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This paper analyzes the spread of nonfinite subordinate clauses at the expense of finite ones in the history of English. A typical example which underwent structural changes is the derivation of to­infinitive clauses from that­clauses. Corpus data show that finite complement clauses were usually the norm in OE, but infinitival variants emerged from the late OE period and started spreading in the early ME period. The ongoing changes as such are to meet semantic and paradigmatic regularities as well as legibility condition at interface and the condition of economy in speech production. The semantic regularity implies that a matrix verb with the [+future]­feature expressing an activity or a state of mind should be conductive to the realization of the event structure referred to by a to­infinitive complement with the same feature. The paradigmatic regularity connotes that the distribution of a to­infinitive clause is confined by the distribution of a DP or ‘for＋DP’ which functions as the logical subject of a to­infinitive and by that of the to­infinitive itself which functions as the complement of a matrix verb too. The result of diachronic change in the to­infinitive clauses and their internal structures in English is proved by the general rule that most of the propositional matrix verb selects a to­infinitive clause as its complement except indicative and subjunctive that­clauses and gerundive clauses in PDE.