Split Infinitives in the U.S. State of the Union Addresses (1846-2024): Diachronic Change, Stylistic Profiles, and Socio-Historical Patterning

抄録

This article investigates the diachronic behavior, stylistic distribution, and socio-historical patterning of split infinitives in the U.S. State of the Union (SOTU) addresses. Using a corpus of SOTU addresses spanning 1790-2024 (Washington to Biden), compiled from The American Presidency Project and annotated with Brill’s part-of-speech tagger, 220 split infinitive tokens attested in 1846-2024 are identified; the earliest occurs in Polk’s 1846 address. These tokens are analyzed with respect to three questions: (i) changes in frequency and distribution; (ii) stylistic and rhetorical differences across presidents and eras; and (iii) the lexical composition of split infinitives and its relation to broader socio-historical developments. The results show a non-linear trajectory: split infinitives are absent from early SOTU texts, first appear in Polk, cluster under late-nineteenth-century presidents such as Grant and Cleveland, decline sharply in the prescriptively dominated early twentieth century, and re-emerge and stabilize from the post-war period onward. Split infinitives are unevenly distributed across presidents and eras, forming part of stylistic profiles. These profiles include earnest recommendations in the nineteenth century, “proper” and “constructive” administration in the Progressive Era, managerial and strategic framing in the Cold War period, and completion-focused and stance-oriented narratives in contemporary addresses. At the lexical level, the corpus exhibits diversity (104 adverbs, 158 verbs) but concentration around templates such as to further aid, to better secure, to fully fund, and to finally end, which recur in shifting policy domains from Reconstruction-era civil rights to homeland security and space exploration. The syllable-level annotation suggests that many of these templates exploit prosodic patterns that favor spoken delivery. This study extends corpus-based work on the split infinitive by providing a detailed, single-genre history and by showing how split infinitive templates function as discourse strategies in the American presidency.