--- title: "Linguistic variation and change: Middle English infinitive (2004)" description: "Trobevšek Drobnak instead tests a theory in which language change is a contest between weaker and stronger variants, where… 5 references." authors: ["Frančiška Trobevšek Drobnak"] year: 2004 venue: "Acta Neophilologica 37" source: "https://journals.uni-lj.si/ActaNeophilologica/article/view/6261" doi: "10.4312/an.37.1-2.103-114" licence: "CC BY-SA (journal licence per DOAJ; Acta Neophilologica)" licence_url: "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/" summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License" canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/drobnak-2004-linguistic-variation-change-middle-english/" --- [Elamur Research](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) · [this page in HTML](https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/drobnak-2004-linguistic-variation-change-middle-english/) [home](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/) / [papers](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/) / [2004](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2004/page/2/) / Linguistic variation and change: Middle English infinitive # Linguistic variation and change: Middle English infinitive **Authors:** [Frančiška Trobevšek Drobnak](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/authors/franciska-trobevsek-drobnak/) · **Year:** 2004 · **Venue:** [Acta Neophilologica 37](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/acta-neophilologica/) ([Acta Neophilologica 2004](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/venues/acta-neophilologica/2004/)) · **Publisher:** [Ljubljana University Press, Faculty of Arts](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/publishers/ljubljana-university-press-faculty-of-arts/) · **Licence:** [CC BY-SA (journal licence per DOAJ; Acta Neophilologica)](https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/) **Links:** [Publisher's page](https://doi.org/10.4312/an.37.1-2.103-114) · [PDF](https://journals.uni-lj.si/ActaNeophilologica/article/download/6261/5989) · [DOI 10.4312/an.37.1-2.103-114](https://doi.org/10.4312/an.37.1-2.103-114) · [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W2601594895) **Citations:** 1 citations (OpenAlex, 2026-10-14) ## Summary The paper asks why, after the Norman Conquest, the English to infinitive spread at the cost of the bare infinitive until the bare form survived only after modals and a few verbs such as let, make, see and hear. Most earlier accounts treat the choice as conditioned by the lexicon or by structure. Trobevšek Drobnak instead tests a theory in which language change is a contest between weaker and stronger variants, where the more explicit form tends to occupy functionally marked, more complex grammatical environments. She traces the history of both forms. The bare infinitive descends from the Old English uninflected -an form. The to infinitive descends from the inflected to + -enne form, which began as a prepositional phrase. To show that the modern distribution was already in place before 1500, she collates the infinitives in a Gospel sample across four translations. Her results support the hypothesis: the formal markedness of the infinitive matched the functional markedness of its grammatical setting. She explains the shift through a balance between economy and efficiency in communication. ## Key points - Table 1 compares the infinitives in Mark chapters 1–3 across four texts: - NIV (1982) - King James Bible (1611) - Wyclif (1378) - the 10th-century Corpus MS of the Old English Gospels, in Skeat's 1871 edition - Wyclif already splits bare and to infinitives exactly as the modern versions do. The bare form appears only after modals, and the text has no for to infinitives. - Loss of the final -n of the infinitive happened at different times by dialect: - Northumbrian: already in Old English - Midlands: by about 1300 - South: it lasted into the 15th century - The for to infinitive started out marking purpose, peaked around 1300, and then retreated to some northern dialects. - The author reverses the usual causal story. She argues that -en became functionally dispensable first, because the clearer marker to was available, and that unrestrained phonetic erosion followed. Where -en still did work, it survived, as in strong past participles and in derivations like widen. ## Interesting ideas - Lining up the same passage across several translations from different periods shows exactly which construction replaced which, verse by verse. - Old English already used bare infinitives as object-controlled predicators after verbs of command and perception, as in "saw a fisherman go". - Explicit (stronger) variants are favoured where the context is complex, and compact (weaker) variants where decoding is easy. - A form erodes once some other cue reliably carries its function, so redundancy predicts which markers disappear. - The author treats contact-heavy, multilingual settings as drivers of explicitness, comparing post-Conquest England to the conditions that produce pidgins and creoles. ## For Mova How these ideas could serve Mova, our small open language model — its files, stages and tests: - **I1** (tree): Parallel archaic and modern versions of fables or scripture could test whether gparse produces equivalent UD trees for "make you to become" and "make you fishers", which would expose dialect-conversion gaps. - **I2** (frames): When a perception or causation verb takes an object plus a bare infinitive, the frame builder should make that object the agent of the embedded verb. - **I3** (back): The generator could choose a that-clause or a to-infinitive over a shorter form when the meaning graph around the clause is dense, trading economy for clarity. - **I4** (tokens): The tagger and lemmatizer could rely on the particle to, or on modals like schal and maist, to identify infinitives in older texts where endings are inconsistent. - **I5** (learn): Evaluation sets could include texts with high dialect and register mixing as a stress test, checking whether the parsers lean on explicit markers more than on morphology. *Our summary of the paper, in our own words — not its text. The work belongs to its authors; read it at the links above.* ## Institutions - [University of Ljubljana](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/universities/university-of-ljubljana/) — University, Ljubljana, Slovenia · 13 works · 38,693 citations 📚 Shelves (2): [🎭 Arts and Humanities](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/arts-and-humanities/) · 17,450 works · [🗣️ Language and Linguistics](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/shelves/arts-and-humanities/language-and-linguistics/) · 17,296 works 🧭 Topics (2): [English](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/english/) · 2,379 works · [⏳ Historical linguistics & language change](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/topics/language-change/) · 250 works ## Cite Cite as: Frančiška Trobevšek Drobnak. 2004. Linguistic variation and change: Middle English infinitive. Acta Neophilologica 37. The paper itself, not this page. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. ```bibtex @inproceedings{drobnak2004linguistic, title = {{Linguistic variation and change: Middle English infinitive}}, author = {Frančiška Trobevšek Drobnak}, booktitle = {Acta Neophilologica 37}, year = {2004}, doi = {10.4312/an.37.1-2.103-114}, url = {https://doi.org/10.4312/an.37.1-2.103-114} } ``` - [← previous Formal analysis of some aspects of Amharic noun phrases](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/adafre-2004-formal-analysis-some-aspects-amharic/) - [next → The Fate of Complex Languages: Classical Arabic and Old Norse in the Age of Globalisation](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/kusters-2004-fate-complex-languages-classical-arabic/) - [↑ back to papers of 2004](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/2004/page/2/) ## References 5 references, 0 of them with a card of ours. ↗ leads to the work, «find» searches for one we have no id for yet. 1. Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S., Finegan, E .. 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