Question e-mailed by Farhad H. in Karah, Iran (December 13, 2014):Hi! How are you? I have a question. Which one is correct? Please explain your reasons.
“Rather than ________ his homework, Paul decided to watch TV.”
(a) doing
(b) do
(c) to do
Thank you so much.
My reply to Farhad:From an idiomatic usage standpoint, the best verb form for that sentence is the bare infinitive “do”: “Rather than
do his homework, Paul decided to watch TV.” This is because using the full infinitive “to do” results in a stilted, very awkward-sounding construction: “Rather than
to do his homework, Paul decided to watch TV.” Check out my posting,
“So which do we use: a gerund, a full infinitive, or a bare infinitive?”, for why this happens with some verbs like “do.”
Now the question is: Why not use “doing” instead? It’s also a grammatically and semantically defensible choice, as we can see here: “Rather than
doing his homework, Paul decided to watch TV.” There is a problem with using the progressive form “doing,” however: from the duration standpoint, its extended action is clearly not parallel with the one-time, instant action denoted by “decided.” In other words, their time frames are incompatible; they are by no means expected to happen simultaneously, certainly not in the same way as the two obviously one-on-one simultaneous actions in a sentence like, say, “Rather than
doing his homework, Paul is
watching TV.” Here, the “doing” of the homework is supposed to happen at exactly the same time as the “watching” of the TV; in short, it’s a semantically legitimate “either/or” thing.
In everyday usage, however, the difference in sense between “Rather than
do his homework, Paul decided to watch TV” and “Rather than
doing his homework, Paul decided to watch TV” is very slight and hardly noticeable. This is why I wouldn’t recommend giving them as alternative answers in a multiple-choice test. Indeed, doing so might just lead to long but eventually fruitless debates over the correct answer—an outcome that will surely only defeat the objective of the test.
