Timeline for Inherent inflection vs. Contextual inflection
Current License: CC BY-SA 4.0
9 events
| when toggle format | what | by | license | comment | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Oct 31, 2022 at 9:26 | vote | accept | Chris | ||
| Oct 29, 2022 at 19:06 | history | became hot network question | |||
| Oct 29, 2022 at 16:59 | answer | added | Draconis♦ | timeline score: 2 | |
| Oct 29, 2022 at 13:54 | comment | added | jlawler | In European languages, the infinitive form is usually inflected (i.e, there is an infinitive suffix), and almost always the citation form for the verb. In English there's no inflection (except for be), but infinitive use is usually contextual. Some people's English may have no infinitives -- the root is good enough; a lot of English speakers pay little attention to inflection and speak thoroughly analytic languages. | |
| Oct 29, 2022 at 11:10 | comment | added | Chris | @YellowSky Secondly, I wonder how common this choice is in other languages. I can't think of any examples in the languages I work in. In German, there is something like: Er wird gesehen. - with a passive auxiliary 'werden' and a past participle form of '(to) see' vs. Er wird sehen. - with futural auxiliary 'werden' and a infinitive form of '(to) see'. Apart from the fact that I am not even sure whether the auxiliary verb in both cases has the same etymological origin, they are two fundamentally different auxiliary verbs in use, which is why I would not speak of inherent inflection here. | |
| Oct 29, 2022 at 11:08 | comment | added | Chris | @YellowSky I hadn't thought of the cases where you can choose between infinitv and gerund in English. Thank you for this example. But firstly, the choice of the inflectional category infinitive does not seem to be exclusively inherently justified in this example either, because there is a syntactic bond with the verb whose complement is the gerund/finitive. The difference becomes clear when one compares this with a purely inherent category, such as the past tense of verbs. The ending of the preterite -ed "played" provides only semantic information without being syntactically determined in any | |
| Oct 29, 2022 at 9:44 | comment | added | Yellow Sky | Perhaps it's all about the cases where you can choose which verbal to use when the choice can affect the meaning, and you choose the infinitive because its meaning is exactly what you want to express, e.g. ‘I saw you dance’ vs. ‘I saw you dancing’, here it's inherent. On the other hand, there are lots of cases where using the infinitive is conditioned by the sentence structure and the syntactic context, e.g. in ’I can do it’ and ‘please, help me do it’, do is a contextual infinitive and no other form fits those constructions unless you paraphrase them substantially. | |
| S Oct 29, 2022 at 9:20 | review | First questions | |||
| Oct 29, 2022 at 19:31 | |||||
| S Oct 29, 2022 at 9:20 | history | asked | Chris | CC BY-SA 4.0 |