Learn English – to afford *doing* something

infinitive-vs-gerund

1) They can't afford to go out very often.

2) They can't afford going out very often.

A native speaker has said that the second usage can be heard in a colloquial speech, but it is incorrect. Is it true?

Best Answer

I searched The Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) for both strings. Here's what I found:

  afford to go        182 results
  afford going        5 results

There's a strong preference for the infinitival complement, so I suggest that you use it in your own writing.

That said, I would accept the other version as grammatical. This is just my personal judgment, but Jim left a comment which agrees, so I'm not the only one. This may be part of a larger trend that some have called the Great Complement Shift, although at the moment the infinitive is still strongly favored; there isn't much evidence in favor of a shift to the gerund for this particular verb yet.

Of the five results in COCA for afford going, four are from the spoken language sub-corpus, and one is from the news sub-corpus. This, along with the relatively small number of results, supports the idea that it might be considered more colloquial.

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