slavic languages except the Macedonian language, such as the elimination of case declension, the development of a suffixed definite...
and
MacedonianMacedonian is the official language of Republic of Macedonia and is a part of the Eastern group of South Slavic languages. Macedonian is closely related to and shares a high degree of mutual intelligibility with the Bulgarian language and to a certain extent with Serbian and Croatian...
have lost the infinitive altogether (which usually ended in -ти) and, for that reason, books concerning these two languages put the present (if imperferctive) or simple future (if perfective) first-person singular conjugation.
Biblical Hebrew
HebrewHebrew is a Semitic language of the Afro-Asiatic language family. Culturally, it is considered a Jewish language. Hebrew in its modern form is spoken by more than seven million people in Israel while Classical Hebrew has been used for prayer or study in Jewish communities around the world for over...
has two
infinitives, the infinitive absolute and the infinitive construct. The infinitive construct is used after prepositions and is inflected with pronominal endings to indicate its subject or object: bikhtōbh hassōphēr
"when the scribe wrote", ahare lekhtō
"after his going". When the infinitive construct is preceded by ל (lə-
, li-
, lā-
) "to", it has a similar meaning as the English to
-infinitive, and this is its most frequent use in Modern Hebrew. The infinitive absolute is used to add emphasis or certainty to the verb, as in מות ימות mōth yāmūth
(literally "die he will die"; figuratively, "he shall indeed die"). This construction is analogous to English cognate objectIn linguistics, a cognate object is a verb's object that is cognate with the verb. More specifically, the verb is one that is ordinarily intransitive , and the cognate object is simply the verb's noun form. For example, in the sentence He slept a troubled sleep, sleep is the cognate object of the...
constructions, as in he slept a sleep of peace
. This usage is commonplace in the Bible, but in Modern Hebrew it is restricted to high-flown literary works.
Note, however, that the to
-infinitive of Hebrew is not the dictionary formIn linguistics a lemma is either of two things:# Morphology, lexicography: the canonical form or citation form of a set of forms ; e.g., in English, run, runs, ran and running are forms of the same lexeme, with run as the lemma.# Psycholinguistics: abstract conceptual form that has been mentally...
; that is the third person singular perfect form.
Finnish
To form the first infinitive, the strong form of the root (without consonant gradationConsonant gradation is a type of consonant mutation, in which consonants alternate between various "grades". It is found in some Finno-Lappic languages such as Finnish, Estonian and Northern Sámi, as well as in the Samoyed language Nganasan. Of the Baltic-Finnic languages, the Votic language is...
or epenthetic 'e') is used, and these changes occur:
- the root is suffixed with
-ta/-tä
according to vowel harmonyVowel harmony is a type of long-distance assimilatory phonological process involving vowels that occurs in some languages. In languages with vowel harmony, there are constraints on what vowels may be found near each other....
consonant elision takes place if applicable, e.g. juoks+ta
→ juosta
assimilation of clusters violating sonority hierarchy if applicable, e.g. nuol+ta
→ nuolla
, sur+ta
→ surra
't' weakens to 'd' after diphthongs, e.g. juo+ta
→ juoda
't' elides if intervocalic, e.g. kirjoitta+ta
→ kirjoittaa
As such, it is inconvenient for dictionary use, because the imperative would be closer to the root word. Nevertheless, dictionaries use the first infinitive.
There are four other infinitives, which create a noun-, or adverb-like word from the verb. For example, the third infinitive is -ma/-mä
, which creates an adjective-like word like "written" from "write": kirjoita-
becomes kirjoittama
.
Seri
The Seri languageSeri is a language isolate spoken by the Seri people in two villages on the coast of Sonora, Mexico.-Classification:...
of northwestern Mexico has infinitival forms which are used in two constructions (with the verb meaning 'want' and with the verb meaning 'be able'). The infinitive is formed by adding a prefix to the stem: either iha-
(plus a vowel change of certain vowel-initial stems) if the complement clause is transitiveIn syntax, a transitive verb is a verb that requires both a direct subject and one or more objects.-Examples:Some examples of sentences with transitive verbs:*Harry sees Adam....
, or ica-
(and no vowel change) if the complement clause is intransitive----In grammar, an intransitive verb does not take an object. In more technical terms, an intransitive verb has only one argument , and hence has a valency of one. For example, in English, the verbs sleep and die, are intransitive...
. The infinitive shows agreement in number with the controlling subject. Examples are: icatax ihmiimzo
'I want to go', where icatax
is the singular infinitive of the verb 'go' (singular root is -atax
), and icalx hamiimcajc
'we want to go', where icalx
is the plural infinitive. Examples of the transitive infinitive: ihaho
'to see it/him/her/them' (root -aho
), and ihacta
'to look at it/him/her/them' (root -oocta
).
Translation to languages without an infinitive
In languages without an infinitive, the infinitive is translated either as a that
-clause or as a verbal nounA verbal noun is a noun formed directly as an inflexion of a verb or a verb stem, sharing at least in part its constructions. This term is applied especially to gerunds, and sometimes also to infinitives and supines ....
. For example, in Literary Arabic the sentence "I want to write a book" is translated as either urīdu an aktuba kitāban
(lit. "I want that I should write a book", with a verb in the subjunctive moodIn grammar, the subjunctive mood is a verb mood typically used in dependent clauses to express wishes, commands, emotion, possibility, judgment, opinion, necessity, or statements that are contrary to fact at present. It is sometimes referred to as the conjunctive mood, as it often follows a...
) or urīdu kitābata kitābin
(lit. "I want the writing of a book", with the masdar
or verbal noun), and in Demotic Arabic biddi aktob kitāb
(subordinate clause with verb in subjunctive). Similarly, the Modern GreekModern Greek refers to the varieties of Greek spoken in the modern era. The beginning of the "modern" period of the language is often symbolically assigned to the fall of the Byzantine Empire in 1453, even though that date marks no clear linguistic boundary and many characteristic modern features...
for "I want to write", as opposed to the Ancient GreekAncient Greek is the historical stage in the development of the Greek language spanning across the Archaic , Classical , and Hellenistic periods of ancient Greece and the ancient world. It is predated in the 2nd millennium BC by Mycenaean Greek...
θέλω γράφειν
(lit. "I want to write") and θέλω γράψαι
(lit. "I want to wrote"), is θέλω να γράψω
, lit. "I want that I shall write".
Even in languages that have infinitives, similar constructions are sometimes necessary where English would allow the infinitive. For example, in French the sentence "I want you to come" translates to Je veux que vous veniez
(lit. "I want that you come", with come
being in the subjunctive mood). However, "I want to come" is simply Je veux venir
, using the infinitive, just as in English. In Russian, sentences such as "I want you to leave" do not make use of the infinitive form. Rather, they contain the conjunction чтобы "in order to/so that" and the past tense form of the verb: Я хочу чтобы вы ушли (lit. "I want so that you left").
See also
- Auxiliary verb
In linguistics, an auxiliary is a verb functioning to give further semantic or syntactic information about the main or full verb following it...
- False purpose
False purpose is a grammatical construct that inaccurately applies intent to an action. The construct nearly always arises because of the incorrect use of the preposition "to" in place front a verb describing an action in the past. False purpose is considered an error by many grammarians, though it...
- Finite verb
A finite verb is a verb that is inflected for person and for tense according to the rules and categories of the languages in which it occurs. Finite verbs can form independent clauses, which can stand by their own as complete sentences....
- Gerund
In linguistics, "gerund" is a term used to refer to various non-finite verb forms in various languages:* As applied to English, it refers to the usage of a verb as a noun...
- Non-finite verb
In linguistics, a non-finite verb is a verb form that is not limited by a subject and, more generally, is not fully inflected by categories that are marked inflectionally in language, such as tense, aspect, mood, number, gender, and person...
- Split infinitive
A split infinitive or cleft infinitive is an English-language grammatical construction in which a word or phrase, usually an adverb or adverbial phrase, comes between the marker to and the bare infinitive form of a verb...
- Verbal noun
A verbal noun is a noun formed directly as an inflexion of a verb or a verb stem, sharing at least in part its constructions. This term is applied especially to gerunds, and sometimes also to infinitives and supines ....