ABSTRACT
The Portuguese inflected infinitive has been the topic of much attention and debate among grammarians and linguists who have attempted to describe its use with long lists of rules and examples. Unfortunately, these attempts have failed to capture the true nature of the inflected infinitive and instead have provided us with inconsistent rules for which counterexamples abound. I propose that an examination of the syntactic distribution of the inflected infinitive in Portuguese will uncover the environments for its use in Portuguese, Galician, and other Romance varieties discussed in chapters three and six. The following discussion is comprised of three sections. In the first section, I provide a description of the theory of Relational Grammar which will serve as a background to my subsequent discussion of Portuguese. Next, I examine the structure and distribution of the inflected infinitive in Portuguese and I propose a general condition on its use. Finally, I offer verifiable predictions regarding the occurrence of the inflected infinitive in Portuguese and other Romance languages.
