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Problems Caused by Avoiding the Split Infinitives
The meaning of certain expressions can be changed completely by
avoiding the split infinitive. The sentence “He failed to
completely understand the book” suggests that the understanding
is not complete, whereas “He failed completely to understand the
book” implies that no understanding was achieved at all. Another
alternative, “He failed to understand the book completely”,
is ambiguous: some readers may take it to mean that the failure was
complete, rather than the understanding incomplete. By placing the
adverb after the verb (“He failed to understand completely the book”),
a fourth variation can be obtained; this version, although unambiguous in
meaning, has been called “unnatural” by Fowler, in the sense
that the word order is not one most English-speakers would naturally use
unless consciously trying to avoid a split infinitive.
In other instances, use of a split infinitive is for many people the
most natural way to add certain kinds of emphasis in conversation:
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Student A: “I'm going to do better next year.”
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Student B: “I'm going to really do better next year.”
On a historical level, it is possible that years of attacks against split
infinitives by prescriptive grammarians have cowed some people into needless
reluctance to split other compound verb forms. For example, people will contort
sentences to avoid placing an adverb in its usual position between the auxiliary
verb and the participle, leading to constructions such as, “The
argument originally had been used…” instead of “The argument had originally
been used”, which is more natural for most speakers.
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