Plz check the grammaticality of the sentence!

Question

Mary believes John to betray her.

where "her" refers to Mary.
If not, why and what possible verbs can occur in the infinitival complement after (believe+object) provided that I can keep an object pronoun referring back to the subject?

Thanx in advance

Mister Micawber · Accepted Answer

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I have no idea what you are talking about, but the original sentence is wrong.

Mary believes John will betray / is betraying / (has) betrayed her.
.

Mythical Lady · Answer

Hi Mistar Micawber,

I've a sort of syntactic analysis I've to do;
I don't know if I can go for it here or in the linguistics part.

In brief, I want to argue fo sentences like
Mary believes Jack to be flawless
to decide between subject to object raising and s-erasure as a transformational rule based on passive and reflexive pronouns.

So I was thinking, if believecan take infinitival complement in which there's a pronoun referring back to the subject. (Syntactically both the subject of the matrix sentence (the main clause) and the object pronoun of the infinitival clause (the embedded clause) are coreferential).

From "Mary believes that Jack is flawless", STOR produces "Mary believes Jack to be flawless"

Similarily, from "Mary believes that John will betray her" STOR produces "Mary believes John to betray her".

But then I question the grammaticality of the latter sentence.Your answer is no. Is it because believe can't have an action verb in its infinitival complement?

The 2nd part of the question: Can you produce a similar sentence to "Mary believes John to betray her" using a verb other than betraybut keeping the whole structure of the sentence?

Hope that it helps claryfying my point[A]

Thank you very much for replying and bearing with me

Mister Micawber · Answer

All those emoticons are inappropriate if you wish to have a serious discussion. They are very distracting.

Betray doesn't work because it is not be. I doubt that any other verb works. These are OK:

I believe you to be ambitious

I believe you to be betraying me
I believe you to be lost in space

I believe you to be on the right track

I believe you to be my long lost brother.

I cannot think of another verb that fits the paradigm.
.

Plz check the grammaticality of the sentence!

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