A diachronic analysis of to-infinitives in English

Under the traditional assumption that English infinitival to originated as a preposition, this paper investigates the historical change of this infinitive marker in terms of its featural specification. Its categorial shift from preposition to functional head entails that some semantic and syntactic features disappeared or appeared within the head to over time. The purpose of this paper is to identify those features that triggered the evolution of to-infinitives, and to discuss how the altered status of to-infinitives can affect their syntactic relation with the verb that merges with them. It is also argued that this historical change is motivated by the human mind, which seeks simplicity and transparency in processing linguistic data.