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In writing an email today I came up with the following sentence:

"We have had two other ladies express an interest in the room."

I'm a native English-English speaker and this felt fine to me. My partner (who is Spanish) felt that the bare-infinitive 'express' in conjunction with the 'have had' was wrong. She felt the closest acceptable option would be the gerund form ie:

"We have had two other ladies expressing an interest in the room."

To me that sounds less normal and a slightly different meaning.

It is something to do with the 'had' specifically, because she felt (as I do) that with a different verb it could be correct, eg:

"We have heard two other ladies express an interest in the room."

I searched online for grammar reference sites and the closest I could find to an example matching my construction was specific to having someone do something for you, for example:

"I have had my lawyer look into it"

(and it was noted that this was an American English construction)

But is this valid in my case?

I'd like someone to confirm or refute whether my original phrase is correct, preferably with an external reference :)

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2 Answers 2

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In the original sentence,

We have had two other ladies express an interest in the room.

the perfect construction, and the nature of the particular noun phrases and complement in the sentence are all irrelevant to the grammar. Let's start with a simple sentence without all the bells and whistles and see what's what.

There is an idiom with have plus either an infinitive complement or a gerund complement. It means to cause someone to do something, which is described in the complement.

  • They had us look for her earrings.
  • They had us looking for her earrings.

This is not, by the way, a "bare infinitive" (or gerund) -- it doesn't use to, true, but it has to have a subject (us in the examples above). Without a subject, neither is grammatical.

  • *They had look for her earrings.
  • *They had looking for her earrings.

Nonagentive sense verbs (see, hear, feel, smell, taste) also work like this have construction -- they can occur without a to complementizer for an infinitive, and they can also occur with a gerund, both of which need subjects (I saw him run/running past, I heard him practice/practicing the flute -- but you can't delete him).

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    I really admire the clarity of this answer. It's good to strip away the confusing irrelevancies in a case like this. I'm having a bit of trouble seeing how to make taste do this little party trick, but no matter - surely someone will come up with an example.
    – FumbleFingers
    Commented Jan 4, 2012 at 2:13
  • Smell and taste are the retarded senses, linguistically speaking. Most languages deal with these senses mostly as metaphors (try explaining how a mango tastes to someone who's never tasted one). But in the right context, you might taste the chef's using far too much cumin in the sauce, or smell the waiter caramelize the crème brûlée at the next table.
    – John Lawler
    Commented Jan 4, 2012 at 2:54
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    Since taste and smell don't normally form linguistic images except metaphorically, they don't need much in the way of complements to describe them the way see and hear do. You can smell the bacon frying, but you can't smell that it's sorry it turned left instead of right at the slaughterhouse.
    – John Lawler
    Commented Jan 4, 2012 at 3:11
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    Hi John, I'm not quite clear - are you saying my original phrase is correct? Or at least it's an example of the same acceptable idiom as "They had us look for her earrings." ? When you say 'perfect construction' do you mean the technical grammar-meaning of 'perfect'? As I mentioned in the question, where I saw this idiom quoted it was specific to the context of having someone do something for you, which would seem to disqualify my original phrase.
    – Anentropic
    Commented Jan 4, 2012 at 19:10
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    It can also mean to experience something without having caused it, especially with a passive complement -- He had his tires slashed, similar to the use of got. But it can be non-causative even with an active.
    – John Lawler
    Commented Jan 4, 2012 at 19:26
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There's no problem with any of the sentences you propose. Actually, I find "We have had two other ladies expressing an interest in the room." to be less natural than your alternative. (I don't know how to look up any evidence though.)

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  • me neither, that's why I posted here. I failed to find any examples of exactly this form via Google, but I am lacking knowledge of proper grammar terminology which might help to search for it.
    – Anentropic
    Commented Jan 4, 2012 at 19:24
  • I'm concurring with the other answers which say both are okay grammatically, but "expressing" generates the image the women standing there in a state of currently expressing interest to a certain degree. The obvious intent though sort of overrides this interpretation and makes this wording almost acceptable. It's a very fine nuance.
    – ThePopMachine
    Commented Jan 4, 2012 at 20:42

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