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Recently I posed this question:

I want to express at the beginning of the lesson that I hope that all my listeners will enjoy my speech. Can I use the causative structure? I hope I will have you enjoying this lecture.

The answer was as follows. My sentence is allegedly inappropriate because in the case "you describe, you cannot make the listeners enjoy the speech, so you can't use the causative form above". Why is it so? I think that if I am a good speaker, I can make the listeners enjoy my speech.

In addition, in Oxford Dictionary I came across this sentence: If you play your radio on beach, you'll have everyone complaining. – I am not able to find out the difference between my sentence (I hope I will have you enjoying this lecture) and the one from OD.

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  • This question was posted only 5 hours ago on ELL. per Meta.SE, if you do not get a satisfactory answer on one site, please ask a moderator to migrate your question rather than posting on multiple sites.
    – anongoodnurse
    Commented Oct 4, 2014 at 19:07
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    Really good question. Your sentence is awkward, and the one in the OD is perfectly natural. There is something about the irrealis future in your clause that doesn’t work with enjoy, but it’s hard to really put your finger on what it is.
    – Janus Bahs Jacquet
    Commented Oct 4, 2014 at 19:08
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    'Have someone Ving [ ... ]' seems to work only with action or 'near-action' verbs. 'He had them all working hard / trying their best / singing their hearts out / complaining / thinking / laughing / smiling / looking happy' but not really 'He had them all feeling happy / looking miserable and certainly not 'He had them all being angry / becoming bored'.
    – Edwin Ashworth
    Commented Oct 4, 2014 at 19:52
  • Your sentence "I hope I will have you enjoying this lecture." actually makes sense, but it's just awkward. For example, if a comedian said "I hope I will have you all laughing at my jokes." it's perfectly acceptable, and not awkward. I think perhaps the issue is the word "enjoying". "Enjoying" is an internal state of mind, whereas laughing is an externally visible effect. If I say "I hope I will have you relaxing after this massage", it's a similarly awkward sentence. You can't control my internal state of relaxation / excitation. I control that.
    – Calphool
    Commented Oct 6, 2014 at 19:29

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As it is, it's unnecessarily wordy. That's not to say, however, the wording could never be apt.

Say, for example, a person is describing the reaction of a crowd to a speech, and s/he says,

"The speech was so offensive, the speaker had the people leaving the auditorium in droves!"

If, however, another speaker gets p immediately after the speaker who "bombed" sits down, s/he might say,

"I hope I will have you enjoying this lecture, and not walking out on me in disgust!"

As I am fond of saying, "There's more than one way to swing a dead cat."

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