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Independently we can use "decide" with both declarative and interrogative clauses:
a. I have decided that I will marry John.
b. I have decided who I would marry.
And it's quite salient that "want to decide" can be followed by questions too:
c. I want to decide who I will marry. (something like, don't tell me who to marry.)
But is it natural to say (d)?:
d. I want to decide that I will marry John.
Thank you!
It's the nature of the verbs in this example that's causing the trouble.
Let's start by getting a different that-complement clause to contrast:
(Using I will marry John, again involving the speaker, complicates matters unnecessarily.)
Want and decide are both mental acts. Which means they're very abstract and hard to combine.
Since they're both mental acts and they both take complement clauses, try reversing them.
Want can't take a that-clause, so this is ungrammatical:
but an infinitive complement is grammatically straightforward:
though strange -- how can one decide what to want? Desires are emotional, decisions are rational.
There is a reason why want takes an infinitive complement with either A-Equi or B-Raising:
These are both events, or at least states, that have not happened at the time of wanting.
Want can refer to the subject's desire for the event or state to happen, and it's normally presupposed that it hasn't. It seems odd to say
if in fact you already own it. But a common way to say that you are discarding it is to say
which suggests that there is another sense in which one (covertly) wants one's actual possessions.
Want is in fact closely related to have, in its sense of 'possess', as well as many other senses.
If A wants X, then what A really wants is (for A) to have X.
This relation has been around for a long time, as can be seen in the parallelism of some idioms with have, though not others
Getting back to the strangeness of want to decide, we see it can make sense only if the subject has not yet made the decision. But the subject has clearly already formed a desire, which may or may not be independent of the decision.
Thus there is a conflict -- or, I should say, a vast uncertainty -- between the subject's mental states of desire and of indecision. This is the same reason why I decided to want sounds strange.
According to me, no.
Ideally you would not use 'want to' followed by a declarative clause. Because the phrase 'want to' suggests something that is yet to be done.
