Re[2]: [tied] Almost perfect [was: verb agreement in one stage of E

At 6:27:46 AM on Sunday, October 12, 2003, Piotr Gasiorowski
wrote:

> 12-10-03 03:39, Ray wrote:
>> --- In cybalist@yahoogroups.com, Piotr Gasiorowski
>> <piotr.gasiorowski@...> wrote:

>>> Consider the following examples:

>>> (1) My wife wants to have me killed.
>>> (2) He had his head cut off.
>>> (3) We had the fire extinguished before the firemen arrived.

>> I think the above sentences have a causative meaning.

> Sentence (1) is causative; (2) is not causative but
> experiential (assuming that the poor devil didn't arrange
> his own decapitation, in which case it would be
> causative-reflexive);

(2) has three possible meanings. The likeliest are the
experiential meaning and a causative meaning in which 'He'
and 'him' refer to different people; both are plausible, and
without context the sentence is genuinely ambiguous. The
third, the causative-reflexive sense, is indeed unlikely,
both on grounds of sense and because one would probably say
'had his own head cut off'.

Brian