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John wants Mary to stay.

"Wants" is the catenative verb here.

"To stay" is the catenative complement of "wants".
"Wants" is the head of "to stay".
"Mary" is the direct object of "wants".
"Wants" is the head of "Mary".
Therefore, "to stay" and "Mary" aren't in the same constituent. — the first conclusion

"Mary" is the subject of "to stay".
Since a verb and its subject always form the same constituent, there must be such a constituent as "Mary to stay". — the second conclusion
Could you tell me please why the conclusions contradict each other?

Also, could you explain why:
If we consider "Mary" is the head of "to stay", it contradicts the fact that "wants" is the head of "to stay".
If we consider "to stay" is the head of "Mary", it contradicts the fact that "wants" is the head of "Mary".

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  • Is it a catenative verb? If it was "John wants to stay" then it would be. But what John wants is "Mary to stay."
    – Boba Fit
    Commented Nov 17, 2022 at 1:00
  • This is very different from how I would analyze the sentence. That's OK, though, since many different methods are valid. However, your method seems to lead to contradictions. Perhaps you can tell us which method you're using? (For example, which grammar book you're following.)
    – MarcInManhattan
    Commented Nov 17, 2022 at 3:26
  • @MarcInManhattan BillJ is that user in the posts of whom I saw this method of parsing. For example, he explains it here.
    – Loviii
    Commented Nov 17, 2022 at 12:20
  • @Loviii He uses CaGEL as I recall, but I don't think that what you wrote accords with that. I'll leave it to someone who's more familiar with that book to comment, though.
    – MarcInManhattan
    Commented Nov 17, 2022 at 16:46

1 Answer 1

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John wants Mary to stay.

There's no doubt that this is a catenative construction.

"Wants" is the catenative verb and the subordinate infinitival clause "to stay" is its catenative complement. The intervening NP "Mary" is the syntactic object of "wants" and the understood (semantic) subject of the subordinate clause.

The subject of the matrix (main) clause is "John".

Note that "Mary" is a 'raised' object since the verb that "Mary" relates to syntactically is higher in the constituent structure than the one it relates to semantically.

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9
  • Thank you for the answer but unfortunately I don't understand how, using it, to answer my original questions. I saw your analogous parse before and so I got very interested to ask about it because some things remained unclear to me. In my original questions above, I tried to formulate what specifically I didn't understand in your parse. Could you please try to understand the original questions and answer them?
    – Loviii
    Commented Nov 20, 2022 at 19:02
  • @Loviii I explained clearly in my answer that "Mary" is the syntactic object of "wants" but only the understood (semantic) subject of the subordinate clause. "Mary to stay" is thus not a constituent. The head of "to stay" is "stay". Also, "want" is head of the matrix (main) clause. It is not part of the subordinate clause. Is that clear now?
    – BillJ
    Commented Nov 21, 2022 at 10:51
  • If we take the sentence "Mary stayed.": 1) Is "Mary" the head of "stayed" or "stayed" the head of "Mary"? 2) Is "Mary stayed" a constituent?
    – Loviii
    Commented Nov 21, 2022 at 12:52
  • @Loviii The head of a clause is always a verb, so the head of the clause "Mary stayed" is the verb "stayed". "Mary stayed" is a main clause, so of course it's a constituent.
    – BillJ
    Commented Nov 21, 2022 at 13:45
  • 1
    You need to explain your linguistic terms the OPs. These questions do not come from professional linguists. You need to explain each technical term because I can assure you that the OPs do not know them. So your answers come off as being way above people's heads.
    – Lambie
    Commented Apr 24, 2023 at 14:43

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