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A Study on the Function of ‘to’ in English to-Infinitive Hyun-seok Park (Deabul University) Little attention has been attracted to the contrast in meaning between bare infinitive and to-infinitive. In traditional grammar, it has been defined that infinitival to is a function word which has no meaning of its own. And many generative grammarians like Chomsky(1957,1981) hold that to is a morpheme that ‘can hardly be said to have a meaning in any independent sense' or tense inflectional element. In contrast, I have examined infinitival to is a prepositional element through the usage of two infinitives in Old English and Middle English. This paper is an attempt to explore whether meaning differences exist between bare infinitive and to-infinitive by focusing on the meaning of the infinitive particle to as a preposition. On the syntactic and semantic grounds, I put forward two proposals: i) to preceding the infinitive has a discernable meaning that distinguishes the bare infinitive from the to-infinitive construction—it refers to the sequent movement between the infinitive and the matrix verb in a time continuum, ii) to is capable of evoking an event of non-realized or possible future. Futhermore, considering a wide range of full verbs having different semantic properties such as help, make, have, see, etc, it is concluded that the meaning of the bare infinitive can be characterized as ‘direct actualization' between the two events, whereas the to-infinitive can be analyzed as ‘indirect actualization'.