39. The Infinitive through history

The infinitive is a verbal form (a non-finite verb form) which consists of the base form of the verb with the particle "to": to do; to go; to play; to take; to break; to find.

Infinitive originated from Verbal Nouns just naming the action but not showing its characteristics. It included an Indo-European suffix –N- e.g.- berenne, etanne (to bear, to eat). It used to be declined as a Noun. It could have complex forms with auxiliary verbs.

There are two types of infinitives in Old English used in infinitival complements: (i) the so called plain or bare infinitive, also called uninflected infinitive, which consists of a verb stem and the suffix (a)n as in sendan ‘send’, findan ‘find’; and (ii) the to infinitive, also called inflected infinitive, involving the prepositional infinitival marker to, an infinitival suffix en/an, and the dative ending ne affixed to the infinitival verb stem, as in to singenne ‘to sing’, to wyrcanne ‘to perform’, etc. Traditional grammarians have observed that in OE the inflected infinitive was limited in its occurrence and was basically employed to express purpose.

In Early ME the infinitive lost its inflected form. The endings -an, – anne were reduced to — en, -enne due to levelling of endings. The preposition «to» which was placed in OE before the inflected infinitive to show direction or purpose, lost its meaning and changed into a formal sign of the infinitive. In ME the infinitive with «to» does not necessarily express purpose. In order to reinforce the meaning of the purpose another preposition «for» was sometimes placed before the «to-infinitive».

Compound forms of the infinitive appeared at a very early date: the Passive Infinitive consisting of «beon» plus Participle II is found in OE texts.

In ME texts we find different types of compound Infinitive.

In Modern English infinitive is the basic form of the verb such as «be» or «run». It can be used by itself (she can swim) and with «to» (she likes to swim). There is also another form of the infinitive called split infinitive. Split Infinitive is a form of the verb with «to», with an adverb placed between «to» and the verb (she seems to really like it).

40. The article.

An article is a word that is with a noun to indicate the type of reference being made by the noun. The articles in the English language are the and a/an, and (in some contexts) some. 'An' and 'a' are modern forms of the Old English 'an', which in Anglian dialects was the number 'one' ('on' in Saxon dialects) and survived into Modern Scots as the number 'ane'. Both 'on' (respelled 'one' by the Normans) and 'an' survived into Modern English, with 'one' used as the number and 'an' ('a', before nouns that begin with a consonant sound) as an indefinite article.

Traditionally in English, an article is usually considered to be a type of adjective. It is also possible for articles to be part of another part of speech category such as a determiner, an English part of speech category that combines articles and demonstratives (such as 'this' and 'that').

Articles are usually characterized as either definite or indefinite.

The only definite article in English is the word the, denoting person(s) or thing(s) already mentioned, under discussion, implied, or otherwise presumed familiar to the listener or reader. The is the most commonly used word in the English language. "The" can be used with both singular and plural nouns, with nouns of any gender, and with nouns that start with any letter. This is different from many other languages, which have different articles in those situations. Old English had a definite article se, in the masculine gender, seo (feminine), and þæt (neuter). In Middle English these had all merged into þe, the ancestor of the Modern English word the.

The indefinite article of English takes the two forms a and an. Semantically they can be regarded as meaning "one", usually without emphasis. They can be used only with singular countable nouns; for the possible use of some (or any) as an equivalent with plural and uncountable nouns. An is the older form (related to one, cognate to German ein; etc.). An was originally an unstressed form of the number ān 'one'.