Grammar is boldly going to the dogs
● Use of split infinitives has almost tripled in three decades
The split infinitive is on the rise, with spoken English following Star Trek’s lead, researchers have said.
Use of the split infinitive, as exemplified by Star Trek’s “to boldly go”, has almost tripled over the past 30 years. Dr Claire Dembry, of Cambridge University Press, said: “The rise of the split infinitive is just one example of language phenomena which some commentators might not like but which are becoming a normal part of everyday speech.”
Spoken English is following the lead taken by Star Trek to boldly go in search of new grammatical rules.
A vast collection of British conversations containing 11.5 million words has uncovered an invasion of split infinitives since the 1990s, along with a growing tendency to put “like” 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 past three decades, the research shows.
Linguists who analysed conversations recorded on people’s smartphones discovered that the split infinitive rate rose from 44 words per million in the early 1990s to 117 per million in the 2010s.
Split infinitives squeeze a word between the word “to” and the verb – something many traditionalists would consider a grammatical error.
Examples cited by the researchers included “to just go”, “to actually get” and “to really want”.
Dr Claire Dembry, principal research manager at Cambridge University Press, who helped set up the Spoken British National Corpus 2014 project with staff from the University of Lancaster, said: “Learners of English deserve to be taught in a way which is informed by the most up-todate research into how the language is used in the real world.
“The rise of the split infinitive is just one example of language phenomena which some commentators might not like but which are becoming a normal part of everyday speech.”
Another change imported from America and highlighted by the research is the habit of starting a sentence with the word “like”.
The study found that the frequency of this usage of the word soared from 160 per million sentences in the 1990s to 625 per million in the 2010s.
A further Americanism was the substitution of “awesome” for “marvellous”, a word that had fallen out of fashion.
The conversations were gathered between 2012 and 2016 by members of the public during everyday encounters with family, friends and colleagues. A total of 672 “speakers” recorded around 1,000 hours of conversations for the project.
The research hinted at one trend that has been a bugbear of BBC Radio 4’s John Humphreys.
The Today programme presenter has railed against the use of the word “so” at the beginning of sentences, especially by academics.
Humphreys, whose bestselling book Lost for Words talks about the decline of the English language, has described it as a “noxious weed” invading everyday speech.
So, the thing about the English language is that it’s always changing. And when something changes, someone is always going to be unhappy.
Some of us might find the increased use of Americanisms awesome, others – such as the Radio 4 presenter John Humphrys, who rages against the current vogue for starting sentences with “So…” – are infuriated.
But those who cling to old grammar rules (and would never begin a sentence with “but”) are losing a battle with reality. A study by Cambridge and Lancaster universities found that we’re increasingly comfortable with split infinitives. It found other things, too – such as an increased tendency to begin sentences with “Like”. Language “purists” will rage against these changes, but in doing so they ignore the fact that English evolved over centuries to become (some time in the 1930s, by our reckoning) the language we know today.
Dr Claire Dembry, who helped set up the study, makes the point that those who are learning it should be taught it as it is now used, rather than how it appeared in arcane text books. We, like, totally agree.