On the Complement Structure of Bare Infmitive Verbs

The purpose of this paper is to argue that the infinitival and participial complements of perception verbs and causative verb have, as in (1) and (2), derive from a common sentential complement and that the contrast between the infinitival and participial complements is one of nonprogressive vs. progressive aspect. (1) a. I saw the moon rise over the mountain. b. I saw the moon rising over the mountain. (2) a. He had his students do a survey of voting behavior. b. He had his students doing a survey of voting behavior. In Section 1, I present a number of arguments in support of the analysis in which the above four complements come from a null-comple-mentiaer S as in (3), i.e. an analysis similar to the one which Chomsky assigns to sentences like I believe John to be an idiot: (3) [VP [V see, have, etc.][NP [S̅ [Comp φ][S]] In Section 2, I give several arguments which indicate that the relation between infinitival and participial complements corresponds to that holding between nonprogressive and progressive constructions. Section 3 is concerned with the discussion as to how to derive the four constructions from (3) and how to account for their syntactic behavior. Participial perception verb complements (henceforth: PPVC's) differ from the others in that only the former can occur in other positions than the one adjacent to the verb (e.g. The moon rising over the mountain was seen by many people last night.). This situation can be accounted for in the following terms: (i) Only PPVC's can undergo 'Pseudo-Modifier Creation', a transformation which extracts an NP from the embedded S and turns the remainder of that S into an adnominal modifying clause. (ii) Complementizerless sentences occurring in positions other than the one adjacent to the verb are blocked by a surface filter as suggested by Chomsky & Lasnik (1977). Section 4 is devoted to a brief summary of the preceding sections and to the discussion of some residual problems involved in the present analysis