Bruce,

Judgments are individual, but I still find the two sentences you mention
more awkward than the corresponding sentence with the split infinitive.

The queen told the page to enter quietly the chamber where the king was
sleeping.
 Adverbs in English almost never come between a transitive verb and its
object:. We'd never say the following:

      He was eating too slowly his food, so he needed to finish quickly the
meal and get right away a taxi.


The queen told the page to enter the chamber quietly where the king was
sleeping.

Adverbs in English do not comfortably come between a noun and a relative
clause that modifies it. I would revise every one of these:

      He polished the car carefully that he bought for his mother.
       I admire the poems enormously Galway Kinnell wrote.
      She remembers the day fondly when he proposed to her.
      Kevin confronted the politician angrily who took bribes.


Dick


On Mon, Dec 15, 2014 at 12:18 PM, Bruce Despain <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
>
> Dick,
>
>
> I don't think your second and third points are very well supported.  My
> argument is admittedly not stronger.  It looks to me that the problem
> arises because of 1) the transitivity of the verb, and 2) the length of the
> whole object of the verb.  It seems to me that the adverb can indeed
> interrupt the whole object:
>
>
> The queen told the page to enter quietly the chamber where the king was
> sleeping.
>
> The queen told the page to enter the chamber quietly where the king was
> sleeping.
>
>
> In this way the parse resolves the adverb before the rest of the object
> is classified more fully.  What makes the second option a little awkward is
> the fact that* enter* may often stand without an object (its object
> understood).  The third option is not too much to expect in a formal style,
> where it is customary to avoid splitting the infinitive.  Even  less modern
> would have been the English of King James; presumably those dialects would
> probably not have worded the indirect command as an infinitive, perhaps:
>
>
> The queen said unto the page, that he should enter quietly the chamber
> wherein the king was sleeping.
>
> The queen said unto the page, that he should enter the chamber quietly wherein
> the king was sleeping.
>
>
> Later:
>
>
> The queen told the page, that he should quietly enter the chamber where
> the king was sleeping.
>
>
> Perhaps it is the pressure of this latter (formal) construction that wants
> the modern speaker to split the infinitive.
>
>
> Bruce
>
>
> --- [log in to unmask] wrote:
>
> From: Dick Veit <[log in to unmask]>
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: ATEG Digest - 11 Dec 2014 to 12 Dec 2014 (#2014-68)
> Date: Mon, 15 Dec 2014 11:03:35 -0500
>
> Here's an example I used in class in support of split infinitives:
>
> Attempts to unsplit the infinite (*to quietly enter*) in the following
> sentence don't seem to succeed:
>
>    The queen told the page to quietly enter the chamber where the king
>    was sleeping.
>
> Consider the possibilities:
>
>    - The queen told the page quietly to enter the chamber where the king
>    was sleeping.
>    Misleading at best. The likely interpetation will be that the queen
>    was speaking quietly.
>
>    - The queen told the page to enter quietly the chamber where the king
>    was sleeping.
>    Pretty awkward. Adverbs do not usually go between verbs and their
>    objects. Who ever says, "I entered quietly the chamber"?
>
>    - The queen told the page to enter the chamber quietly where the king
>    was sleeping.
>    Solved a phony problem and created a real one. Now we've split a
>    relative adverb ("where") from the noun it modifies ("the chamber").
>
>    - The queen told the page to enter the chamber where the king was
>    sleeping quietly.
>    Not even ambiguous. This will be interpreted to mean the king wasn't
>    snoring for a change.
>
> Dick Veit
>
>

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