Special Situations Using Split Infinitives

Compound split infinitives (where more than one adverb is employed) and other multi-word insertions are still contentious; as recently as 1996 the usage panel of The American Heritage Book of English Usage were evenly divided for and against such sentences as “I expect him to completely and utterly fail.” More than three-quarters of the panel rejected “We are seeking a plan to gradually, systematically, and economically relieve the burden.” On the other hand, 87% of the panel deemed acceptable the multi-word adverb in “We expect our output to more than double in a year.”

Splitting infinitives with negations, as in the phrase “I want to not see you any more”, is one of the trickiest areas of contention. Some people who are generally tolerant towards split infinitives draw the line at those split by negation, calling them awkward or ungrammatical. However, the relative inflexibility of negation makes it hard to reformulate such sentences: while “I want to happily run” can easily be altered to “I want to run happily”, “I want to see you not” is not modern English. The possibilities are moving up the “not” to immediately before the to-infinitive (“I want not to see you any more”), which sounds awkward to most people; or negating the verb rather than the desire (“I don't want to see you anymore”) — which, some might object, entirely alters the meaning of the sentence; or simply “I want to see you no more.”

There are rare examples of non-adverbial phrases participating in the split infinitive construction, as in Shakespeare's split infinitive, a poetic inversion: “Thy pity may deserve to pitied be” (Sonnet 142). Modern examples are “It was their nature to all hurt one another” or “It was her destiny to one day assume the throne”. These have endured the same shifts of opinion and gradual acceptance as adverbs.

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