Promised never to smoke or promised never smoking

Question

I saw this problem from some textbook:

A - "My father promised never to smoke."
B - "My father promised never smoking."

I know the correct answer is A because it feels right.

But what is the proper reason?

Answer 1

Promise takes to-infinitival clauses as complements:

1. My father promised never to smoke.

But it doesn't take V-ing clauses as complements:

2. *My father promised never smoking.　(ungrammatical)

Unfortunately, you just have to memorize which kinds of complements each verb can take. In the case of promise, it takes one and not the other.

With a different verb, the opposite might be true:

3. *My father never enjoyed to smoke.　(ungrammatical)
4. My father never enjoyed smoking.

Promise can also take a noun phrase as a complement, and in English it is possible to derive nouns from the -ing form of a verb:

5. One of Mr. Mbeki's first trips was to Mali, where he promised funding and training for conservators like Traore at South Africa's national libraries in Cape Town and Tshwane.

In this example, promise takes the long noun phrase starting with funding and training as a complement. You might think that your example with smoking could work in the same way. However, it can't because never forces us to interpret smoking as a verb:

6. My father promised smoking.　(grammatical with smoking as a derived noun)
7. *My father promised never smoking.　(ungrammatical)

Example 6, however, requires a specific context to make sense:

Imagine that I told you that I was opening a club, and in defiance of California law, my club would definitely have smoking. And then when the club finally opened and you came to visit, you found out I couldn't have smoking there after all, and you were quite upset. "You promised me there would be smoking," you'd say. "You promised smoking! There's no smoking here!"

In that sort of context, smoking as a derived noun makes sense. We can tell by the phrase no smoking that smoking is a noun; this is different from the clause never smoking, in which smoking is a verb.

Answer 2

Remove never from the examples for a moment.

It's possible to promise (something to) a person. Who did he promise?

He promised Jane.

And it's possible to promise some things

He promised fidelity/love.

You can also promise to do certain things.

He promised to marry.

He promised to return.

But you can't promise smoking any more than you can promise sitting or standing or swimming. It simply makes no sense.

In the same way you can't promise never smoking.

But you can promise never to smoke.