Dear All:
I suspect that one of the reasons that many modern grammars use
what seem to be simplistic structural pattern definitions (e.g. [S V DO INF]
for both “We wanted him to be hired” and “We wanted him to go home”) is that
the differences among those sentences are differences in what the various
participants are doing – the relationships among them – and we don’t really
have a theoretically agnostic way of talking about that. The minute a term like
“underlying subject” is used, the description is locked into a particular
model.
This is true of all descriptions, of course (simply by
using a label like “infinitive,” I’ve committed to a kind of model), but cases
like these bring up major points of contention among current models. Almost
everyone who works on English is happy with the term “infinitive,” but there is
nowhere near the same level of consensus about the idea that infinitives are
really, truly, made out of full sentences, etc. I have a knee-jerk reaction the
minute I see a phrase like “underlying subject,” and I’m sure I use phrases
that others on the list would have an immediate negative reaction to as well. One
way authors of grammar books can try to dodge the entire issue is simply to
omit any references to this type of material at all, and thus we end up with [S
V DO INF].
Older grammars, like the ones Herb mentions, did something that
I think we can still do: we can all agree that there are different patterns of
relationships among the participants, even if we don’t agree on why
those differences exist. To some extent, the differences among the patterns can
be “anchored” by relating them to native-speaker reactions to questions about
implications of the structure (e.g. “If I say that ‘X V-ed Y to Z’ am I saying
that it’s Y who will be doing the Z-ing?”). In other words, we can adopt ways
to probe for differences that there will be wide consensus on, even if there is
no such consensus on what the differences mean for a theory of linguistic
structure (this is what I’m trying to get at with the term “theoretically
agnostic”).
Bill Spruiell
Dept. of English
Central Michigan University