Prepositional infinitives in Latin & Romance
by Keith Tse (Chinese University of Hong Kong)
Prepositional infinitives are an important type of clausal complementation in all Romance languages, especially the use of de-infinitive and ad-infinitive which are pan-Romance in their uses as non-finite clausal complements (Harris 1978:197-198, Vincent 1988:68-70, Ledgeway 2012a:179, cf. Meyer-Lübke 1900:426ff.). However, although Romance prepositional infinitives are widely attested across time and space, their Latin (or proto-Romance) origins are as yet unknown, since prepositional infinitives do not exist in Latin, apart from some very late and dubious examples which cannot be taken for granted (Diez 1876:201-202, Beardsley 1921:97). Nonetheless, there have been recent attempts to reconstruct proto-Romance prepositional infinitives, which are structurally equivalent to Latin prepositional gerunds/gerundives as suppletive markers of the oblique functions of the infinitive and the latter may be taken as precursors of the former (Schulte 2007:87ff).
In this post, I outline a proposal concerning the Latin origins for…
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