Small Clauses in Disguise

The intended message of the sentence

(7)	This country needs literate citizens.

is not that this country is underpopulated, but that more of the population that it already has should be literate. Thus, the sentence really conveys the same message as the sentence

This country needs its citizens to be literate.

The logical object of the need relation is not the set of citizens, but the eventuality of their being literate.

A teacher who says to a class whose enrollment is already determined,

I want motivated students.

can only mean that he or she wants the students already in the class to be motivated.

Once again, this phenomenon can be viewed as an instance of metonymy where the coercion function is provided by the explicit content of the sentence itself. In particular, the word ``literate'' conveys a relation between the eventuality of being literate and its logical subject, the typical citizen. This relation becomes the coercion relation, coercing the logical object of ``need'' from the typical citizen to the literacy eventuality.

In the formal notation, the sentence initially conveys

$need'(e_{1},x,y) \& literate'(e_{2},y) \& citizen(y) \& typelt(y,s)$

The country x needs y where y is a typical citizen and is literate. After coercion, the interpretation is as follows:

$need'(e_{1},x,e_{2}) \& literate'(e_{2},y) \& citizen(y) \& typelt(y,s)$

Now it is the literacy of the citizens that is needed. The coercion relation between e₂ and y is provided by the predication

literate'(e₂,c₂)

This interpretation is illustrated in Figure 9.

  

Figure 9: Parse of ``This country needs literate citizens.''