Why I'm writing this

For those unaware, I graduated college with a dual major and a minor. The minor was in linguistics, and the reasoning was simple: I really enjoy linguistics. I think that language is so fascinating, especially historic, comparative linguistics. Finding artifacts in our daily, modern languages that formed over time. Learning how words changed over time, and how a lot of words we use today ultimately can trace all the way back to Proto-Indo-European. It's beyond fascinating to me and I can easily nerd out for hours thinking about "weird" constructions in languages, looking up etymologies of words, phrases, or idioms, or thinking about my own idiolect and comparing it to those around me.

In one of my linguistics courses in college (undergraduate), I had a really good professor who assigned us a fascinating project. Every week, we had to write up a few sentences/paragraphs on a "language artifact" that we found interesting. It could be anything that we heard in day to day speech over that week, or something we thought of or wondered about. It was pretty open.

I really loved this assignment, because I love thinking about such things. And so I decided here to start doing something similar. I'm not setting out to try to solve these "artifacts". Maybe in the future, I'll go back and revisit some. But mostly, I just want to write up when I think of something interesting about "language". I'm not restricting myself to English here, either. I'm learning German, and that is fair game for artifacts too.

Gerunds and Infinitives

So this is my first "language artifact" post, and it deals with the concept of some verbs requiring a gerund while others require an infinitive (or a to-infinitive), in English.

As an example, "I like to read." The verb like here can take a full to-infinitive. But it can also take a gerund: "I like reading." -- this works perfectly fine, too.

But what about "I want to read."? We cannot just as well say *"I want reading." and achieve a similar meaning. It just doesn't work.

Okay, well, we can like reading and we can like to read and we can want to read, but how do we discuss our enjoyment of reading? The verb "enjoy" can only take a gerund: "I enjoy reading." works, but not *"I enjoy to read" -- that doesn't work.

So then, my open question, which I will not set out to solve here, is: Why is this? What determines which verbs take a gerund or an infinitive or both?

That's for me to think about another day.