We saw him enter the room. He was seen to enter the room.
When the sentence that has the pattern of “S+V+O+OC” is changed into passive form, do we call ‘to enter the room’ as a subjective complement or an object?
passive-voice
We saw him enter the room. He was seen to enter the room.
When the sentence that has the pattern of “S+V+O+OC” is changed into passive form, do we call ‘to enter the room’ as a subjective complement or an object?
Best Answer
The two sentences under question are
The second is clearly the passive transform of the first. The problem is what to do with the infinitive complement, complicated by where the to came from (or went to, if one uses a different model). As usual, a great deal has been deleted and modified already in that first sentence. Where did it come from?
As I mentioned in the comment, that first sentence is the result of B-Raising, followed by Passive.
The sense verb see governs B-Raising, which requires an infinitive object complement clause for see, roughly -- pre-deletions -
[[for him] [to enter [the room]]]
The infinitive object clause [S] has inner bracketings for the subject [NP] of the infinitive clause and the infinitive verb phrase [VP] of the clause -- which contains a direct object NP. Both the subject NP and the VP are marked by complementizers (respectively, for NP and to VP). I.e,
*We saw for him to enter the room.
See is a sense verb and therefore occurs in a lot of idioms and metaphors. Mostly they involve making reference to metaphors, like I see what you mean. And most of them involve chopping out chunks of clauses ("clause reduction" as it's called in the trade; see Jim McCawley's famous paper "On Examining the Remains of Deceased Clauses").
It is normal for the subject complementizer for to be deleted, unless the infinitive is at the beginning of a sentence.
I want him to win the trophy.
%I want for him to win the trophy.
For him to speculate would be premature.
*Him to speculate would be premature.
Another of the peculiarities of sense verbs is that they don't allow to with an infinitive complement.
So both of the complementizers are deleted, leaving only the bracketing
That's still a direct object clause. What Raising does, when it's governed by a Raising verb like see, is to change the bracketings, freeing the [him] to be the new Object of see, with the infinitive clause, now demoted to a phrase (en chômage, in Relational Grammar terminology), left right where it is at the end.
Now Passive applies to this Raised object him, producing
Except that the passive of see doesn't have quite the same affordances as the active -- as I said, sense verbs are complicated -- and so the passive seen still requires the ordinary to complementizer. Which is automatically provided, free of charge, like the do of Do-support, from That Big Bag Of Auxiliaries In The Sky.