Earticle

This paper attempts to account for synchronic and diachronic aspects of the syntactic status of the to-infinitive particle in English. From the perspective of grammaticalization, the to-infinitive particle is discussed to be an inseparable affix in the inflected infinitive PP which changes into a head of TP by P-to-T movement after the inflectional reduction. I show that the to-infinitive particle exhibits tense/modal/aspectual distinctions. The proved paths of grammaticalization from the lexical/semantic features to the functional/formal features, and from the concrete features to the abstract features are in support of the current syntactic structure of the split TP {MP-TP-AspP} where MP is selected by C, TP by M and AspP by T.