Talk:Infinitive

message: Infinitive is also the name of a management consulting company based in the DC Metropolitan area (US).  www.infinitive.com —The preceding unsigned comment was added by 209.183.210.226 (talk) 18:58, 14 May 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Alternate for INFINITIVE 

message: From the article: "...the infinitive of a verb is its basic form with or without the particle to: therefore, does and to do, is and to be, and so on are infinitives."  
I don't see how 'does,' or 'is' are infinitives.  They are the third person singular form of the verb "to do" and "to be."  (he/she/it does/is)  
I think the intro could be better written along the lines of:  "The infinitive form of a verb carries no inflectional information of the person, or number of any subject that may (or not) be involved; nor the mood, voice, or tense of the verb itself."  It's short, sweet, and is true of all languages.
:Quite right. The infinitive is a non-finite form, while is/does are finite verbs. --Doric Loon (talk) 10:26, 28 August 2008 (UTC)
thread_title:  Is 'does' an infinitive? 

message: An old Hellenic languages section was placed within comment tags so that it was invisible, and a new In Greek section was created. I've merged the two, but now the section is kind of a mess. Is there anyone who knows how the Modern Greek infinitives developed and how they are used and who can clean the section up? I'm familiar with Ancient Greek, but at a loss with regard to Modern Greek. — Eru·tuon 22:32, 28 October 2010 (UTC)
replies: text: I'd like to see a reputable source (i.e. a scholarly work by a linguist, not a 'teach yourself' grammar) which says that Modern Greek has an infinitive. (When I worked on computer parsing of Modern Greek, the standard work in English was Mackridge, P. (1985). The Modern Greek Language. Oxford University Press. Doubtless there are more recent ones now.) Peter coxhead (talk) 19:34, 27 May 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Modern Greek 

message: The 2nd paragraph of the intro of this article is a laundry list of properties that "most" infinitives have "most" of.  Isn't it true that, in most languages that have infinitives, the infinitive of a transitive verb can take an object? Eldin raigmore (talk) 21:12, 10 February 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Should "most infinitives can take an object" be added to the "shopping list"? 

message: *They head verb phrases which can contain objects, adverbs, predicatives, and so on.
*They function as other lexical categories — usually nouns — within the clauses that contain them, for example by serving as the subject of another verb.
*They do not represent any of the verb's arguments (as employer and employee do).
*They are not inflected to agree with any subject, and their subject, if they have one, is not case-marked as such.
*They cannot serve as the only verb of a sentence.
*They are the verb's lemma or citation form (the name of the verb, often regarded as its basic uninflected form), used in giving the definition or conjugation of the verb.
*They do not have tense, mood, aspect, and/or voice, or they are limited in the range of tenses, moods, aspects, and/or voices that they can use.
*They are used with auxiliary verbs.
Eldin raigmore (talk) 21:22, 10 February 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Intro's "laundry list" needs references. 

message: Much of the article, and the comments here, are written as though there were a 'thing' which has the name 'infinitive'. Actually, linguistic terminology, like scientific terminology, arises from and is embedded in theories about language. English used to be described as if it were a language like Classical Latin or Greek; in this framework, an English 'infinitive' is whatever seems to be analogous to an infinitive in those languages. It's questionable whether 'infinitive' is a useful term at all in a truly stand-alone description of modern English. If it is, the case needs to be made purely in terms of modern English, and not by reference to other languages.
A similar argument applies to modern Greek. To call the form of the verb which is used after the auxiliary έχω (to form various tenses which didn't exist in classical Greek) an 'infinitive' is hard to justify by any definition. The form can't be used anywhere else, which is quite uncharacteristic of infinitives.
More generally, the entire article is grossly under-referenced. Inline citations are needed all over it to demonstrate that editors are not just expressing their pet views. Peter coxhead (talk) 19:22, 27 May 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Quite right. You and I would not be readily invited to speak at conventional colloquies regarding grammar. --Kent Dominic·(talk) 04:57, 14 January 2021 (UTC)
thread_title:  Terminology as theory 

message: Can someone who is knowledgable of Greek phonetics add the IPA transcription where it needs to be? It's quite unprofessional to not include IPA transcriptions. Not everyone reads Greek, and using only Greek without phonetic transcription (and I mean *real* phonetic transcription, not Romanization) makes that part of the article inaccessible to non-experts.
14.53.183.65 (talk) 01:19, 5 March 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Use of International Phonetic Alphabet 

message: The article says:
: The Portuguese personal infinitive has no proper tenses, only aspects (imperfect and perfect), but tenses can be expressed using periphrastic structures. For instance, even though you sing/have sung/are going to sing could be translated to apesar de cantares/teres cantado/ires cantar.
Does Portuguese have any kind of non-periphrastic aspect marking in infinitives?
143.54.6.199 (talk) 19:18, 10 April 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Portuguese infinitive inflected for aspect? 

message: Why in the bar at the bottom of the article there is not the subjunctive mode for verbs? --Dejudicibus (talk) 18:26, 9 December 2012 (UTC)
replies: text: Presumably because it's a guide to lexical rather than grammatical categories - but in that case, I'm not sure why infinitive and so on are there (or what it's doing on the infinitive article). Victor Yus (talk) 21:17, 9 December 2012 (UTC)
thread_title:  Subjunctive 

message: Is the Romanian word să not a subordinating conjunction rather than a preposition? If someone can argue that it is indeed a preposition, please let me know. I do not regard myself as an expert in Romanian, but the only grammar I can find agrees with me.
If nobody gets back to me, I shall change the wording. LynwoodF (talk) 21:37, 28 June 2015 (UTC)
replies: text: No one has commented on this point, but I have found other grammars which confirm my view. So I have now made the change. LynwoodF (talk) 21:26, 30 June 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Romanian – use of ''să'' in clauses replacing infinitive 

message: I don't think the article explains cases like "the task to be completed".  Not exactly sure how to analyze it, though it seems to be a noun phrase overall.  Is the infinitive is acting as an adjective phrase that comes after the noun?  Or this is actually a clause with "completed" as the main verb constituent, with the clause overall acting as a noun? -- Beland (talk) 01:25, 31 July 2018 (UTC)
thread_title:  The task to be completed