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Who saw him die? (C. T. Onions, An advanced English Syntax)
C. T. Onions say the infinitive with sense verb denoting ‘in the act of dying’. Is it meaning the infinitive denote progressive meaning? Then what is the difference between the case and this: who saw him dying?
Background
I think the problem is that the sentence "he is dying" can mean many different things:
He has cancer, and he has only months to live.
He was just shot, and he has only minutes to live.
He's not breathing, and he has only seconds to live.
In fact, if someone says "So-and-so is dying," a common follow-up question might be, "How long does he have?"
Example Sentence
In the sentence "Who saw him die?", the word "die" is being used in the sense of "to stop living". In other words, the question is asking who witnessed the moment of death. It could be interpreted to mean "Who saw him in the act of dying?" in the literal sense of "the act of dying" as a near-instantaneous process.
If I were to ask, "Who saw him dying?", I would be asking who saw the person while they were dying, even if they weren't there at the moment they died.
Keep in mind that Onions wrote more than a century ago, before the notion of aspect or complementation entered English grammatical study.
When Onions writes that “These Infinitives are best regarded as adverbial = ‘a-dying’, etc., i.e., ‘in (the act of) dying’, etc.” he did not have the grammatical equipment to understand the participle dying as either an ‘object-oriented complement’ or a recategorization of a telic verb as an activity verb.
With respect to your specific question, he is not distinguishing the participle from the infinitive, but employing the participle as an approximation to the sense of the infinitive. I have no doubt that he thinks of dying here in its telic aspect and that he means: “Who saw him complete the act of passing from life?”
That said, I think he’s entirely wrong; die is not ‘adverbial’ but the verb heading the non-finite clause HE DIE which is the complement of the verb SEE.
