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In grammar, accusative and infinitive (also Accusativus cum infinitivo or accusative plus infinitive, frequently abbreviated ACI or A+I) is the name for a syntactic construction first described in Latin and Greek, also found in various forms in other languages such as English and Dutch. [1]
Latin word order is relatively free. The verb may be found at the beginning, in the middle, or at the end of a sentence; an adjective may precede or follow its noun (vir bonus or bonus vir both mean 'a good man'); [5] and a genitive may precede or follow its noun ('the enemies' camp' can be both hostium castra and castra hostium; the latter is more common). [6]
The 'active infinitive' mode is often realised by a simple accusative future participle. The 'passive infinitive' mode can be realised by the ' īrī infinitive' paradigm of the perfect periphrasis, but this option is comparatively rare. [3] There are three additional future infinitive periphrases for both active and passive/deponent verbs.
Latin is a heavily inflected language with largely free word order. Nouns are inflected for number and case; pronouns and adjectives (including participles) are inflected for number, case, and gender; and verbs are inflected for person, number, tense, aspect, voice, and mood.
The future active infinitive must agree with what it is describing in number, gender, and case (nominative or accusative). Esse has two future infinitives: futurus esse and fore; The future passive infinitive uses the supine with the auxiliary verb īrī. Because the first part is a supine, the ending -um does not change for gender or number.
The most common type of indirect speech is indirect statement, for which in classical Latin (although not in medieval Latin) the usual grammatical form is the accusative and infinitive construction. In this the subject of the quoted sentence is put into the accusative case , and the verb is changed to an infinitive.
The accusative case in Latin has minor differences from the accusative case in Proto-Indo-European. Nouns in the accusative case (accusativus) can be used: as a direct object; to qualify duration of time, e.g., multos annos, "for many years"; ducentos annos, "for 200 years"; this is known as the accusative of duration of time,
Latin infinitives challenged several of the generalizations about infinitives. They did inflect for voice (amare, "to love", amari, to be loved) and for tense (amare, "to love", amavisse, "to have loved"), and allowed for an overt expression of the subject (video Socratem currere, "I see Socrates running"). See Latin conjugation § Infinitives.