抄録
This paper presents an analysis of the historical development of for to infinitives in English within the framework of Distributed Morphology advocated by Halle and Marantz (1993). Having demonstrated that there were two types of for to infinitives in Middle English that exhibited different syntactic behaviors, I argue that the change from the early type to the late type was caused by the shift of correspondence between morphosyntactic/semantic features and the phonological expressions that realized them. This hypothesis enables us to maintain an invariant syntactic structure of inflected infinitives and deal with its parametric changes within the phonological component.
