Syntactic, semantic and stylistic aspects of the subject of the infinitive

The diploma thesis is concerned with syntactic, semantic and stylistic aspects of the subject of the infinitive. The aim is to examine all forms of realization of the infinitival subject, and to investigate relation between the syntactic function of the infinitive and the form and semantics of its subject. Furthermore, the thesis attempts to characterise and compare fiction and academic prose in terms of realization of the subject of the infinitive. In the theoretical part of the study, the infinitive is introduced as one of the means of complex condensation, and is discussed from a formal and functional point of view. Further, a general characterisation of the subject of the infinitive is presented, focusing on various forms of its realization and on its interpretation. The main part of the study, the corpus-based research, consists in a detailed analysis of 200 instances of an infinitival clause collected from the British National Corpus. Since the study focuses on two different registers, the material is analysed for each of them separately. In the last part of the analysis, the registers are subsequently compared in terms of distribution of syntactic functions of the infinitive and realization of the infinitival subject