Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1994. [Vol. 2.] Eger Journal of American Studies. (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 22)

STUDIES - Csaba Czeglédi: On the Distribution of Infinitival and Gerundive Complements in English

1. b (when you were thinking of doing different things) did you think of (the possibility of) asking Brown? (cf. Wierzbicka 1988:30) But compare (4) and (5), (4) a. I remembered to ask Brown, b. I remember asking Brown. (5) a. I regret to ask Brown, b. I regret asking Brown. where a similar 'wanting' versus 'possibility' interpretation of the respective complements does not seem to be plausible. Quirk et al.'s (1985) view on the meaning of sentences like (4) and (5) is that -ing complements on retrospective verbs, such as remember and regret, express anteriority and infinitival complements on this subclass of verbs express posteriority. In other words, -ing complements suggest that the action described in the complement sentence happened before, whereas infinitival complements express that it happened after, the point in time expressed by the tense of the matrix verb. Compare also the following examples (Quirk et al. 1985:1193): (6) a. I regret to tell you that John stole it b. I regret telling you that John stole it Contrast in temporal deixis relative to that expressed in the matrix clause, however, hardly explains why the infinitive is preferred in (7a) and the gerund in (7b) below. Quirk et al. (1985:1191—2) suggest that the infinitive is favored in (7a) but the gerund in (7b) because the former is associated with potentiality and the latter with performance. (7) a. He started to speak, but stopped because she objected, b. He started speaking, and kept on for more than an hour. 16