Earticle

초록

영어

A Study on the Function of ‘to’ in English to-Infinitive Hyun-seok Park (Deabul University) Little attention has been attracted to the contrast in meaning between bare infinitive and to-infinitive. In traditional grammar, it has been defined that infinitival to is a function word which has no meaning of its own. And many generative grammarians like Chomsky(1957,1981) hold that to is a morpheme that ‘can hardly be said to have a meaning in any independent sense' or tense inflectional element. In contrast, I have examined infinitival to is a prepositional element through the usage of two infinitives in Old English and Middle English. This paper is an attempt to explore whether meaning differences exist between bare infinitive and to-infinitive by focusing on the meaning of the infinitive particle to as a preposition. On the syntactic and semantic grounds, I put forward two proposals: i) to preceding the infinitive has a discernable meaning that distinguishes the bare infinitive from the to-infinitive construction—it refers to the sequent movement between the infinitive and the matrix verb in a time continuum, ii) to is capable of evoking an event of non-realized or possible future. Futhermore, considering a wide range of full verbs having different semantic properties such as help, make, have, see, etc, it is concluded that the meaning of the bare infinitive can be characterized as ‘direct actualization' between the two events, whereas the to-infinitive can be analyzed as ‘indirect actualization'.

목차

1. 서론
 2. 본론
  2.1. 부정사의 유형
  2.2. 고대영어의 부정사
  2.3. 중세영어의 부정사
  2.4. 현대영어의 부정사
 3. 결론
 인용문헌
 Abstract

키워드

저자

• 박현석 [ Hyun-seok Park | 대불대학교 ]

참고문헌

발행기관

간행물

표지보기 관심저널 등록

• 간행물명

  영어영문학21 [English21]

• 간기

  계간

• pISSN

  1738-4052

• 수록기간

  1967~2025

• 등재여부

  KCI 등재

• 십진분류

  KDC 840 DDC 820