'Painted' or 'painting' after 'want' + NP

Question

Which is correct? Is it, "Do you want your house painting" or "Do you want your house painted"? Examples of both can be found on the internet.

Is there a difference between them? Can you use either?

Answer 1

These are complex catenation patterns. CGEL gives

• I saw them fighting

as an example using the -ing form after the NP;

• I had my car stolen / washed                         (different senses of have NP V-ed!)

show examples of the [NP + past participle] type.

So both constructions are considered acceptable by CGEL, but that doesn't mean that they're always equally idiomatic (some might even say grammatical) for all V + NP + V-ing/V-ed complex catenations.

In discussion with others in comments, it becomes clear that idiomaticity is dependent not only on the actual verbs / direct objects involved, but also on region.

Coming from the NW of England, I find

• The car needs/needed its oil changing                   to be more natural-sounding than
• The car needs/needed its oil changed.

But I find

• I'd like my fence painting white                               and
• I'd like my fence painted white                                 equally natural.

While the -ing form connotes doing, activity, and the -ed form the completed state, it's fair to say the variants are closely synonymous. 'I'd like my fence to be painted white' say (though 'I like my fence painted white' may be either a deleted form of 'I like my fence to be painted white' [iterative] or an object-oriented depictive construction meaning 'I like my fence in this white paint'. Compare 'I like my oysters rare'.

(Obviously the ambiguity as with "Do you really want your son painting?" doesn't arise in this case, but external context will almost always disambiguate.)

And while Basil Cottle, in Survey of English Dialects, writes " 'I want this finishing by Friday', here assigned only to Yorkshire, is certainly a Geordie trait, too", Araucaria (' "Do you want the house painting" is perfectly cromulent in BrE' and 'We have a saying in the UK "If you want something doing, do it yourself" ') states that this is far more general.

On the other hand, Laurel, writing in the United States, says that to her ears,

• Do you want your house painting?"                        sounds less natural than
• Do you want your house painted?

I'd say that this is largely, though confusingly not totally, a regional difference, with the past participle preferred consistently in the States, but the present participle often preferred (though not to the exclusion of the past participle) in the UK.