The familiar problem of sentences such as 'I saw John cross(ing) the street' is addressed. Is 'John cross(ing) the street' one or two sentence elements; if two, on what level of description; what are the arguments for the various analyses and how valid are they; what do we mean by "subject" of 'cross(ing)' and is subject in this sense the same as "subject" of 'saw'? The conclusion is that there is no reason to consider such object with infinitive/present participle constructions unitary sentence elements on any syntactic level, but that it may be a worthwhile approach to explain the frequent intuition that they are by assuming metaphorical interpretations, which translate two separate syntactic elements into one non-linguistically experienced event. (Copyright 1993, Sociological Abstracts, Inc., all rights reserved.) (LLBA 1993, vol. 27, n. 4)