In traditional descriptions of English, the infinitive is the basic dictionary form of a verb when used non-finitely, with or without the particle to.
In many other languages the infinitive is a distinct single word, often with a characteristic inflective ending, like cantar ("[to] sing") in Portuguese, morir ("[to] die") in Spanish, manger ("[to] eat") in French, portare ("[to] carry") in Latin and Italian, lieben ("[to] love") in German, читать (chitat', "[to] read") in Russian, etc.
Many verb forms known as infinitives differ from gerunds (verbal nouns) in that they do not inflect for case or occur in adpositional phrases.
They can play various grammatical roles like a constituent of a larger clause or sentence; for example it may form a noun phrase or adverb.
Following certain verbs or prepositions, infinitives commonly do have an implicit subject, e.g., As these examples illustrate, the implicit subject of the infinitive occurs in the objective case (them, him) in contrast to the nominative case that occurs with a finite verb, e.g., "They ate their dinner."
As shown in the above examples, the object of the transitive verb "want" and the preposition "for" allude to their respective pronouns' subjective role within the clauses.
In some languages, infinitives may be marked for grammatical categories like voice, aspect, and to some extent tense.
[2] A matter of controversy among prescriptive grammarians and style writers has been the appropriateness of separating the two words of the to-infinitive (as in "I expect to happily sit here").
German infinitives can form nouns, often expressing abstractions of the action, in which case they are of neuter gender: das Essen means the eating, but also the food.
In North Germanic languages the final -n was lost from the infinitive as early as 500–540 AD, reducing the suffix to -a.
The loss or reduction of -a in the active voice in Norwegian did not occur in the passive forms (-ast, -as), except for some dialects that have -es.
In Romanian, the infinitive is usually replaced by a clause containing the conjunction să plus the subjunctive mood.
Romance languages inherited from Latin the possibility of an overt expression of the subject (as in Italian vedo Socrate correre).
[4] These, alongside Sardinian,[citation needed] are the only Indo-European languages that allow infinitives to take person and number endings.
Other Romance languages (including Spanish, Romanian, Catalan, and some Italian dialects) allow uninflected infinitives to combine with overt nominative subjects.
[5][6] In Ancient Greek the infinitive has four tenses (present, future, aorist, perfect) and three voices (active, middle, passive).
Athematic verbs, and perfect actives and aorist passives, add the suffix -ναι instead, e.g., διδό-ναι.
Bulgarian and Macedonian have lost the infinitive altogether except in a handful of frozen expressions where it is the same as the 3rd person singular aorist form.
Almost all expressions where an infinitive may be used in Bulgarian are listed here; neverthess in all cases a subordinate clause is the more usual form.
The infinitive construct is used after prepositions and is inflected with pronominal endings to indicate its subject or object: בכתוב הסופר bikhtōbh hassōphēr "when the scribe wrote", אחרי לכתו ahare lekhtō "after his going".
When the infinitive construct is preceded by ל (lə-, li-, lā-, lo-) "to", it has a similar meaning to the English to-infinitive, and this is its most frequent use in Modern Hebrew.
The Finnish grammatical tradition includes many non-finite forms that are generally labeled as (numbered) infinitives although many of these are functionally converbs.
The infinitive is formed by adding a prefix to the stem: either iha- [iʔa-] (plus a vowel change of certain vowel-initial stems) if the complement clause is transitive, or ica- [ika-] (and no vowel change) if the complement clause is intransitive.
For example, in Literary Arabic the sentence "I want to write a book" is translated as either urīdu an aktuba kitāban (lit.
"I want that I write a book", with a verb in the subjunctive mood) or urīdu kitābata kitābin (lit.
"I want the writing of a book", with the masdar or verbal noun), and in Levantine Colloquial Arabic biddi aktub kitāb (subordinate clause with verb in subjunctive).
For example, in French the sentence "I want you to come" translates to Je veux que vous veniez (lit.