|
Traditional accounts of English grammar are directly (in the case of the earlier ones) or indirectly (following their predecessors) influenced by Latin grammar, even though the grammar of English as she is spoke derives more from the Germanic side of its heritage. Thus they will describe non-finite usage of a verb as an infinitive, whether it includes a to (e.g. I am ready to order) or not (e.g. May we order now?).
On the other hand, the recent, fairly radical, Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (Huddleston and Pullum, 2002, Cambridge University Press) talks of infinitival clauses but not of an infinitive as such.
I prefer to tread a middle ground and think of the bare word as the infinitive and the traditional to-infinitive as being rather a large set of phrasal verbs (e.g. be {adjective} to {infinitive}), although I must confess that the to-infinitive was so drilled into me when studying French, Latin, and Spanish that I had to override my instinct to type to be etc. in the last set of parentheses.
In any case, I think the most helpful way for you to think of it is that to-infinitives use a preposition, and prepositions rarely translate one-to-one. Instead they mainly have to be learnt on a case-by-case basis. (Plus there's the added complication that there are a lot of Spanish phrases with an infinitive which translate to an English phrase with a gerund).
|