ABSTRACT
Much has been written concerning the distribution of the inflected infinitive in Portuguese. Many scholars have attempted to predict the occurrence of the inflected infinitive by providing long lists of rules and norms and relevant examples. However, since these descriptions of the inflected infinitive did not attempt any serious structural analysis, rules proposed for its use ended up being inconsistent and imprecise. Using my syntactic analysis of the inflected infinitive from chapter two as a background, I will study the descriptions provided by previous linguists and grammarians for the distribution of the infinitive in Portuguese and Galician and demonstrate how these attempts have failed to capture the necessary condition for the inflected infinitive in these languages.
