infinitives - "He intends leaving tomorrow"

He intends to leave tomorrow. (1)

He intends leaving tomorrow. (2)

(The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language)

CGEL says there’s no discernible difference between the two, yet I imagine some difference from the ‘be+~ing’ meaning. This presents a plan / intention and implies near future. Although the adjunct, tomorrow, weakens the meaning of the plan or near future, (2) still has the meaning of your intentionality or volition, I guess. Can it be the proper difference?

Answer

One of the hot topics among English-language linguists is the ‘Great Complement Shift’—the apparently well-established fact that for about four hundred years speakers have been drifting away from infinitive non-finite complements and toward gerund non-finite complements. You'll find a comfortably brief discussion in 3.4 of this draft of a forthcoming book chapter.

It’s important to note, however, that this trend has no predictive value at all. There are many verbs which exhibit the opposite tendency, away from gerunds and towards infinitives. This paper, for instance, aptly titled ‘Swimming against the tide of the Great Complement Shift’, identifies prefer and continue as two such verbs.

Intend is another such. The Comments to your question show how distasteful WendiKidd, Mari-LouA and I find the use with gerund complements, and our instinct is corroborated by the corpus data cited by Alex B. The Google NGram which Peter Shor links suggests, and the one below appears to confirm, that use with the gerund has never been as common as that with the infinitive, and has steadily become less common over the past century.

Use with the gerund is basically a 19th-century alternative: perfectly correct, but unusual today.

As for a distinction in meaning, I think it very unlikely, unless you suppose that 19th-century writers were two or three times more likely to have firm short-term intentions than their modern counterparts.

When you're dealing with an individual verb, the distinct between infinitive or gerund or FOR .. TO .. or that complementation is certainly meaningful. But I'm very dubious about claims that such distinctions have any global significance; and even if such significance could be shown, it would still be irrelevant to individual cases, which should always be suspected of Swimming Against the Tide.