Date:  Fri, 7 Oct 1994 10:17:16 -0400

From:  "William A. Kretzschmar, Jr." <billk[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]ATLAS.UGA.EDU>

Subject: Re: -"had" Constructions



On Fri, 7 Oct 1994, Bruce Southard wrote:



>  [A.] "She had her purse stolen last night." I analyzed the function as

> that of objective complement, but then started thinking about similar

> constructions:

>   1. I had my house painted last year.

>   2. The secret police had the politician jailed until last week.



I think these are essentially parallel in structure, with `have' used as a

factitive verb. The "causation" that we see in (1) and (2) is a

"semantic" feature added to the grammatical relationship invoked by use of

`have' as a factitive. I.e., in (1), we see that `house' and `painted'

are set into a linking relationship by the factitive verb; in a separate

clause the linking would be invoked by a form of `to be' as "house was

painted". The same is true in the target sentence [A]: `purse' and

`stolen' have been set in a linking relationship by the factitive verb.

The only difference between [A] and (1) or (2) is the semantic role of the

grammatical subject of the sentence; in [A] there is no causal role

toward the factitive relationship, while in (1) and (2) there is. One

might say that when `have' is used as a factitive verb, it may or may not

semantically include causality; other factitive verbs are sematically

more explicitly causal, like `elect' or `make'.



Regards, Bill

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Bill Kretzschmar         Phone:  706-542-2246

Dept. of English         FAX:   706-542-2181

University of Georgia      Internet: billk[AT SYMBOL GOES HERE]hyde.park.uga.edu

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