The Short Infinitive in Slovene: A Corpus-based Approach

The article presents the results of an in-depth, corpus-based study on the use of the short and long infinitive in Slovene. After a few introductory remarks followed by a brief theoretical overview of the topic, a categorised list of problematic infinitive structures based upon a previously performed analysis of olar, a corpus of student texts, is provided. olar’s data gave insight into the whole range of linguistic problems associated with the use of two forms and allowed for the subject of the study, i.e. ‘full verb + infinitival complement’ structures, to be precisely defined. The following section describes the method used to compile a shortlist of high-frequency full verbs co-occurring with infinitival complements from the half-million-word, morphosyntactically and syntactically annotated training corpus that was created within the Communication in Slovene project. Finally, the co-relation between genre, mode and the use of the two forms is examined in detail; based on a quantitative analysis of data extracted from corpora of written (FidaPLUS) and spoken language (GOS) for each full verb on the shortlist, new findings on the actual use of the short and long infinitive in both written and spoken texts are presented.