meaning - Can object complements make any difference to sentences?


I'm reading a grammar book, and I have some questions.


A.




  • We ate the fish raw.

  • I want Sue drunk.

  • I prefer the music soft.

  • I like coffee black.

  • We drank the beer cold.



This type of sentence (Verb + Object + Object Complement) is in frequent use. Then the meanings are the same as the following?




  • We ate the fish which was raw.

  • We ate the fish while it was raw.

  • We ate the raw fish.

  • I prefer the soft music.

  • I like black coffee.

  • We drank the cold beer.

  • We drank the beer while it was cold.

  • We drank the beer which was cold.



I suspect there will be differences, but I can't catch them.


B.


Another type of sentence is as follows.






    • I know that London is the capital of the U.K. (o)

    • I know London to be the capital of the U.K. (?)



    The book says the latter is not natural, but no reason for it.






    • I believe that the rain is falling. (o)

    • I believe the rain to be falling. (?)



    Same here. The second is said not to be natural.






    • I know Mary to be a Christian.

    • I believe John to be a man of interity.



    But these two are said to be acceptable. Why?






    • I remember him to be tall and lank.

    • I remember him tall and lank.



    Could be there any difference, if any?






    • I find that this chair is comfortable.

    • I find this chair to be comfortable.

    • I find this chair comfortable.



    It says each has a slightly difference nuance, but the contexts are not given. And I don't understand the explanation, perhaps because it was translated word for word into my mother tongue.






    • If you look in the files, you'll find —

      • that she is Mexican. (o)

      • her to be Mexican. (?)

      • her Mexian. (?)





    This is very strange to me. Are all the sentences not acceptable?




C.


I'll type up some more sentences below.




  • NBC announced Henry to be the winner.
    vs. "… Henry the winner."

  • They report the sea level to be down considerably.
    vs. "… the sea level down considerably."

  • He hates gin to be diluted.
    vs. "… gin diluted."

  • The police want Bill to be alive.
    vs. "… Bill alive."

  • Quick, get in here! Tommy needs his leg [set (o)/to be set (?)].

  • Tommy needs his leg [to be set (o)/set (?)] eventually, but let's not rush things.




Answer



An interesting bunch of examples, and correctly grouped.
However, the three groups are not monophyletic. Briefly,



Group A is an example of what linguists call a "rule conspiracy", where a number of independently motivated processes "conspire" to produce a similar surface structure. Georgia Green discussed them in her paper [Green, Georgia M. (1970) 'How Abstract is Surface Structure?' CLS 6, 270-281].



What's come to be called the 'Green Conspiracy' includes such structures as



  • I shot him dead.

  • I buried him alive.

  • I found him alive.

  • I need him dead.


et cetera, with very different meanings.


The point, if any, is that there is a limited number of surface structures that English prefers, and there are many more different ways to get from meaning to one of them. I.e, these structures do not represent a single kind of meaning, but rather several. They are all, of course, regular (in much the ways suggested by the OP), but which rule gets used is arbitrary and idiomatic.



EDIT: a little more about Green's paper, which seems to be difficult to find.
This is from a paper by Goldsmith and Huck commenting on the theories involved.



Green (1970), noting that a variety of different semantic structures could be associated with the same surface syntactic construction, argued that there must be a limited set of syntactic “target structures” into which the transformational rules map their representations. The sentences She shot him dead and They buried him alive, she argued, both share the same superficial syntactic structure, but crucially differ semantically as to whether the adjective indicates a pre-existing state or a result. As she pointed out, “natural language syntax is free to utilize mechanisms by which a large and diverse set of logical and semantic relations are somehow squeezed into a small number of surface structures” (Green 1970:277). In that paper, she referred to such mechanisms as “conspiracies.”





Group B is a conflation of several varieties of Raising and Equi,
with different kinds of tensed and untensed complement clauses.


Group C consists of several examples of the rule of to be-Deletion
(p.9 in the Transformation List).



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