Remind Vs Remember

REMIND VERSUS REMEMBER AND THE GERUND OR INFINITIVE CHOICE




1. Introduction

This study will analyse the behaviour of two different verbs which seem to have similar in meaning. The verbs to analyse are remind and remember which will be exposed to two different complement situations each of them to see if there is a contrast in meaning.

2. Hypothesis

Since it seems thatthere are semantic differences between the verbs remind and remember, this paper will analyse how is it that these verbs behave in a different way and have different meaning. It seems that these differences are based on the natural directness of these verbs, since remind behaves in a more indirect way while remember is completely direct with respect to the trajector. Moreover, there is anotherconcern that I would like to elucidate; it has to do with the confusion of when to use gerund or infinitive after these verbs as verbal complements and how this choice would change the meaning of the matrix.

3. Theoretical Framework

According to Kiparsky and Kiparsky, the gerund is located after factive predicates, that is, those kinds of verbs that take for granted the truth of thecomplement. In this case, I will only analyse the verb remind and remember. In the case of the verb remember followed by the gerund represents the fact that an event has been completed before. Thus, it can be said that the gerund is the one that evokes the ended action since it evokes the whole of the event’s interiority as a sum of positions occupied by the realiser, that is, the realiser of the event isnot situated at any particular moment.
Then, the use of the gerund can be simply seen as the direct object of the main verb and the relation of a direct object to a transitive verb is basically nontemporal since the role of the object is merely to identify one of the participants in the transitive verb’s event. Otherwise, if it happens that there is a temporal relation between the eventexpressed by the gerund and the main verbs, it is just an implication based on the main verb meaning. For example, an event that is remembered had necessarily to take place before the remembering. Therefore, this temporal relation comes from the nature of the gerund which can evoke an event.
On the other hand, the infinitive does involve temporality as it seems to be and indicator of afuture action. Many authors claim that the infinitive denotes unrealised or potential activities. Stowell says that the infinitive incorporates a future tense operator, that is, “the time frame of the infinitival clause is unrealised with respect to the tense of the matrix in which it appears”. Thus the infinitive does have a temporal relation to the main verb. Besides, infinitive can also be seen asan action that becomes objectified, that is, a direct object. That is how the infinitive marks or predicts an endpoint or goal in future actions.
While making the decision of when to use these complements for transitive verbs what has to be taken into account is that the meaning of the whole sentence is going to change depending whether you use infinitive of gerund.

4. Methodology

Themethodology to follow in this paper was to take a sentence from a corpus in order to analyse it and see if there was a semantic difference between the use of remind and remember. Then, it was analysed if these verbs were followed by gerund or infinitive and if these choice changed the meaning of the main verb.
There is one sentence to analyse through out this project which was adapted(modified) so that there would be four sentences to get contrast in meaning when using the verb remind followed by an infinitive and a gerund (which would be ungrammatical); and when using the verb remember followed by an infinitive and a gerund as well. This contrast among these four sentences was made with the purpose of seeing if the sentence would suffer a change in meaning depending on the selection...