To-infinitives such as to go, to catch, to see, etc. are the ‘infinitives’ that people mean when they talk of split infinitives. Split infinitives are usually frowned upon by those who mention them. A sentence like He wants to actually see them leave is said to contain a split infinitive because the word to is separated from the word see.

We saw on p. 37 that verbs can take a wide variety of expressions as their complements. Further study of the complementation of verbs will feature in Chapter 5. However, in order to provider representative survey of the distribution of verbs, we now need to take note that verbs can themselves occur as the complements of verbs. For instance, the verb want can have either a noun phrase or a verb phrase as its complement:

All the sentences we have looked at so far in this chapter have been short and simple statements. They have had a subject and a verb, and sometimes other things following the verb. On p. 36 we described such constructions as having
a truth value; they can be true or false.

There is a small and rather special set of verbs called modal verbs. These are may, might, can, could, will, would, shall, should, must, ought,
need, and a few others.

Further facts about the distribution of verbs will be presented later. Meanwhile, we need to survey the variations in verb forms. The typical verb has an inflectional paradigm consisting of either four or five forms. (There are also a few atypical verbs which we shall come to shortly.) Here are
some examples:

The ‘verb’ element in a sentence is not necessarily just a single word. It would be more satisfactory to call it a verb phrase, which may be just one verb, or may be made up of several verbs. The examples given above have just one verb in the verb phrase: e.g. barks, disappeared, explained, but in the following the verb phrases contain two
or more verbs:

The examples given above are obviously extremely simple ones. In the vast majority of utterances there is more than just a subject and a verb. There is usually at least one further element to complete or supplement the construction. The total range of construction types for whole sentences is very great; a slightly fuller treatment of the topic will be found in Chapter 5 (see pp. 71–4). However, it is necessary to anticipate a little of this material, since it will help us to
understand the distribution of verbs.

We have now established one of the most important properties of verbs. They can have subjects. But as yet we have taken a rather limited view of subjects. When the subject is an instance of third person reference (he, she, it, they), we could use a more explicit form of words to indicate what we are talking about. Instead of It barks, They sing, or She sparkles, we could say The dog barks, Your friendly neighbours sing, or The hostess sparkles; in fact, very frequently
we need to do this to be clear.

In Chapter 2 we identified a set of words called personal pronouns (see p. 29) which distinguish between first person (I, we), second person (you) and third person (he, she, it, they). (Most of the pronouns also have other forms, me, us, him, etc., but for now we only need to use those in the
first column of Figure 11, p. 29.)

Determiners may be used as heads, as in the following examples: Some arrived this morning I have never seen many He gave us two Like third person pronouns, these force us to refer back in the context to see what is being referred to. Some arrived this morning makes us ask ‘Some what?’, just as He arrived this morning makes us ask ‘Who did?’. But there is a difference. He stands in place of a whole noun phrase (e.g. the minister), while some is part of a noun phrase doing duty for the whole (e.g. some applications).
Here are some more examples: