Re: [tied] verb agreement in one stage of English

11-10-03 19:48, Piotr Gasiorowski wrote:

> ... I suspect that the sentence in
> question was still potentially interpretable as a "possessed object plus
> complement" construction, especially because of the presence of a
> possessive pronoun (<hiora>). The writer may have had used the inflected
> participle mechanically, on the analogy of sentences like "They had
> their house-ACC built-ACC", ignoring strict logic. It's true that you
> can't eat a cake and _have_ it if <have> means literally 'possess, own',
> but meaning is a flexible thing, and <have> has always expressed various
> kinds of abstract relations. It's this semantic generalisation of <have>
> that made the development of the perfect possible.

PS

Consider the following examples:

My wife wants to have me killed.
He had his head cut off.
We had the fire extinguished before the firemen arrived.

Piotr