I couldn’t agree with you more. I believe that the CG linguists would also agree. They think to have a framework that allows the distinction to be made and the continuum you point out to be splayed out into various colors.
Bruce
Bruce,
If I want a problem to go away or want my refrigerator to fill up, then I don't expect the problem or the refrigerator to do anything. But that only becomes a problem when we want to define the construction in a narrow way. If the construction builds from the ground up, then we need to expect these anomalies in the same way we expect word meanings to grow and change.
Is wanting X to Y the same as expecting X to Y? How about encouraging? discouraging? Helping? Ordering? Making? The more abstract the classification pattern, the further it drifts from the real world of meaning.
Each of these verbs uses these constructions in unique ways. The patterns build from use, not independently of it.
Craig
Bruce Despain wrote:
Your pattern, “If I say that ‘X V-ed Y to Z’ am I saying that it’s Y who will be doing the Z-ing?” looks like what might be described in a constructional grammar (CG). These folks are averse to describing the relationships of constructions as built up of other constructions. They like to contrast the usage construction meaning vs. the grammatical construction meaning.
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
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