How should differences in tense, and such, be handled for interrupting clauses?

Question

This is best asked by way of example. Suppose I want to ask someone if they have done some action, or plan to do so. And to be precise, suppose either is acceptable to me. So I might ask:

Have you painted the house, or do you plan to paint it?

But I could make that more succinct as follows:

Have you, or do you plan to, paint the house?

Now I prefer the latter, but it has a problem to my eyes/ears in that the tense of the verb "paint" now agrees only with the "plan to" in the interrupting clause. That is, it does not agree with "Have you" at the start, which really wants "painted".

As a result, in this particular situation, I simply wouldn't use the second version even though, as I say, I prefer it. There are numerous examples where this agreement problem does not arise in which case I'd use it. For example:

Do you plan, or have you simply decided not, to paint the house?

Am I being overly cautious? For example, is there perhaps a rule that says my second version is OK -- e.g. maybe the rule is that the verb's tense need agree only with the last of a sequence of verbs?

Finally, a similar question. In the second example I give above, where I show a situation where tense agreement is not a problem, is what I gave:

Do you plan, or have you simply decided not, to paint the house?

is better or worse than:

Do you plan to, or have you simply decided not to, paint the house?

As a computer programmer, I prefer the first because it demonstrates better re-use, but using programming practices to guide English use is not always a good idea :-)

Answer 1

These results from Google Books strongly suggest that writers almost always side with OP's position here (they avoid "deletion of repeated elements" which imply a clash of verb forms)...

Has it been or will it be [done]? - 389 hits
Has it or will it be [done]? - no hits

But as a perfectly competent native speaker I think that's bordering on "hypercorrection", since in normal speech people often say things like that.

So really the "correct" answer for OP is to stick to his (slightly over-analytical) gut feeling for formal written contexts. But loosen up a bit in relaxed spoken contexts - or at least be prepared to hear others use the "looser" versions without thinking their command of English is somehow "defective".

Answer 2

OP writes:

Have you, or do you plan to, paint the house?

One hears native speakers mangle such questions and statements in similar fashion quite often on the radio. This sort of interruption is not conversational syntax, and they're in over their heads when aiming for sophistication.

In your sentence, have lacks the past participle it needs.

But you could ask

Have you painted the house, or do you plan to [paint the house]?

There, the underlying infinitive of the verb, paint, can be "recovered" or "obtained" from the preceding past participle to complete the infinitive. But the reverse is not true: the past participle cannot be recovered proleptically from the not-yet-encountered infinitive.

You could, however, ask:

Do you plan to paint the house, or have you already [painted the house]?

And in that case the past-participle painted can be recovered from the already-encountered infinitive.

P.S. In the dialect spoken where I live (Central Atlantic, US) it is common to put heavy emphasis on have when the question is posed like this:

Do you plan to paint the house, or HAVE you already?

I don't think that intonation is limited to this region of the country though I seem to hear it here more often than elsewhere. Many people would say:

Do you plan to paint the house, or have you alREADy?