So, to boldly split the infinitive is now allowed

SPLITTING an infinitive and starting a sentence with “so” or “like” are habits that any self-respecting grammar pedant would abhor.

A new study, however, has found that conventions that prohibit such practices are so widely flouted that the incorrect usages have effectively become part of modern spoken English.

Researchers have suggested that teachers no longer need to advise pupils against splitting infinitives since they are now in common parlance.

Language experts at Lancaster University and Cambridge University Press have amassed what they claim is the largest-ever public collection of transcribed British conversations.

By analysing the 11.5million words, they uncovered an invasion of split infinitives since the Nineties, along with a growing tendency to put “like” and “so” at the start of sentences.

Use of the split infinitive, as exemplified by the famous Star Trek introduction “to boldly go where no one has gone before”, has almost tripled over the last three decades.

Linguists who analysed conversations recorded on people’s smartphones discovered that the split infinitive rate rose from a mere 44 words per million in the early Nineties to 117 per million in the 2010s.

Split infinitives squeeze an intervening word between the word “to” and the verb – something many traditionalists would consider a serious grammatical error.

Examples cited by the researchers included “to really

want” and “to actually get”. Dr Claire Dembry, principal research manager at Cambridge University Press, who helped set up the Spoken British National Corpus project, said: “Learners of English deserve to be taught in a way which is informed by the most up-to-date research into how the language is used.

“The rise of the split infinitive is just one example of language phenomena which some might not like, but which are becoming a normal part of everyday speech.

“Language teaching should reflect these changes, which can only be observed in a corpus such as this.”