According to previous works on the two infinitives such as Fischer, et al. (2006), the to-infinitive and the bare infinitive have been in competition throughout the history of English. The competition between two infinitives seems to be still going on in present-day English. Here is an example: That will make him leave versus
This thesis deals with linguistic and social factors which may have an influence on this phenomenon, namely, variability in the use of ‘to’ in present-day English. The goal of this study is to further document on-going variation between the two infinitives and to explore the linguistic and social variables correlate to this variation. To achieve the goal, real examples on the internet are documented and grammaticality ratings of 196 sentences are collected from a total of 22 native speakers of English, using a questionnaire-type survey. Linguistic variables examined are the type of sentence (i.e. statement, negative, interrogative), and the negation of the infinitives (i.e. make him not leave vs. make him leave). The social variable examined is gender.
My hypothesis was that negation would play a key role in acceptability of the construction with to-infinitive.
The results confirm my hypothesis in that speakers rate the negated sentences with ‘to’ to a similar degree to the negated sentences without ‘to’. In addition to the confirmation, the results show that negation has more influence on speakers’ judgments than the type of sentence.