SIL talk by Fenna Bergsma (Fryske Akademy)

Different infinitives in Frisian

Frisian has two morphologically distinct infinitives: one ending in -e (pronounced as [ə]) and one ending in -en (pronounced as [n]). It has been argued (cf. Visser 1989, Hoekstra 1997, Bergstra 2020) that they follow the noun-verb distinction and that infinitives on -e are verbal infinitives and infinitives on -en are nominal infinitives. In this talk, I show that not all infinitives on -en behave as expected from this description, and I conclude a description with two types of infinitives does not fully capture the distribution of the infinitives. I compare the different infinitives in Frisian to the different infinitives in English, and I show that their distributions largely overlap. I briefly work towards an analysis and show predictions that follow from this.