CHAPTER IV. 
THE PREDICATIVE INFINITIVE WITH AUXILIARY VERBS. 
A. THE ACTIVE INFINITIVE. 
Perhaps the most frequent use of the active infinitive in Anglo-Saxon is 
to complete the sense of these auxiliary verbs: 
agan (nagan), owe (not), ought (not). mot, may, must. 
cunnan, know, can. sculan, owe, shall . 
dear(r), dare. tSurfan, need. 
magan, can, may. willan, 1 desire, will. 
No doubt, as is generally believed, the complementary infinitive after these 
verbs was originally scarcely, if at all, distinguishable from the objective in¬ 
finitive, treated in Chapter II; for the auxiliary verbs originally were transitive 
in sense and could govern a noun object, as is still true of willan in its primary 
sense of ‘ desire/ As, however, the transitive sense more and more paled away 
in the auxiliaries, the latter came to seem more and more to be mere copulas 
between the subject and the infinitive; and the infinitive, instead of seeming 
to be the object of the auxiliary, appears to us as the most significant element 
in the verb phrase. Hence it is that I have put the use of the infinitive with 
auxiliary verbs under the general heading of the more verbal (or the predica¬ 
tive) uses of the infinitive. 
The predicative infinitive with auxiliaries is habitually uninflected, though 
occasionally it is inflected. The examples of the uninflected infinitive are so 
numerous and are so normal that it has not seemed profitable to me either to 
collect or to publish the complete statistics thereof. Suffice it to say that this 
infinitive is very frequent in poetry and in prose, in Early West Saxon and in 
Late West Saxon, and in the more original works as well as in the translations. 
Nor have I sought with a verb like willan, which is sometimes a transitive verb 
and sometimes an auxiliary, to separate the two uses. In a word, the paucity 
of my statistics as to the predicative uninflected infinitive is intentional, and 
is based on the belief that what is peculiar in such verbal phrases rests on the 
shift in meaning of the auxiliaries, and belongs rather to a history of the auxili¬ 
aries than to a history of the infinitive. Moreover, the history of the auxiliaries 
has already been worked out to a greater or less degree, especially in the case 
of the two most interesting ones, sculan and willan. 2 A few examples, there¬ 
fore, will suffice for the uninflected infinitive as the complement of auxiliary 
verbs. On the other hand, I have tried to collect all the examples of the rarer 
construction, the inflected infinitive as complement to the auxiliaries. I do 
not forget that this use of the inflected infinitive as complement to auxiliary 
verbs is denied by some careful students of Anglo-Saxon, as by Dr. K. Kohler, 
l. c., p. 45, Professor Blackburn, 2 1. c ., p. 57, and Dr. Riggert, l. c., pp. 9, 68, 70, 
1 For reasons already given, I do not put here, but under the objective use, beginnan, don, gewunian, habban, 
onginnan, and wunian. Beon ( wesan ) is treated in Chapter VII. .Dr. Kenyon, l. c., pp. 88 ff., uses the terms 
complement and complementary so as to include a very large number of verbs, transitive and intransitive. 
2 See, in the bibliography, the works by Blackburn, C. B. Bradley, H. Bradley, Graef, K. Kohler, H. 
Kurrelmeyer, Ljunggren, Liittgens, and Riggert. . .... •• f 
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