Supine - what is supine in English grammar?
Prompted by the use of a poster who obviously uses supine as a variant for to-infinitive I was really a bit annoyed about such confusion of terms, as supine is a term in Latin grammar for a rare verb form.
So I googled for supine and looked up the word in Oxford Dictionaries. They have nothing about the use of supine /'su:pain/'sju:pain/ as a variant for to-infinitive.
Astonishingly en.wikipedia mentions that supine is sometimes used for to-infinitive, but only when it is used in subject position. I have the impression wikipedia has digged up a term that was last used a hundred years ago. Wikipedia has a preference for rare grammar terms.
As I said this is my impression. But I would like to hear views of members of this forum. The term is not listed in the register of Oxford Guide to English Grammar nor of Longman English Grammar.
http://www.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/english/supine
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supine
The OED does indeed record one of the definitions of the noun supine as "to-infinitive", but notes it is now rare.
1b. In English: the to-infinitive. Also in German: the infinitive with zu. Now rare. These forms derive from the use of the preposition with a dative infinitive.
The most recent attestation given for this sense is from 2000:
2000 W. S. Coblin & J. A. Levi tr. F. Varo Gram. Mandarin Lang. viii. 123 The supine is rendered by the simple form, [e.g.,] ‘to love’ gai.
Since the OED records word senses in chronological order, and since the first entry for the noun supine (1a, immediately preceding sense 1b, quoted above) is:
1a. A Latin verbal noun with the same stem as the passive participle, used only in the accusative and ablative cases esp. to denote purpose.
It appears this application to English grammar is a holdover from when classical educations venerated Rome, and English linguists and grammarians explicitly tried to model English grammatical terms and constructs after Latin ones.
In recent decades that has become unfashionable (or, more strongly, explicitly considered misguided) in linguistic circles, which is probably why you (or I) haven't encountered this usage before: it is obsolete.