Editing Split infinitive (section)

=== Modern English ===
After its rise in [[Middle English]], the construction became rare in the 15th and 16th centuries.<ref name=Nagle/> [[William Shakespeare]] used it at least once.<ref name="Vizetelly1915">{{cite book | last = Vizetelly | first = Frank | year = 1915 | title = Essentials of English Speech and Literature | publisher = Read Books | page = 156 | isbn = 1-4086-6266-3 | url = https://books.google.com/books?id=zD4jeNDmNXYC&pg=PA156 | access-date = 2010-01-04}}</ref><ref>Some have suggested that another sentence in Shakespeare, from ''Coriolanus'', Act I, scene 2, contains a split infinitive: "Whatever hath been thought on in this state, / That could be brought to bodily act, ere Rome / Had circumvention?" [https://books.google.com/books?id=7vkxAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA50], [https://books.google.com/books?id=KC1XAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA720-IA2] Others say that "bodily" here is an adjective and "act" is a noun, as Vizetelly and [https://books.google.com/books?id=eOBRurBikwQC&dq=%22brought+to+bodily+act%22+%22real%2C+actual%22&pg=PA130 Johnson's Dictionary] do.</ref> The uncontroversial example appears to be a syntactical inversion for the sake of meter:<ref>{{Cite journal|last=Semerjyan|first=Maria|title=The Split Infinitive in Modern English|url=https://www.academia.edu/28206300|journal=[[Academia.edu]]|language=en}}</ref>
:''Root pity in thy heart, that when it grows''
:''Thy pity may deserve '''to pitied be''''' ([[Sonnet 142]]).
[[Edmund Spenser]], [[John Dryden]], [[Alexander Pope]], and the [[King James Version of the Bible]] used none, and they are very rare in the writing of [[Samuel Johnson]]. [[John Donne]] used them several times, though, and [[Samuel Pepys]] also used at least one.<ref name=AHBEU>{{cite book| year = 1996 | title = The American Heritage Book of English Usage: A Practical and Authoritative Guide to Contemporary English | publisher = Houghton Mifflin | pages = 34–35 | isbn = 0-395-76786-5 | url = https://books.google.com/books?id=BEHFyMCdwssC&q=American+Heritage+Book+of+English+Usage | access-date = 2009-07-29}}</ref><ref name=Hall>Hall (1882)</ref> No reason for the near disappearance of the split infinitive is known; in particular, no prohibition is recorded.<ref name=Nagle/>

Split infinitives reappeared in the 18th century and became more common in the 19th.<ref name=MWDEU>{{cite book | author = Merriam-Webster, Inc. | year = 1994 | title = Merriam-Webster's Dictionary of English Usage | pages = 867–868 | isbn = 0-87779-132-5 | url = https://archive.org/details/merriamwebstersd00merr/page/867 | url-access = registration | access-date = 2009-11-12 | publisher = Merriam-Webster}}</ref>
[[Daniel Defoe]], [[Benjamin Franklin]], [[William Wordsworth]], [[Abraham Lincoln]], [[George Eliot]], [[Henry James]], and [[Willa Cather]] are among the writers who used them. Examples in the poems of [[Robert Burns]] attest its presence also in 18th-century Scots:
:''Who dared '''to nobly stem''' tyrannic pride.'' ("The Cottar's Saturday Night")

In colloquial speech, the construction came to enjoy widespread use. Today, according to the ''American Heritage Book of English Usage'', "people split infinitives all the time without giving it a thought."<ref name=AHBEU/> In corpora of contemporary spoken English, some adverbs such as ''always'' and ''completely'' appear more often in the split position than the unsplit.<ref name=EvG>{{cite book | last = Van Gelderen | first = Elly | year = 2004 | title = Grammaticalization as Economy | publisher = John Benjamins | pages = 245–246 | isbn = 90-272-2795-0 | url = https://books.google.com/books?id=e7yG6WSuwi8C&pg=PA246| access-date = 2010-10-31}} [http://www.public.asu.edu/~gelderen/TO-''not''.doc .doc version]</ref>