Syntactic and semantic status of infinitive constructions in Croatian and English

The paper presents the results of a comparison of infinitive constructions in Croatian and English by referring primarily to the grammar of Silić and Pranjković (2005) and Belaj and Tanacković Faletar (2020) for Croatian, and Greenbaum et al. (1999) and Biber et al. (2003) for English. The paper approaches the problem in question systematically by examining the syntactic and semantic criteria for distinguishing between the infinitive as a predicate of a non-finite complement clause on the one hand and a sentence element on the other (for instance, the lexical part of a complex verbal predicate or the subject) (cf. also Zovko Dinković and Nazalević Čučević 2024). The paper also considers some infinitival complement clauses that have not been explicitly mentioned in Croatian so far. These include infinitival clauses with the function of predicative complement, as well as those that function as attributive and appositional clauses. When determining the syntactic and semantic status of these clauses, we primarily apply functional criteria. We compare Croatian examples with the English ones to highlight the similarities and differences in the approach to the semantic and syntactic analysis of constructions with the infinitive. By relying on semantic criteria, the paper proposes a more elaborate arrangement of verbs along the continuum of syntactic functions of infinitive constructions found alongside these verbs. As the aforementioned authors also note that their review is not complete, our analysis attempts to point out areas that may be improved, thus contributing to the completeness of the description of the infinitive in Croatian.