This paper considers the structure of infinitives in Belfast English, which allows a wide range of infinitives to be preceded by for to. It is argued that the for of for to is the complementizer for, which differs from standard English for in being able to cliticize to to. This accounts for a number of features of infinitives in the dialect, including the placement of negation and the possibility of the infinitival subject preceding for. The implications of this analysis for the structure of infinitives in general is discussed, in particular in relation to the subcategorization of verbs which take infinitival complements.
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Much of this paper was developed during a stay as a visiting scholar in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at MIT. I am grateful to the Department for affording me this opportunity and to Noam Chomsky, Ken Hale and David Pesetsky for much useful discussion. I am also most grateful for the helpful comments and suggestions of three anonymous NLLT reviewers.
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Henry, A. Infinitives in a for-to dialect. Nat Lang Linguist Theory 10, 279–301 (1992). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00133814
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF00133814