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Josh Brandt-Young wrote: > Can you not conceive of a language that has more than one infinitival > form? (Finnish has five!) No, "to" is not a preposition that *can* > precede the infinitive; it *must* precede the infinitive unless the > active verb is one of a special group: can, could, will, would, shall, > should, may, might... What good is it to call "to" a preposition in this > case? It's certainly not serving a prepositional function! Right. It's more like a infintival particle, I guess one could call it. > What does it matter what part of speech "to" originally belonged to? > Isn't the important thing how it's *used*? It's like saying that we must > still declare "pop" to be a verb even when it's used as a noun to mean > "soda" because that was its original part of speech. You might just as > well say that the "-ed" we use to form the past tense isn't really an > inflectional suffix, but rather an adverb meaning "in the past." Er, you mean a contraction of the past tense of the verb "do", no? :) > Language is what language is, Nik. A little calm please. We all make mistakes. ======================================================= Tom Wier <[log in to unmask]> ICQ#: 4315704 AIM: Deuterotom Website: <http://www.angelfire.com/tx/eclectorium/> "Cogito ergo sum, sed credo ergo ero." There's nothing particularly wrong with the proletariat. It's the hamburgers of the proletariat that I have a problem with. - Alfred Wallace ========================================================