Editing Split infinitive (section)

=== The argument from the full infinitive ===
A second argument is summed up by Alford's statement "It seems to me that we ever regard the ''to'' of the infinitive as inseparable from its verb."

The ''to'' in the infinitive construction, which is found throughout the Germanic languages, is originally a preposition before the dative of a verbal noun, but in the modern languages it is widely regarded as a particle that serves as a marker of the infinitive. In German and Dutch, this marker (''zu'' and ''te'' respectively) sometimes precedes the infinitive, but is not regarded as part of it. In English, on the other hand, it is traditional to speak of the "[[Infinitive#Uses of the bare infinitive|bare infinitive]]" without ''to'' and the "full infinitive" with it, and to conceive of ''to'' as part of the full infinitive. (In the sentence "I had my daughter clean her room," ''clean'' is a bare infinitive; in "I told my daughter to clean her room," ''to clean'' is a full infinitive.) Possibly this is because the absence of an ''inflected'' infinitive form made it useful to include the particle in the citation form of the verb, and in some nominal constructions in which other Germanic languages would omit it (e.g., ''to know her is to love her''). The concept of a two-word infinitive can reinforce an intuitive sense that the two words belong together. For instance, the rhetorician John Duncan Quackenbos said, "''To have'' is as much one thing, and as inseparable by modifiers, as the original form ''habban'', or the [[Latin]] ''habere''."<ref>{{cite book | last = Quackenbos | first = John Duncan | year = 1896 | url = https://archive.org/details/practicalrhetor00quacgoog | title = Practical Rhetoric | publisher = American Book Company | page = [https://archive.org/details/practicalrhetor00quacgoog/page/n228 222] }}</ref> The usage writer John Opdycke based a similar argument on the closest French, German, and Latin translations.<ref>{{cite book |last=Opdycke |first=John B. | title = Get it Right! A Cyclopedia of Correct English Usage | year = 1941 | publisher = Funk and Wagnalls | page = 174}}</ref>

However, the two-part infinitive is disputed, and some linguists argue that the infinitive in English is a single-word verb form, which may or may not be preceded by the particle ''to''. Some modern [[generative grammar|generative]] analysts classify ''to'' as a "peculiar" [[auxiliary verb]];<ref>{{cite book |last1=Sag |first1=Ivan A. |last2=Wasow |first2=Thomas |last3=Bender |first3=Emily M. | year = 2003 | title = Syntactic Theory: A Formal Introduction | publisher = Center for the Study of Language and Information | page = 361 | isbn = 1-57586-400-2}}</ref> other analysts, as the infinitival [[Subordination (linguistics)|subordinator]].<ref>{{cite book | last = Huddleston | first = Rodney | author-link = Rodney Huddleston | year = 2002 | title = The Cambridge Grammar of the English language | editor = Huddleston, Rodney |editor2=[[Geoffrey Pullum|Pullum, Geoffrey K.]] | chapter = Non-finite and verbless clauses | publisher = Cambridge University Press | pages = 1183–1187 | isbn = 978-0521431460 }}</ref>

Besides, even if the concept of the full infinitive is accepted, it does not necessarily follow that any two words that belong together grammatically need be adjacent to each other. They usually are, but counter-examples are easily found, such as an adverb splitting a two-word finite verb ("will not do", "has not done").