THE PREDICATIVE INFINITIVE WITH ACCUSATIVE SUBJECT. 213 
original, Alfred and other Anglo-Saxon writers not a few times use the accusa¬ 
tive with passive infinitive, — a construction thoroughly un-English. (3) The 
history of this construction in the other Germanic languages tends to show that 
Dr. Zeitlin unduly minimizes the influence of the Latin upon the Anglo-Saxon. 
It is only fair to add, however, that what he says as to the influence of the 
Latin upon the Anglo-Saxon is more or less bound up with what he says as 
to the influence of the classical languages upon the Germanic languages, -— a 
topic discussed by me in Chapter XVI, section viii. 
Perhaps I should add that Dr. Kenyon does not discuss the origin of this 
idiom in Anglo-Saxon in his The Syntax of the Infinitive in Chaucer (1909); and 
that Dr. Riggert, in his Der Syntaktische Gebrauch des Infinitivs in der Alt- 
englischen Poesie (1909), p. 52, adopts the view of T. Muller, which was given 
above. 
II. INFLECTED. 
As we saw in Chapter VIII, the inflected infinitive with accusative subject 
occurs only sporadically in Anglo-Saxon, the less doubtful cases only in the 
later Chronicle and in iElfric, after the differentiation between the two infini¬ 
tives had been appreciably weakened. A few of the remaining examples are 
due to the presence of a Latin gerund, gerundive, or future participle in the 
original; while in a few other instances the infinitive hovers between an ad¬ 
verbial (final or consecutive) use on the one hand and a predicative on the 
other. In a word, in Early West Saxon, most of the examples are doubtful, 
and are due partly to the Latin influences specified and partly to the natural 
tendency of the inflected infinitive after certain verbs of tendency ( tcecan , etc.) 
to pass over from a final-consecutive to a predicative use. 
For the accusative with an infinitive in the other Germanic languages, see 
Chapter XVI, section viii. 
B. THE PASSIVE INFINITIVE. 1 
That the passive infinitive with accusative subject, when the object of a 
transitive verb, is due to Latin influence, is highly probable, as was long ago 
declared by Dr. Kellner. 2 As we have seen above, only two examples of the 
construction have been found in Anglo-Saxon poetry, one each in Genesis and 
in Guthlac, each a poem based on Latin originals. In the prose translations, 
in each of the groups of verbs, the construction in question is in most cases in 
direct translation of the same idiom in Latin, though occasionally it corresponds 
to other constructions in Latin (an objective passive infinitive, 1; a predicative 
active infinitive, 3; a predicative past participle 3 in the accusative, 8; no 
Latin, 1; all of which have been illustrated above, pp. 120 ff.). Moreover, we 
find the Latin passive infinitive with accusative subject often rendered by an 
active infinitive (with or without an accusative subject). The passive con¬ 
struction is very rare in the more original Anglo-Saxon prose (no example is 
found in the Chronicle or the Laws, and only one example occurs in Wulfstan) 
and in ^Elfric (only three examples) despite his known proclivities for Latin 
i Cf. Chapter VIII, p. 120. 2 See Kellner,3 1. c., p. 306. 
3 Most of these may be considered passive infinitives with esse understood. 
