# All Slavic languages: Want/need/like + pronoun + infinitive



## 涼宮

Good evening 

English is the only language I've seen so far that uses *need/like/want + pronoun + infinitive* whereas in many other languages the pattern is *need/like/want + that + pronoun*(if needed)* + **conjugated **verb * (may be in subjunctive, like romance languages)

For example:

a) I want you to clean up the house vs  quiero que limpies la casa/je veux que tu nottoies la maison.

b) I need you to sign this vs necesito que firmes esto/j'ai besoin que tu signes ceci.

c) I like you to pamper me vs me gusta que me mimes/j'aime que tu me gâtes.

What logic do Slavic languages follow? 

Thank you in advance!


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## Kartof

Take Bulgarian for example:

1) Искам да изчистиш къщата. (I want that you clean the house)
2) Трябва да подпишеш това.  (It's needed that you sign this)
3) Бих искал да ме глезиш.  (I'd want that you pamper me)

Clearly it's of the second variety, especially since there is no infinitive in Bulgarian, making the first construction impossible.


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## jazyk

> What logic do Slavic languages follow?


Rather like Romance languages, except that, for lack of a subjunctive, they use the past instead. Macedonian and Bulgarian use the present, though.


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## LilianaB

There is really no such construction _I want you to_ in Slavic langauges. You have to paraphrase it to get similar meanng. Chce żebyś poszedl do szkoły. Byłoby mi miło gdybyś poszedl do szkoły - I like. I need you, would be very hard to translate. The concept is foreign I guess to Slavic languages. This is Polish. I cannot use cyrillic right now for Russian.
I do not think I should talk about all Slavic languages, however, because the situation in Russian is different when I think about it. It is possible to translate_ I need you to do something_ with almost the same construction. It could be a construction from Baltic languages in Russian. I do not know if other Slavic languages have it: Polish does not.


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## Kartof

jazyk said:


> Rather like Romance languages, except that, for lack of a subjunctive, they use the past instead. Macedonian and Bulgarian use the present, though.



Yes and because the verb follows a conjunction in Bulgarian, it can be in either the perfective or imperfective aspect, while the verb in the main clause, if it lacks a conjunction, has to be in the imperfective aspect.


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## 涼宮

LilianaB said:


> There is really no such construction _I want you to_ in Slavic languages. You have to paraphrase it to get similar meanng. *Chce żebyś poszedl do szkoły. Byłoby mi miło gdybyś poszedl do szkoły* - I like. I need you, would be very hard to translate.



With chce do you mean _he/she_ or _I_?  since you didn't use diacritics (poszedl) I don't know who speaks. I see you use the past as Jazyk said. But the second sentence uses conditional, which is really different in meaning from the present tense.  Isn't there actually a way to say it without conditional? Because I like you to pamper me is not the same as I'd like you to pamper me. The first one has already occurred X number of times and therefore I like you to do it, whereas the other hasn't probably happened yet and if would be kind of you if you did it, that's how I see it.



Kartof said:


> Yes and because the verb follows a conjunction in Bulgarian, *it can be in either the perfective or imperfective aspect, while the verb in the main clause, if it lacks a conjunction, has to be in the imperfective aspect*.



Do you mean that in the sentences I put the imperfective should be used, whereas if I say something like '' I want you to clean up the house _because_ we're having visitors'' should use the perfective?  I'm a little confused about what aspect I should use in the 3 cases I presented.


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## LilianaB

Hi, by chcę I mean the First Person Singular. It is pronounced as -e but it should be spelled with the diacritic. The second one does not really make any difference in meaning whether it is with the diacritic or not. It should be ł though. I am sorry, I missed those two diacritical signs. They are obvious to me, so sometimes I do not notice right away if they are there or not. If you want the third person, it would be Ona chce, without the diacritical sign. Ona chce abyś poszedł do szkoły. I do not think there is really a way to express the idea _I like you to do something_ without the conditional in Polish. I don't think there is an easy way to say _I  would like you to pamper mi. Chciałabym, perhaps. _ In fact,  I think you menat _I would like you,_ not _I like you_. _I like you_ is not really proper English. There are no such distinctions as you menationed in Polish because the construction is very foreign to Polish language. It is different in Russian. I think they might have borrowed this construction from Baltic languages.


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## Kartof

涼宮 said:


> Do you mean that in the sentences I put the imperfective should be used, whereas if I say something like '' I want you to clean up the house _because_ we're having visitors'' should use the perfective?  I'm a little confused about what aspect I should use in the 3 cases I presented.



Aspect works in the following way in Bulgarian:

-Imperfective aspect is the default aspect.
-Perfective aspect can only be used if it follows a conjunction (in this case да, but also others such as ще which introduces the future tense).
-Perfective aspect is used for an action completed within certain bounds while imperfective aspect doesn't specify bounds of completion.
-Some imperfective aspect verbs must be prefixed in order to obtain an perfective aspect.  This prefixed perfective aspect verb can then be turned into a prefixed imperfective aspect verb.

Therefore, in the present tense, the main clause of your sentences (not preceded by a conjunction) contain the want/need/like verbs.  These must be in the perfective aspect.  The subordinate clauses (the part of the sentence following the conjunction, in this case да) can either contain verbs in the imperfective or the perfective aspect, depending on the meaning you want conveyed.  In the way I translated your sentences, the subordinate clauses of the first two sentences are perfective, since you presumably want the actions of cleaning and signing completed when you're making the request.  In the third sentence, I translated pamper in the imperfective aspect because the act of pampering is indefinite.

*Note: While this distinction may seem similar to the indicative/subjunctive divide in Romance languages, it is fundamentally different because the verb's aspect doesn't indicate the certainty with which it occurs; rather it determines whether the action is a specific one at a certain time or a generalized one that can occur whenever.  A verb's aspect is NOT dependent on the meaning of the verb in the main clause as the subjunctive is in Spanish.


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## Arath

Kartof said:


> Take Bulgarian for example:
> 
> 1) Искам да изчистиш къщата. (I want that you clean the house)
> 2) Трябва да подпишеш това.  (It's needed that you sign this)
> 3) Бих искал да ме глезиш.  (I'd want that you pamper me)
> 
> Clearly it's of the second variety, especially since there is no infinitive in Bulgarian, making the first construction impossible.



I really don't like translating the conjunction "*да*" as "*that*". The English conjunction "*that*" corresponds to the Bulgarian "*че*". Languages like Serbian and the Romance languages use the same preposition for "I want you *to* clean the house" and "You said *that* you'd clean the house". Bulgarian doesn't. In Spanish it's *que*, in Serbian "*да*". "*That*" is a really bad translation of "*да*". I don't think that there is any situation in which the English "*that*" can be translated with the Bulgarian "*да*". In Serbian and Spanish that's not the case.

Искам да изчистиш къщата = I want + a special preposition which definitely does not correspond to the English "*that*" in any of its senses + you clean the house.

The grammatical construction in Bulgarian "да + conjugated verb" corresponds very well to the English construction "to + infinitive".

I don't think it's correct to put Bulgarian together with the other languages, without explaining that, unlike them, it doesn't use the same preposition for both constructions: 

1)*I want that you come*(Искам да дойдеш)
2)*You said that you'd come* (Каза, че ще дойдеш)

Just like English, Bulgarian uses the same construction for:

1) *I want to come* (Искам да дойда)
2) *I want you to come* (Искам да дойдеш)

English uses "to + infinitive" for both, Bulgarian uses "да + conjugated verb". Here, Bulgarian is different from the other languages. In the first example, they use the infinitive, in the second - "that + conjugated verb".


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## Kartof

Arath said:


> I really don't like translating the conjunction "*да*" as "*that*".
> Just like English, Bulgarian uses the same construction for:
> 
> 1) *I want to come* (Искам да дойда)
> 2) *I want you to come* (Искам да дойдеш)
> 
> English uses "to + infinitive" for both, Bulgarian uses "да + conjugated verb". Here, Bulgarian is different from the other languages. In the first example, they use the infinitive, in the second - "that + conjugated verb".



Yes, I agree with you but I don't think that there's really any way to directly translate an infinitive into Bulgarian.  After all, both the first and second sentence that you gave in this example are "that + conjugated verb" and the one that passes for an infinitive is actually the verb conjugated to match the conjugation of the subject in the main clause.  I view "да" as a conjunction that doesn't really have an accurate translation in English so "that" has to be used instead.  An infinitive is a verbal form but the Bulgarian "да + conjugated verb" is the start of a new clause in my mind.  Since the verb following "да" can take on as many forms as the verb in the main clause can (if not more), I think it's unfair to lump them all together as an "infinitive".

I read somewhere that the exact grammatical difference between "да" and "че" is that "да" always precedes an indicative clause while "че" precedes a subjunctive clause, even though the verbs aren't marked themselves for such moods.


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## Arath

Kartof said:


> Since the verb following "да" can take on as many forms as the verb in the main clause can (if not more)...



Only the present and past imperfect tense of the main or auxiliary verb can follow "да". You can't use the past aorist after "да". "да дадох", "да четох".

When I say that the Bulgarian construction "да + conjugate verb" corresponds to the English "to + infinitive", I mean that the English infinitive (bare or with to) is always translated in Bulgarian with a da-construction, it is never translated with "че". 



Kartof said:


> After all, both the first and second sentence that you gave  in this example are "that + conjugated verb"...



The English construction "that + conjugated verb" has nothing to do with the Bulgarian construction "да + conjugated verb". So it's misleading to claim that in Bulgarian we say "I want that you clean the house", because we don't say that. Spanish, French and Serbian people really use such constructions, but we simply don't.


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## Kartof

Yes, what you're saying is true but the main point of what I'm trying to get across is that the "да+conjugation" construction is NOT an infinitive and "да" is a conjunction that roughly covers part of the meaning of the English "that".

Also, while aorist verbs can't follow да, present and imperfect tense verbs in the perfective aspect that can't stand alone in the main clause can.


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## LilianaB

Hi, I am very sorry but your name does not appear on my screen, it must be written in a script unknown to my computer. 
I do not think you should really make any generalizations as far as grammatical structures go in Slavic languages. Slavic languages differ a lot from the grammatical point of view, especially: there more similarities from a semantical point of view. It is better to talk about each language individually. #1.

Going back to your constructions, Chciałbym żebyś - male speaking - I would like you to
                                              Chcę żebyś - I want you to
It is impossible with need. But then you have to think about the fact that it would be different if a female is speaking and you have to use Pan/Pani forms if you do not know the people. Chciałbym żeby Pan przyszedł. The form with _I want to_ may sound rude in Polish or very authoritative if used improperly.


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## bibax

I also see only two rectangles. Castellano obviously uses a strange alphabet. 

Czech:

a) I want you to clean up the house. = Chci, a*bys uklidil* dům.

b) I need you to sign this. = Potřebuji, a*bys* to *podepsal*.

c) I like you to pamper me. = Jsem rád, když (= when) mě rozmazluješ (hýčkáš).

The sentences a) and b) use the present conditional in the dependent clause. It is similar to the Romance languages, except that, for lack of a subjunctive, Czech uses the conditional instead.

In the sentence c) there is a common temporal dependent clause (I like when you pamper me) with indicative present.

The conditional variants (I'd want..., I'd need ...) need, of course, the conditional in the main clause (Chtěl bych, ..., Potřeboval bych, ...) as well.


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## 涼宮

First, Kartof, thank you for the lecture of Bulgarian  it helps me to know a lot more about that language.



LilianaB said:


> Hi, I am very sorry but your name does not appear on my screen, it must be written in a script unknown to my computer.





bibax said:


> I also see only two rectangles. Castellano obviously uses a strange alphabet.



Thank you both of you for your explanations! By the way, I bet you both are using Windows XP, because both in Vista and 7 most languages are displayed properly not matter the browser. The username is in Japanese, which it's not an alphabet. You can know how to read it if you look at my signature (It seems most people don't notice it )

I am interested in knowing if Russian and Slovak use something similar to Bulgarian or Polish. Probably Slovak does something similar to Czech.


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## Azori

涼宮 said:


> Probably Slovak does something similar to Czech.


a) I want you to clean up the house. = Chcem, aby si upratal dom.

b) I need you to sign this. = Potrebujem, aby si to podpísal.

c) I like you to pamper me. = Som rád, keď ma rozmaznávaš.


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## LilianaB

Russian uses something similar to Polish for the _I want you_, and _I would like you to_ construction. It uses something different for the construction _I need you_. It is possible in Russian. It is similar to a construction in Baltic languages. It is the same construction as _I need_ in Russian. I am sorry but I cannot type in cyrillic right now.


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## TriglavNationalPark

Slovenian:

I want you to clean up the house. = *Želim (hočem), da pospraviš hišo.
*
I need you to sign this. = *Potrebujem te, da bi to podpisal / da to podpišeš.* However, this isn't very idiomatic to my ears; I would use "ask" (= *prositi*), instead of "need" (= *potrebovati*).

I (would) like you to pamper me. = *Rad(a) imam, ko/da me razvajaš. / Rad bi(a) videl(a), da bi me razvajal(a).*


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## Outsider

Has everyone forgotten about this recent thread in the All Languages forum?


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## 涼宮

But dear Outsider, in that thread only Bulgarian was mentioned, in this thread it was explained further and better . I am interested, for now, only in Slavic languages


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## Dr. Zamenhof

By the way, the sentence in French should be: _j'ai besoin que tu *nettoies* la maison._

Greetings from Mexico.


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