Verb Movement in Middle English Infinitives

Abstract

This paper discusses the infinitival verb movement in Middle English and Early Modern English within the Minimalist Program advocated by Chomsky (1993, 1995). A close investigation of negative infinitives reveals that three types of word order were possible till the sixteenth century : (i) not-to-V order, (ii) to-not-V order and (iii) to-V-not order. The last type of word order is the case of infinitival verb movement. It is shown that this movement is related to the nominal feature of the infinitival morpheme (i.e. -en/-e), and that the weakening and subsequent loss of the infinitival morpheme caused the loss of the infinitival verb movement.