UDC

372.881.111

Authors

Khrabrova Valentina Evgenyevna
National Research University Higher School of Economics lit. A, 3 Kantemirovskaya St., St. Petersburg, Russian Federation;
e-mail: stefankhrabrova@mail.ru

Abstract

The paper raises the problem of the split or cleft infinitive, which is supposed to be an uncommon grammatical form. Foreign linguists have proposed two opposite points of view: prescriptive vs democratic. It is highly recommended that the split infinitive should not be used in academic English, especially in academic writing, as grammarians still have not recognized it. Despite this, linguistic research of British and American national corpora of the English language makes it clear that at present the split infinitive is being used actively as an across-the-board phenomenon. In the theoretical section, the author presents information about types of splitters: adverbs and adverbial structures that are integral parts of split infinitives and can function as signals of completion, continuance, approval, disapproval, time frame, etc. As a grammatical unit, the split infinitive is both a semantic element and an emphatic construction. Hence, with the view to developing a thoughtful attitude to language acquisition and eliciting students’ response to new linguistic elements, English language teachers should select didactic texts that can serve as an appropriate basis for developing exercises aimed at speaking (colloquial language) and syntactic parsing. The research reveals a high frequency use of split infinitives in English-language newspapers, which speaks for the fact that it is high time something was done to reconsider obsolete grammar rules.

Keywords

split infinitive, splitter, intensifier adverb, adverbial phrase, emphatic construction, subjunct

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