Abstrakt
The inherited wisdom is that the negator not precedes the infinitive marker to, as in not to be. It is only occasionally that linguistic literature mentions the alternative ordering, as in to not be, dubbing this a preferably American variant.
The paper focuses on the negative split infinitive and, relying on various corpora (including the BNC, the Spoken BNC2014, and the COCA), confirms the hypothesis that this construction has been spreading in American as well as British English, both spoken and written. Furthermore, the paper attempts to identify factors that underlie the competition between the non-split negative infinitive (not to be) and the split negative infinitive (to not be), such as subtle semantic differences and frequency-induced chunking.