By "qualifiers," I mean something like this:
昨日見た映画
The movie that I saw yesterday
I understand that you cannot use たい-form to talk about what other people want. So, can we use たい-form in qualifiers? For example, can we say something like "The dog that wants to eat"?
食べたい犬
Or would that just end up translating as "The dog that I want to eat"?
Alternatively, could we use たがる to say that we think the dog wants to eat?
食べたがっている犬
This grammatical structure is usually called a relative clause.
Both ～たい and ～たがる can modify a noun that follows, and they can optionally have a subject marked with が or の. For example you can say:
- 私が食べたい料理 the dish I want to eat
- 肉を食べたがっている犬 a dog who wants to eat meat
- その犬が食べたがっている肉 the meat the dog wants to eat
- 彼が見たい映画 the move he wants to watch
As you may know, there is an important difference between ～たい and ～たがる, which is described in detail here.
食べたい犬 without any context is an ambiguous and confusing expression, but can be easily taken as "the dog which I want to eat," because たい usually describes the speaker's own desire.
