Scurtă privire asupra infinitivului în limba română actuală
A Brief Analysis of the Infinitive in Contemporary Romanian Language

Summary/Abstract: The Infinitive has represented from the very beginning and continues to represent even today an extremely debated issue not only in Romanian, but also in foreign language studies, due to the multiple aspects it has or employs. The usage of the Infinitive in Latin has been retained, one way or another, in most Romance languages. However, this does not happen to the same extent, regarding its frequency, in each of these languages. Thus, unlike Romance Western languages, where the syntactic usage of the Infinitive has been considerably enriched, Romanian has reduced the role of the Infinitive in its system, replacing it very often with the Conjunctive (sometimes even with the Gerund), a tendency that has brought Romanian closer to Balkan languages, such as Neo-Greek, Albanian, Bulgarian and Serbo-Croatian, which, apparently, have influenced it in this way. There cannot be an equivalence or concordance between the Infinitive and the Conjunctive. The phenomenon of competition is a living phenomenon that has not been brought to a closure yet, which illustrates the complex relation between langue and parole and also sets the norm as an intermediate level between the two facets of language. In order to draw a picture of the situation of the Infinitive in the contemporary Romanian language, we have conducted a survey on papers of literature, philosophy, science, paremiology, administration and journalism. The conclusion we have reached is that in combination with the syntactic semi-auxiliary a putea, the predominance of the Infinitive is overwhelming in comparison with the occurrence of the Conjunctive in the same situations.

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