Like it or not, splitting the infinitive in English seems to be the way to go

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 11.5m words has found 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 in the last three decades, the study shows.

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 1990s 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 grammatical error, even though it is based on comparisons with Latin and has always been common in English

Dr Claire Dembry, principal research manager at Cambridge University Press, who helped set up the Spoken British National Corpus 2014 project with experts from the University of Lancaster, 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 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. Language teaching should reflect these changes, which can only be observed in a corpus such as this.”