Abstract
This paper attempts to account for the distribution of to-infinitives with lexical subjects in Middle and Modern English in terms of their Case licensing, within the framework of the minimalist program. After identifying two classes of to-infinitives whose subjects are accusative and nominative, respectively, the historical changes in the category and formal features of the infinitive marker to are examined on the basis of to-infinitives as verb complements. Then, it is argued that accusative subjects are licensed by to in to-infinitives as complements to adjectives and nouns, due to its prepositional nature that it retained until the sixteenth century. On the other hand, to-infinitives with nominative subjects, which were first attested in the fourteenth century, are shown to be categories of CP, with C responsible for nominative Case assignment under the system of Case/agreement based on the C-T configuration. Among them are the exclamatory and absolute infinitives, which are argued to have survived until quite recently because of their same sorts of illocutionary force as finite clauses.
