This study addresses both the practical question of what forms of complementationare found with verbs expressing the notion of choice in English and thetheoretical question of explaining the control and temporal effects found withthese verbs. The explanation proposed is based on an approach in which syntax istaken to be driven by semantics. Semantics is defined in terms of themeaning-content associated with the linguistic forms occurring in theconstructions examined, namely the to-infinitive, thegerund-participle, and the lexical content of the different verbs of choicethemselves, together with the semantic value of the complement’s functionwith respect to the main verb. Although it does not utilize a corpus in thestrict sense of the word, nor employ statistical argumentation, the study isbased mainly on an examination of attested usage in Canadian English asreflected by Canadian websites accessed in the fall of 2006.
