"I Don't Want Carmelo Reading This Twice": Nonfinite Syntactic Alternation Governed by "Want" in Contemporary English

The verb want selects at least two types of complementation patterns when it is followed by a nominal constituent, as illustrated in want Carmelo to read this and want Carmelo reading this. In the light of data retrieved from several corpora of Present-day English, this paper explores the syntactic, dialectal, textual and semantic characteristics of both structures in the very recent history of the language. As regards the syntax of the constructions, an analysis based on the notion of extended transitivity is here suggested in an attempt to integrate the syntactic features of the patterns within a single syntactic schema.

Abstract licence: CC BY

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