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I want you to do it.Is "you" both an object and subject in the above sentence, i.e. an object of the verb "want" and the subject in the non-finite subordinate infinitive clause "you to do it"?

Deadrat · Accepted Answer

What I want isn't you. What I want is something done and by you.

The object of verb "want" is the infinitive construction.
The subject of the infinitive is "you."

Tkacka15 · Answer

deadratThe object of verb "want" is the infinitive construction.The subject of the infinitive is "you."

Thanks for the reply.

BillJ · Answer

tkacka15I want you to do it. Is "you" both an object and subject in the above sentence, i.e. an object of the verb "want" and the subject in the non-finite subordinate infinitive clause "you to do it"?

Yes, it’s called a ‘raised’ object. This is called a complex catenative construction: complex because an NP (“you”) intervenes between the two verbs "want" and "do".

But “you” is not an argument of “want”. What I wanted was not “you” but something (“it”) to be done by you. Syntactically, “you” is object of “want”, but semantically it relates only to the subordinate do clause (as understood subject), not to “want”. We thus say that “you” is a raised object: the verb that “you” relates to syntactically is higher in the constituent structure than the one it relates to semantically.

BillJ

Tkacka15 · Answer

BillJ tkacka15I want you to do it.Is "you" both an object and subject in the above sentence, i.e. an object of the verb "want" and the subject in the non-finite subordinate infinitive clause "you to do it"?Yes, it’s called a ‘raised’ object. This is called a complex catenative construction; complex because an NP (“you”) intervenes between the two verbs.But “you” is not an argument of “want”. What I wanted was not “you” but for something (“it”) to be done by you. Syntactically, “you” is object of “want”, but semantically it relates only to the subordinate do clause (as understood subject), not to “want”. We thus say that “you” is the raised object: the verb that “you” relates to is higher in the constituent structure than the one it relates to semantically. BillJ

Thanks for that excellent explanation.

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