An Endangered Marker. On the Loss of Swedish att after kommer and some Paral- lels in English.

Both English and Swedish have an infinitive marker, to and att, respec-tively, and in both languages the marker is a weak element with a ten-dency to be lost. In English, there are several well-known cases of the marker being phonetically merged with a preceding verb, and sometimes, when informal direct speech is being rendered, this is reflected in writ-ing. On the Internet, in February 2006, Google finds 31 million hits in English texts for gonna, 26 million for gotta, 24.1 million for wanna and 2.15 million for oughta. More to the point of the present paper, the marker may disappear altogether as a result of it being felt that the pre-ceding verb has the character of a bona fide auxiliary and therefore de-serves to be allowed to pattern with the others in being followed by a to-less infinitive. The so-called marginal auxiliaries dare and need may be used with or without an infinitive marker on the following verb.1 The auxiliary ought is practically always cited as ought to in pedagogical grammars, but as pointed out by Quirk et al. (1985: 139), the infinitive marker is sometimes dropped 2: “Elicitation tests on young people have shown that, for both AmE and BrE, in nonassertive contexts the to-less ought construction is widely acceptable, and for some speakers even 1 Grammatical differences and restrictions connected with the two constructions need not concern us here. 2 In the previous Quirk et al. (1972:82), this to-dropping was described as occur-ring in AmE. Huddleston & Pullum (2002:109) share this view: “especially i