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영어

This study aims to descriptively investigate the forms and functions of infinitives in Old English as a stage of examining English infinitives chronically, since in Modern English infinitives are used extensively with multiple functions, despite the fact that their forms and structures have become very simple because of the loss of complicated inflectional systems of Old English. Old English infinitives can be classified into two groups, that is, simple infinitives and inflected infinitives. The simple infinitives of Old English, the origin of Modern English bare infinitives, ended in -an, -ian, -on, or -n, which functioned as subjects or objects of sentences, and were also used to express purposes and played other important roles with causative verbs, verbs of perception and several common verbs. The inflected infinitives have also been called ‘gerundial infinitives’ or ‘prepositional infinitives’, which reflects the characteristics of the inflected infinitives. That is, the inflected infinitives were inflected as nouns in the dative case. And they were also governed by the preposition ‘to’, which has come to be felt as the sign of the infinitives in Modern English owing to the loss of complex inflectional endings of Old English. The inflected infinitives also played various important roles in Old English in addition to the roles as nouns.