Although conjugated infinitives (CIs) occur in languages as diverse as Portuguese, Welsh, Hungarian, and West Greenlandic, the prototypical infinitive is nonfinite in the traditional sense: it has no subject person agreement. This paper argues that CIs are special in the sense that they cannot arise spontaneously in the course of language acquisition. Even in languages with obligatory agreement, CIs require salient triggers. Two common sources are identified: (1) purposive subjunctives; (2) pronominal elements (e.g., construed with a nominalization). These sources require one of two kinds of reanalysis, generally based on a surface ambiguity. In all of the cases documented here, more than one of these factors interacted to trigger a CI.
Castiglione, Angela, Annamaria Chilà & Alessandro De Angelis
2023. L’infinito personale in siciliano moderno: aspetti geolinguistici e caratteri strutturali tra sincronia e diacronia. Cuadernos de Filología Italiana 30 ► pp. 41 ff.
Ambar, Manuela & Ángel L. Jiménez‐Fernández
2017. Inflected Infinitives in Romance. In The Wiley Blackwell Companion to Syntax, Second Edition, ► pp. 1 ff.
Dragomirescu, Adina & Alexandru Nicolae
2016. On the origin of inflected “non-finite” forms: the infinitive vs the supine. Diacronia :4
Dragomirescu, Adina & Alexandru Nicolae
2016. Originea formelor verbale „nonfinite” cu flexiune: infinitiv vs supin. Diacronia :4
Pöll, Bernhard
2007. On the licensing of overt subjects in Spanish infinitival clauses. Probus 19:1
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