Bruce,

I can imagine contexts in which "The children were confessed to have enjoyed themselves" would work (I think) — what's needed is a context in which children are not supposed to enjoy themselves at all, and their parents are being forced to admit that their errant offspring in fact did enjoy something. I've read Puritan literature, so was primed for that kind of interpretation.

My first reaction was to treat the infinitive as kind of object complement, by analogy to sentences like "We considered Harald to have met the conditions for participation" (≠ "We considered that Harald had met the conditions for participation"), which in turn seem analogous to "We considered Harald happy" -- i.e., it's the kind of object complement that denotes a quality, which can be a stative, and I'm wanting to interpret the infinitive as denoting a state. The DO elements in those can be turned into subjects via passivization, but of course the OC elements can't.

Of course, that blithely ignores the fact that 'say' doesn't normally occur in [S __ DO OC] sequences, and may be papering over some of the syntactic differences by simply slapping a label on a slot.

--- Bill Spruiell

From: Bruce Despain <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>>
Reply-To: ATEG English Grammar <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>>
Date: Thursday, October 17, 2013 11:34 AM
To: ATEG English Grammar <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>>
Subject: Re: verb characterization

Scott,
Let me venture a few suggestions based on some principles of paraphrase.

I have studied R. A. Close's Reference Grammar (for ESL students) to classify many of the verbs of English by the kinds of constructions they take.  The first thing that comes to mind are the approximately eight verbs that I call propositional because they take a proposition in the form of an infinitive phrase as object: appear, be, chance, happen, look, prove, seem, and sound.  Thus we have, "It seems to be that the children enjoyed themselves."  The impersonal subject of the propositional verb may then be supplanted by that of the proposition:  "The children seem to have enjoyed themselves."

There is another set of verbs which may take a projected object along with an indirect object: announce, assert, confess, confirm, declare, maintain, note, say, shout, repeat, and report.  Such verbs may be found in the passive with the projection as subject: "It was announced (to all) that the children enjoyed themselves."  If the verb of saying is passive, it is possible to make the projection an infinitive and thus blend the two constructions:  "The children were announced (to all) to have enjoyed themselves."  This is not at all possible if the deep subject of the verb of saying is not the same as the subject of the projection:  "It was confessed that the children enjoyed themselves" and "The children confessed to have enjoyed themselves" but not "*The children were confessed to have enjoyed themselves."  This excludes confess, confirm, shout, and repeat.

My tentative reply to your question about what the infinitive phrase is doing is that it is serving at least two funtions: reduction of a projection that becomes subject and allowing its subject to become subject of a proposition.

Bruce

--- [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]> wrote:

From: Scott Woods <[log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>>
To: [log in to unmask]<mailto:[log in to unmask]>