(Trends in Linguistics Studies and Monographs 321) Peter Uhrig-Subjects in English - From Valency Grammar To A Constructionist Treatment of Non-Canonical Subjects-Walter de Gruyter (2018)

Peter Uhrig
Subjects in English
Trends in Linguistics
Studies and Monographs
Editor
Volker Gast
Editorial Board
Walter Bisang
Hans Henrich Hock
Natalia Levshina
Heiko Narrog
Matthias Schlesewsky
Amir Zeldes
Niina Ning Zhang
Editor Responsible for this volume

Volker Gast and Niina Ning Zhang
Volume 321
Peter Uhrig
Subjects in
English
From Valency Grammar to a Constructionist Treatment

of Non-Canonical Subjects
ISBN 978-3-11-058725-8
e-ISBN (PDF) 978-3-11-058980-1
e-ISBN (EPUB) 978-3-11-058728-9
ISSN 1861-4302
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018936674
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The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie;
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|
To my parents
Preface
This book is a revised version of my doctoral thesis with the hardly marketable
title Aspects of English Subjects – A valency-based analysis of item-specificity with
a focus on clausal subjects, which I defended in 2013 at the Friedrich-Alexander-
Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU). The whole endeavour would not have
been possible without the support of all the people whom I would like to thank
in this preface.
First and foremost, I am extremely grateful to my supervisor, Thomas Herbst,
who was always there to discuss theoretical and methodological issues, gave
great feedback, was extremely supportive and ever so patient with me when my
dissertation fell out of focus again. Special thanks also go to the examiners,
Stefan Schierholz, who was a critical reader and the expert on German linguistics,
and Thorsten Piske, who was an examiner for my viva voce.
I am very grateful to Dirk Siepmann, who made available a large portion of
the corpus data on which this research is based, and to Gerold Schneider, who
made available his parsed version of the British National Corpus to me. Thanks
to Michael Klotz and Susen Faulhaber for many fruitful discussions on syntactic
theory in general and valency theory in particular. I am indebted to the native
speaker informants who went through the ordeal of judging all the strange sen-
tences I found came up with or found in the corpora. In alphabetical order these
are Jonathan Beard, Naomi Bishop, Anika Blacksmith, Amy Buer, Turlach
O’Brion and Ned Reif. Special thanks go to the two people who endured by far the
largest number of test items, Kevin Pike and David Heath. David also kindly
proofread the entire manuscript and provided valuable feedback. Christina
Sanchez-Stockhammer provided moral support, proofread parts of the manu-
script and made excellent suggestions that helped me improve these parts.
Though he was much less constructive in discussions of syntactic theory, Gerd
Bayer still provided moral support and constant nagging, for which I am also
grateful.
Thanks to Thomas Proisl for help with the parsing of the corpora, to Besim
Kabashi for always being able to provide suitable IT infrastructure and support
when needed and to both for sharing their expertise and keeping me company
during many enjoyable lunches.
I also would like to gratefully acknowledge the compute resources and sup-
port provided by the Erlangen Regional Computing Center (RRZE), in particular
by the High-Performance-Computing group, Thomas Zeiser, Michael Meier,
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110589801-007
viii | Preface
Georg Hager and Gerhard Wellein. Moreover, I would like to thank the Studienstif-
tung des deutschen Volkes for their generous funding and exciting summer acad-
emies.
Furthermore, I am indebted to Volker Gast, who provided very detailed and
constructive feedback on an earlier version of the manuscript, and to Birgit Sie-
vert, Julie Miess and Nancy Christ at De Gruyter for all their help and support in
the process of turning the manuscript into a book.
Heartfelt thanks go to my family. My parents, Anneliese and Michael Uhrig,
have always believed in me and supported me on my way to the PhD. Together
with my in-laws, Inge and Erhardt Förtsch, they made sure I found the time to
finish the dissertation by babysitting and helping out whenever needed. Last, but
definitely not least, my wife Sabrina deserves my gratitude for her patience, her
moral support, and her love.
Contents
Preface | vii
Abbreviations, symbols and frequently used labels | xv
List of Figures | xvii
List of Tables | xix
1 Introduction | 1
1.1 Aims | 1
1.2 Brief account of the theoretical background | 1
1.3 Research questions and hypotheses | 3
2 Theory | 5
2.1 History of the term | 6
2.1.1 The beginnings | 6
2.1.2 Treatment in reference grammars over the past 100 years | 8
2.2 The role of the subject in generative grammar and in
valency/dependency grammar | 16
2.2.1 Generative grammar | 16
2.2.1.1 Early generative grammar | 17
2.2.1.2 GB and Minimalism | 21
2.2.1.3 Generative Studies endorsing the subject concept | 25
2.2.1.4 Summary | 27
2.2.2 Valency models | 29
2.2.2.1 Basic tenets | 29
2.2.2.2 Criticism and multi-level approaches to valency | 31
2.2.2.3 The role of valency in grammatical models | 33
2.2.2.4 Note on the present study | 35
2.3 Towards a definition of subject in English | 36
2.3.1 Sentence/Clause | 36
2.3.2 Criteria | 37
2.3.3 Use of terminology in this study | 50
2.4 Summary | 52
3 Methodological Considerations | 53
3.1 English | 53
x | Contents
3.2 Data | 53
3.2.1 A Valency Dictionary of English (VDE) | 56
3.2.2 Corpora | 56
3.2.2.1 Representativeness | 56
3.2.2.2 Size and noise | 58
3.2.2.3 Annotation | 62
3.2.3 Native speaker interviews | 65
3.3 Acceptability/Grammaticality | 66
4 Clausal Subjects in active clauses | 71

4.1 Data analysis | 71
4.1.1 VDE data | 71
4.1.2 Corpus evidence | 73
4.1.2.1 Restrictions identified | 75
4.1.2.2 Problematic cases | 77
4.1.2.3 Summary | 78
4.1.3 Native speaker data | 78
4.2 Case study: modality and non-extraposed [to_INF] subjects | 81
4.2.1 Theoretical background | 82
4.2.2 Presentation of data | 83
4.2.3 Interpretation of the data | 86
4.3 Conclusion | 89
5 Analysis of subjects in passive clauses | 93

5.1 Short theoretical introduction | 93
5.2 Analysis | 96
5.2.1 Passive clause subjects as subset of active clause
complements | 97
5.2.2 Passive clause subjects not found in the active clause | 100
5.2.2.1 Complement occurs only as passive subject | 100
5.2.2.2 Possible influence of other valency carriers in the clause | 105
5.2.2.3 Prepositional passive | 111
5.2.3 [to_INF] vs. [V-ing] | 115
6 Analysis of subjects in copular clauses | 123

6.1 What counts as a copular clause? | 124
6.2 Theoretical treatment of copula verbs and copular clauses | 124
6.3 Data Analysis | 129
Contents | xi
6.3.1 Adjectives and extraposed clausal subjects | 130

6.3.1.1 [that_CL] but no [to_INF] | 131
6.3.1.2 [to_INF] but no [that_CL] | 134
6.3.2 Nouns and extraposed clausal subjects | 138
6.3.2.1 [to_INF] vs [that_CL] | 139
6.3.2.2 [V-ing] | 146
6.3.3 Case study: adjectives and non-extraposed clausal
subjects | 149
6.3.4 Case study: nouns and non-extraposed clausal subjects | 153
6.3.4.1 Special case 1: of importance | 157
6.3.4.2 Special case 2: image | 158
6.4.1 Summary of results | 160
6.4.2 Theoretical implications | 163
7 Extraposition | 169
7.1 Theoretical treatment | 170
7.1.1 Extraposition vs. dislocation | 173
7.1.1.1 The problem | 173
7.1.1.2 Evidence | 175
7.1.1.3 Conclusion for the present study | 177
7.1.2 Obligatory extraposition | 178
7.1.3 What is the subject? | 187
7.1.3.1 Survey of different positions | 188
7.1.3.2 Criteria for subjecthood revisited | 189
7.1.3.3 Summary | 199
7.2 Syntactic properties | 204
7.2.1 Extraposed to which position? | 204
7.2.2 [that_CL] with and without that | 206
7.3 Factors influencing extraposition | 209
7.3.1 Weight/Processing | 209
7.3.2 Information packaging | 212
7.3.3 Factivity | 214
7.3.4 Register | 217
7.3.5 Type of complement | 218
7.3.6 Type of valency carrier | 220
7.3.7 Valency carrier | 221
7.3.8 Other complements/valency pattern | 226
xii | Contents
7.4 Case study: tough movement | 228

8 Existentials | 237
8.1 Phenomena covered | 237
8.1.1 Limitation to there-clauses | 237
8.1.2 Existentials vs locative there-clauses | 239
8.2 Survey of structures | 241
8.2.1 Bare existentials | 242
8.2.2 Extended existentials | 242
8.2.2.1 Relative clause extensions | 244
8.2.2.2 Infinitival extensions | 244
8.2.2.3 Participial extensions | 246
8.2.2.4 Extented existentials vs. bare existentials with postmodified or
complemented [NP] | 247
8.2.3 Presentational existentials | 251
8.3 What is the subject? | 252
8.4 Theoretical treatment | 263
8.4.1 Postverbal [NP] in extended existentials as subject of a small
clause? | 263
8.4.1.1 Heavy [NP] shift | 264
8.4.1.2 Simplicity | 264
8.4.1.3 So-called ‘predicate restriction’ | 265
8.4.1.4 [NP]s which resist conversion into a clause | 266
8.4.2 Issues of agreement | 267
8.4.3 Further studies | 270
8.4.4 Proposed structure | 273
9 Conclusions and perspectives for syntactic models | 279

9.1 Data for linguistic analysis | 279
9.2 The concept of subject | 285
9.2.1 Problems of diverging subject properties | 285
9.2.2 Consequences for modelling ‘subjects’ | 288
9.2.3 A universal category? | 293
9.2.4 Summary | 294
9.3 Perspectives for grammatical models | 295
9.3.1 Item-specific selection of subjects | 295
9.3.2 Valency | 298
9.3.2.1 Valency patterns | 298
Contents | xiii
9.3.2.2 Long-distance dependencies and multiple valency carriers | 306

9.3.2.2.1 Tough movement | 306
9.3.2.2.2 Passives and small clauses | 311
9.3.2.3 Limitations | 313
9.3.3 The bigger picture | 314
9.3.3.1 Conflicting determinants | 315
9.3.3.2 A cognitive approach | 317
9.4 Summary | 327
References | 329
Index | 345
Appendix | available online
Note: Appendix available online https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110589801-222

Abbreviations, symbols and frequently used
labels
Symbols for linguistic units

[to_INF] a to-infinitive clause complement: To do so would confuse the others.
[that_CL] a that-clause complement: That he turned out to be innocent really sur-
prised me.
in postverbal position also without the conjunction that:
It’s a pity (that) he had to leave so early.
[V-ing] an -ing-clause complement: Being with you has opened my eyes.1
[NP] a noun phrase complement
[on_NP], ... a particle phrase complement: He insisted on his right of way.
[...] Sometimes, other symbols of this sort are used, e.g. [wh_CL] in I don’t
know where she went. or [for_NP_to_INF] in It was stupid for him to do that.
They should be transparent in principle. A full list of possible complements
can be found in Herbst/Schüller (2008: 123f) or (in a slightly different
notation) in the Valency Dictionary of English (Herbst et al. 2004: xv-xx).
Symbols for example status

* not acceptable
? of questionable acceptability/dubious source/no agreement among native
speakers
# acceptable sentence but not in the given context or in a specific reading
||
1 With -ing-forms, there is a gradient between clearly verbal and clearly nominal forms. The
symbol [V-ing] is used for verbal forms, usually with a complement that shows that it is in fact
verbal. Thus the underlined constituent in the following sentence is not classified as [V-ing]
since the verb widen does not usually take an [of_NP] complement: [...] even in the countryside
deep ploughing, ripping out of hedgerows and widening of roads have seemingly obliterated most
traces of the ancient landscape. (BMT 32)
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110589801-015
xvi | Abbreviations, symbols and frequently used labels
Abbreviated literature
CamG The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (Huddleston/Pullum
2002)
CGEL A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (Quirk et al. 1985)
LGSWE Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English (Biber et al. 1999)
VDE A Valency Dictionary of English (Herbst et al. 2004)
Sources of examples and data

BNC British National Corpus, XML Edition
AB1 234 and similar example taken from the BNC; the first set of characters is the
text ID, the number after the space is the s-unit (≈ sentence) ID
within that text
HP7.123 and similar example taken from a book of the Harry Potter series by J. K.
Rowling; HP7 indicates volume 7; the number after the full stop
is the page number
academic, britnews, fiction, labels used for a set of additional corpora described in Section
newsmerge, newspapers, 3.2.2.1
popmerge
List of Figures
Fig. 1: Phrase-marker for ‘sincerity may frighten the boy’ (adapted from Chomsky 1965:
65) | 17
Fig. 2: Structure of a sentence in the GB model (adapted from McCloskey 1997: 201) | 21
Fig. 3: Hierarchy of the grammaticalization of the argument relation (adapted from Jacobs
1994: 71) | 33
Fig. 4: Combined dependency/constituency diagram for “Pass your sister the meat.” (adapted
from Matthews 1981: 91) | 34
Fig. 5: Varying scope of the term subject illustrated by Matthews (1981: 104; adapted) | 52
Fig. 6: Number of lexical units for the various types of clausal subject in the VDE | 72
Fig. 7: Plot of the distribution of modal verbs in the BNC and in the sample of sentences with
[to_INF] subject | 84
Fig. 8: Distribution of modal elements among selected verbs occurring with [to_INF] subjects in
the data collected for the present chapter | 85
Fig. 9: Distribution of modal verbs across all instances of selected verbs in the BNC | 86
Fig. 10: Complement block for complete (VDE 164) | 97
Fig. 11: Complement block for admit (A) (VDE 15) | 99
Fig. 12: Complement block for the general sense of remark (VDE 673) | 114
Fig. 13: Syntactic structure of (3) in Helbig’s model (adapted from Helbig 1992: 111) | 125
Fig. 14: Semantic structure of (3) in Helbig’s model (adapted from Helbig 1992: 111) | 126
Fig. 15: Representation of (3) in Welke’s model | 126
Fig. 16: Stanford typed dependencies representation of (3) | 127
Fig. 17: Analysis of a non-copular clause in Herbst/Schüller’s (2008) model | 163
Fig. 18: Analysis of a copular clause in Herbst/Schüller’s (2008) model | 163
Fig. 19: Possible structure for non-extraposed copular clauses | 164
Fig. 20: Modified structure for non-extraposed copular clauses | 167
Fig. 21: Complement block of appear (VDE 40) | 180
Fig. 22: Complement block for attract from the VDE (58) | 227
Fig. 23: Complement block for frighten from the VDE (334) | 228
Fig. 24: Relationships in example (73) according to word grammar (Hudson 1999: 201) | 267
Fig. 25: Graphical representation of (80) in Erdmann’s relational model (adapted from Erdmann
1976: 185) | 272
Fig. 26: Acceptance and rejection of test items for adjectives followed by a [that_CL] (see
Appendix 19) | 282
Fig. 27: Feature structure for she in HPSG (Pollard/Sag 1994: 20) – © 1994 by The University of
Chicago Press, reproduced by permission | 290
Fig. 28: Relevant features of walks in HPSG (Pollard/Sag 1994: 28) – © 1994 by The University
of Chicago Press, reproduced by permission | 290
Fig. 29: Relevant features of existential there in HPSG (Pollard/Sag 1994: 147) – © 1994 by The
University of Chicago Press, reproduced by permission | 291
Fig. 30: Relevant features of be as used in existentials in HPSG (Pollard/Sag 1994: 147) – ©
1994 by The University of Chicago Press, reproduced by permission | 291
Fig. 31: Representation of the interrogative ‘yes-no-question’-construction (adapted from
Herbst/Schüller 2008: 151) | 303
Fig. 32: Syntactic representation of (29) | 307
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110589801-017
xviii | List of Figures
Fig. 33: Syntactic representation of the relevant part of (28) | 308

Fig. 34: Dependency representation of the relevant part of (30) | 309
Fig. 35: Two possible valency carriers for the subject in (31) | 310
Fig. 38: Possible dependency relations for (34a) | 312
Fig. 39: Possible dependency relation for (34a) | 312
Fig. 40: Simplified possible organization of NPs (adapted from Bybee 2007: 324) | 317
Fig. 41: Simplified possible organization of NPs (adapted from Bybee 2007: 325) | 318
Fig. 42: Aspects of a network representation of extraposed sentences | 320
Fig. 43: Non-extraposed and extraposed [that_CL] subjects together with the analogous
structure with an [as if_CL] in a network representation. | 323
Fig. 44: Schematic representation of the frequency distribution of extraposed subjects with
three adjectives (not to scale) | 326
List of Tables
Tab. 1: Cartography of subject positions according to Cardinaletti (2004: 136) | 24
Tab. 2: Additional corpora used in the present study | 57
Tab. 3: comparison of google.de and google.com for looking forward to doing/to do | 61
Tab. 4: comparison of google.de and google.com for looking forward to having/to have with
and without a filter for region | 62
Tab. 5: Clausal subjects with verbs in the range a – b in the VDE | 72
Tab. 6: Clausal subjects of the [to_INF], [that_CL] and [V-ing] type with verbs in the range a – b
in the VDE, augmented by corpus data | 74
Tab. 7: Distribution of modal verbs in the sample of sentences with [to_INF] subjects | 83
Tab. 8: Distribution of modal verbs in the BNC and in the sample of sentences with [to_INF]
subject | 84
Tab. 9: Summary of restrictions on non-extraposed clausal subjects of active verbs | 89
Tab. 10: Summary of the findings for complete | 98
Tab. 11: Summary of the findings for admit (A) | 99
Tab. 12: Summary of the findings for teach | 101
Tab. 13: Summary of the findings for help | 102
Tab. 14: Summary of the findings for support | 102
Tab. 15: Summary of the findings for settle | 103
Tab. 16: Summary of the findings for read (γ) | 104
Tab. 17: Summary of the findings for blame | 105
Tab. 18: Summary of the findings for [to_INF] and [V-ing] with allow (A ‘permit’) | 117
Tab. 19: Summary of the findings for [to_INF] and [V-ing] with permit | 118
Tab. 20: VDE/Patternbank data for extraposed [to_INF] and [that_CL] subjects; for lexemes with
multiple lexical units, the lexical unit in the VDE/Patternbank is given in
parentheses | 139
Tab. 21: VDE/Patternbank data augmented with corpus results; for lexemes with multiple
lexical units, the lexical unit in the VDE/Patternbank is given in parentheses | 140
Tab. 22: Data from VDE/Patternbank, corpora and native speaker interviews combined; for
lexemes with multiple lexical units, the lexical unit in the VDE/Patternbank is given in
parentheses | 142
Tab. 23: Results of corpus research and native speaker interviews on clausal subjects in
canonical position of copular clauses with adjectives starting with h as predicative
element | 150
canonical position of copular clauses with nouns starting with i as predicative
element | 154
Tab. 25: Summary of restrictions on extraposed subjects in copular clauses with adjectives as
predicative elements | 160
Tab. 26: Summary of restrictions on extraposed subjects in copular clauses with nouns as
predicative elements; for lexemes with multiple lexical units, the lexical unit in the
VDE/Patternbank is given in parentheses | 161
Tab. 27: Summary of restrictions on clausal subjects in canonical position in copular clauses
with adjectives as predicative element | 162
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110589801-019
xx | List of Tables
Tab. 28: Summary of possible restrictions on clausal subjects in canonical position in copular
clauses with nouns as predicative element | 162
Tab. 29: Extraposition and non-extraposition of [to_INF] subjects with active verbs according to
the VDE; for lexemes with multiple lexical units, the lexical unit in the VDE/Patternbank is
given in parentheses | 169
Tab. 30: Summary of the criteria for subjecthood with extraposition | 200
Tab. 31: Position of extraposed [that_CL] subject | 205
Tab. 32: Frequency of canonical and extraposed variants in spoken and written texts (250 each)
from Kaltenböck (2004: 132) | 217
Tab. 33: Proportion of extraposition by complement type, based on Erdmann (1987: 41); figures
not exact | 219
Tab. 34: Frequency of non-extraposition compared with subject it-extraposition; figures from
Kaltenböck (2004: 152), who also includes other types of complements | 219
Tab. 35: Proportion of extraposition by complement type and valency carrier, based on
Erdmann (1987: 41, 92, 94, 101–103); figures not exact | 220
Tab. 36: Proportion of extraposition by complement type and valency carrier, based on
Kaltenböck (2004: 152f) | 221
Tab. 37: Obligatory extraposition in active clauses in the VDE; for lexemes with multiple lexical
units, the lexical unit in the VDE/Patternbank is given in parentheses | 222
Tab. 38: Basic clauses and their existential counterparts; constructed on the basis of CGEL
(1404) | 243
1 Introduction
In a nutshell, what the present study sets out to show is that subjects are influ-
enced by more item-specific idiosyncrasies than has often been acknowledged
in grammatical theory. It will also be shown that the notion of ‘subject’ might
not deserve the central place in grammatical description and theory it often
holds.
1.1 Aims
The purpose of the present study is twofold. First it tries to give a descriptive
account of subjects in English or, to be more precise, of elements that scholars
have in some way called subject in a description or model of English grammar.
The second aim is to elucidate the status of the subject both as a concept in
grammatical theory and with regard to the question whether the subject is
determined by item-specific arbitrary formal restrictions in the same way
as postverbal complements of the verb have been shown to be.2
The descriptive account is based on the documentation provided by refer-
ence grammars, on individual studies of the phenomena in question and, most
importantly, on data specifically collected for this study, both derived from
corpora and from native speaker interviews. The descriptive part allows us to
review and possibly challenge claims made in grammatical theory based on
sound empirical evidence. It has to be made very clear that the present study is
centred on English and that any observations and results regarding the gram-
mar of subjects are confined to the English language. No claims concerning the
universal applicability of the results will be made.
As to the theoretical status of the subject, a short introduction is necessary
in order to explain the motivation behind the research questions formulated in
Section 1.3.
1.2 Brief account of the theoretical background

The theoretical background of the present study is valency theory (see Section
2.2.2 for an introduction). There is a fundamental difference between the treat-
||
2 See Faulhaber (2011) for a very thorough study of such phenomena including a review of the
relevant literature.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110589801-021
2 | Introduction
ment of subjects in valency theory and in many other frameworks, most notably
generative grammar. In the generative tradition (Chomsky 1965, [1981] 1993) any
semantically compatible subject (or, in later stages of the theory, any subject
that realizes a certain theta role) can occur in a clause and the subject is thus
not formally determined by the verb, i.e. it is not subcategorized for in the same
way as postverbal elements are. Valency theory on the other hand treats sub-
jects as valency complements of the verb in exactly the same way as postverbal
elements, which in turn means that it could allow for item-specific restrictions
on subjects.
In the tradition of dependency theory (Tesnière 1953, [1959] 1965), many va-
lency descriptions of German3 (e.g. Helbig/Schenkel [1969] 1973) treat the sub-
ject as an obligatory complement of the verb (similarly Welke’s 2011: 167ff
“Grundvalenz” [‘basic valency’]), and Emons’ (1978) description of English gen-
erally adopts this position. In his model of valency in English in a generative
transformational framework, Allerton (1982: 45) draws a distinction between
surface subjects and valency subjects, a concept which is echoed and extended
in a different framework by Herbst/Roe (1996), who investigate the necessity of
clause elements at three different levels and show that, from the point of view of
verb valency, the complement realising the subject is very rarely an obligatory
complement. As obligatoriness is one of the two most important criteria for
complement status in valency theory, the status of the subject as a complement
of the verb would be in question if the second criterion were found not to be met
either. This second criterion is that the formal realisation of a complement is
determined by the verb. In the case of, say, the [on_NP] after insist, this is rela-
tively easy to establish. In the case of subjects, the vast majority of which are
straightforward noun phrases,4 it is much harder to confirm such a relation-
ship.5 This is why most of the discussion in the present study is devoted to
clausal subjects even though their frequency in the language is marginal com-
||
3 Much of the valency research done on English is inspired by the extensive literature on
German valency grammar.
4 It is not particularly relevant for the purpose of this study to discuss whether NPs are noun
phrases or determiner phrases (DPs). For an overview of the arguments for and against the “DP
Hypothesis” see for instance Hudson (1984, 1990), Huddleston (1984) or for a generative posi-
tion Abney (1987) and Bernstein (2001).
5 As much of the research on valency grammar was done in the context of German linguistics
it should be pointed out here that in German the subject [NP] is (usually) in nominative case
and thus formally determined. On the other hand, one could argue that English pronouns are
formally selected in the same way and in French, the language for which Tesnière (1953, [1959]
1965) originally devised dependency grammar, case also only exists in pronouns.
Research questions and hypotheses | 3
pared to that of [NP]s: There are practically no verbs in English that do not allow
an [NP] subject, so if we want to find syntactic restrictions on the formal realisa-
tion of subjects, we will have to analyse sentences with non-[NP] subjects.
While the different forms of clausal subjects may not be interchangeable for
various other reasons than the valency of the valency carrier, their distribution
overlaps enough to allow for such a study.6
1.3 Research questions and hypotheses

The major question that this study sets out to investigate is whether the form of
the subject is arbitrarily restricted by the valency carrier in the clause. We can
split the question up into sub-questions and formulate hypotheses for each of
these in order to make them more manageable. One chapter will be devoted to
each of the phenomena in question.
Hypotheses:
1. The form of the subject of a non-copular active declarative clause is deter-
mined by the main verb of the clause (discussed in Chapter 4).
2. The form of the subject of a passive declarative clause is determined by the
main verb of the clause (discussed in Chapter 5).
3. The form of the subject of a copular declarative clause is determined by the
predicative element (discussed in Chapter 6).
The reason for distinguishing between non-copular and copular clauses7 is that
in the latter, the predicative element seems to exert more influence on the sub-
ject than the copula verb (see discussion in Section 2.2.2 and, more specifically,
at the beginning of Chapter 6).8 The reason for distinguishing between active
and passive clauses is that subjects in the latter are often treated as derived
from active clause ‘objects’ and that their degree of ‘governedness’ may thus
differ from active clause subjects.
||
6 Some researchers in the generative tradition may argue that differences in distribution be-
tween various clausal subjects are also due to different types of implicit arguments. In the
present study, these are not covered since the valency model used (Herbst et al. 2004,
Herbst/Schüller 2008) attempts to model verb complementation without null elements.
7 Copular clause is shorthand for a clause in which the main verb is a copula verb.
8 Basically this approach mirrors the distinction often made between verbal predicates on the
one hand and adjectival and nominal predicates on the other (see for instance Mair 1990).
4 | Introduction
Furthermore, research carried out during the compilation of the Valency

Dictionary of English (Herbst et al. 2004; henceforth VDE) suggests that subject
extraposition does not only follow general rules related to processing con-
straints and information structure (see discussion in Section 7.3 for details), but
that there is a lexical element to extraposition. This would mean that some
verbs allow for a clausal subject to be extraposed or not, whereas some others
may the clausal subject to be extraposed. The same may be true of adjectives
and nouns as valency carriers in copular clauses, so we shall give the respective
hypothesis a rather general wording:
4. Whether subject extraposition is obligatory, optional or impossible is de-

termined by the valency carrier, other factors being the same. (discussed in
Chapter 7)
There is a fifth hypothesis that is only loosely related to the first four but is high-
ly relevant for a discussion of what grammatical models of English should treat
as subject and whether the term really makes sens in the description of English.
To address this question, extraposed and existential structures, i.e. structures in
which the identification of subjects is less straightforward since there are multi-
ple candidates, are reviewed in some detail:
5. The concept of subject in grammatical theory represents an amalgam of

properties that can be mapped onto a single constituent in canonical claus-
es but less so in non-canonical structures (discussed mainly in Chapters 7
and 8).
Subject is both one of the most controversial notions in
linguistics and the one most often taken for granted.
(Bakker/Siewierska 2007: 141)
‘Subject’ is a concept which has been
notoriously difficult for linguists to define.
(Rothstein 2001: ix)
But the identification of a subject
seems unusually straightforward.
(Matthews 2007a: 104)
2 Theory
Subjects in English are peculiar. For most English sentences most linguists will
agree on what the subject is, but few would agree on a definition.9 Having been
in use for over 2,000 years in the study of language, logic and philosophy, the
term is often taken for granted, but if it is not, it is highly controversial. In this
chapter, a brief overview of the history of the term will be given, including an
outline of how it has been applied to English over the past 100 years. As Jesper-
sen observed, “[a]n exhaustive critical examination of everything that has been
said by grammarians and logicians on this question would require a whole vol-
ume” (Jespersen 1924: 145). Not surprisingly, the situation has not improved
since Jespersen made that statement over 90 years ago. In addition, the present
study is meant not to be exclusively a review of the relevant literature. Thus the
discussion of the history will have to be limited to the few prominent approach-
es mentioned below, although there are many more and any such selection has
to be to some extent arbitrary.
After the descriptive perspective, a discussion of generative grammar and of
valency theory will be carried out since these are two diametrically opposed
models with regard to the status of the subject and since the theoretical back-
ground of the present study is valency theory.
In the remainder of the chapter, criteria for subjecthood mentioned in vari-
ous descriptive and theoretical works will be presented as an approximation to
a definition of the term. The review of criteria will not only be helpful in deter-
mining the subject status of elements in non-canonical structures such as exis-
tentials later in the study, it will also allow us to reflect on our own use of the
term subject.
||
9 Koya (1992: 24) makes a similar point.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110589801-025
6 | Theory
2.1 History of the term

2.1.1 The beginnings
The term subject stems from Latin subiectum, which is a translation of Ancient
Greek hypokeimenon (ὑποκείμενον). Although the term was not coined by the
philosopher Aristotle, his influential writings, above all the Categories, intro-
duced the twofold division of subject and predicate that is still used by many
grammarians today. According to his definition, a subject10 is “that of which
everything else is predicated, while it is itself not predicated of anything else“
(Metaphysics 1028b36).11 It has to be noted that Aristotle relates categories in the
language to categories in the world:
In Topics I 9 and throughout the Categories, Aristotle is concerned to establish that the
basic types of linguistic expression correspond to the basic categories of reality. Complete
thoughts expressed in sentences are the primary vehicles of meaning, but these consist of
smaller units of meaning, significant words and phrases. These units are significant just
because the extralinguistic world shares a similar structure. Aristotelian categories are
categories both of beings and of linguistic items. In addition, the distinction between sub-
stance and property in the world is reflected in the distinction between subject and predi-
cate in a sentence. In both instances, the existence of a single unified entity, a concrete
particular or a complete thought or assertion, is consistent with the analysis into the more
basic ontological categories of substance and property (quality, quantity, and so forth) or
the more basic linguistic categories of subject and predicate, because the relation between
substance and property or subject and predicate is such that a single item results from
their combination. (Modrak 2001: 43; her italics)
We can thus already understand Aristotle’s approach in the linguistic sense in

which it is understood today: “Simple sentences are formed by combining a
single subject and a single predicate” (Modrak 2001: 44). According to Modrak
(2001: 44f), “[s]imple sentences may be combined by conjunction or disjunction
||
10Not all translations use the term subject in the cited passage: “Now the substratum is that of
which everything else is predicated, while it is itself not predicated of anything else.” (Ross’
translation; my italics), “The substrate is that of which the rest are predicated, while it is not
itself predicated of anything else.” (Tredennick’s translation; my italics) or “What underlies is
that of which other things are predicated while it itself is predicated of nothing further” (Bos-
tock’s translation; my italics). Wedin (2000: 183f) reads subject and makes a case against the
phrasing “everything else” in the translation.
11 By convention, the works of Aristotle are cited following the numbering in Bekker’s edition
of the complete works, irrespectively of the actual edition used. This reference indicates page
1028, second column, line 36 of the Metaphysics. The translation of the citation is by Modrak
(2001: 154).
History of the term | 7
to form complex sentences” in Aristotle’s theory. Simplicity/complexity is de-

termined on semantic grounds, however, so it is clear that the terms do not
denote formal categories here.12 Seuren (1999: 42ff), on the other hand, main-
tains that Aristotle left a terminological gap where we expect what we call sub-
ject today. According to him, the term hypokeimenon is used only to refer to the
“thing or entity” (Seuren 1999: 42) in the real world:
The property assigned (if it is an accidental and not a necessary property) is called
symbebēkós (accidens in Latin). The sentence part expressing the property is called
katēgoróumenon or katēgórēma. No specific term, however, is created for the sentence part
that refers to the hypokeímenon. (Seuren 1999: 42; his italics)
Seuren claims that the terminological confusion between subject as “the thing
the sentence is about” and “the sentence constituent we now recognize as sub-
ject” (Seuren 1999: 42) lasted for many centuries.13 He found that the term
hypokeimenon is applied to the grammatical subject from the fifth century AD
onwards and terminus subiectus in the grammatical meaning in the sixth centu-
ry (Seuren 1999: 43f). Around that time, a disambiguation in Latin translations
of hypokeimenon into suppositum (reference term) and subiectum (subject term)
can also be observed, although it was never consistently applied (Seuren 1999:
44).
In the 19th century, linguists became aware that what they called logical
subject14 did not always coincide with the grammatical subject of a sentence:
“Die Grammatik aber, werden wir jetzt zu zeigen suchen, verdreht gar oft das
logische Verhältniß von Subject und Prädicat” [“Grammar, though, as we shall
try to show, often reverses the logical relationship between subject and predi-
cate.”] (Steinthal 1855: 198). Steinthal’s logical subject is more or less Aristotle’s
hypokeimenon.
||
12 See also Modrak (2001: 45f, 72 and 155f) for further discussion.
13 In the light of psychological subjects, notional subjects, deep structure subjects, initial
subjects and other concepts that will be discussed below, this citation reveals a rather optimis-
tic perspective on the matter. Indeed one might be inclined to argue that the confusion is still
as bad as it ever was.
14 Seuren criticises Steinthal and others for using the term “logical”, which is, he claims, due
to “the widespread misconception that the subject-predicate distinction originated in Aristo-
tle’s logic” (Seuren 1999: 46). Seuren himself might be mistaken in this respect, though, as
subject and predicate were established terms in philosophy in general and logic in particular at
that time, even though Frege’s account of the issue was still to come and even though he is
right to observe that the distinction between verbal and cognitive concepts was not fully devel-
oped (Seuren 1999: 48).
8 | Theory
Seuren (1999: 46ff) continues to outline how the term subject came to be
used as a discourse-related notion around 1900. From that point of view, a
change in contrastive stress results in a change of logical (or psychological –
both terms were used for the same concept by different scholars) subject as in
(1) a. SCOTT wrote Ivanhoe. (Seuren 1999: 46)

b. Scott wrote IVANHOE. (Seuren 1999: 46)
where the stressed elements are considered “’logical’ predicates [...] and the
uncontrasted parts are, correspondingly, the ‘logical’ subject” (Seuren 1999:
46).
Von der Gabelentz (1869, 1891: 365–373) extends the division by distin-
guishing between grammatical, logical and psychological subject, where the
latter is probably best described by the term theme in work done on functional
sentence perspective in the Prague School (e.g. Mathesius 1929). In fact, Halli-
day’s definition of theme in functional grammar (Halliday 1994: 30–33) specifi-
cally cites the psychological subject in traditional accounts. The logical subject
is probably best described as semantic argument in many current models (see
for instance Helbig 1992: 13f, Ágel 2000: 176–179) or core element in frame se-
mantics (Fillmore 2007: 133; a concept that does not correspond exactly to the
notion of argument in other approaches but is largely compatible).15
As we have seen the term subject has come to be pervasive in the syntactic
literature even though there has never been much consensus as to its definition
(see Seuren 1999: 53 for a similar point).
2.1.2 Treatment in reference grammars over the past 100 years
It is, indeed, unfortunate that the grammarian has to use the

word “subject,” which in ordinary language means, among
other things, also ‘topic’ (‘subject matter’). (Jespersen 1924: 146f)
It is commonplace in works on linguistic theory to refer to concepts from the

realm of “traditional grammar” and to then state in what way one’s own analy-
sis offers advantages over the traditional account (e.g. CamG 208). Interestingly,
it often seems to be taken for granted that there is one uniform model of tradi-
||
15 Fillmore states that the “core vs. periphery distinction is analogous to, but not identical to,
the distinction in Tesnière (1959) between actants and circonstants. Core elements are those
which are necessary to the central meaning of the frame” (Fillmore 2007: 133).
tional grammar and that every linguist is familiar with it, so that references and
citations are unnecessary. However, even with the few traditional works used
for the present study, there is considerable divergence in terminology, defini-
tions and the syntactic model, so that some key concepts will be briefly dis-
cussed here.
The selection of reference grammars for the present chapter was based on
the influence they have had on the study of English over the past 100 years. For
instance, Jespersen’s grammatical descriptions of English16 had an enormous
impact on subsequent studies and are still frequently cited today. Zandvoort’s
Handbook of English Grammar (1957/1972)17 is a very traditional account of Eng-
lish grammar but was tremendously successful, particularly in the teaching of
English at university level before the London School grammars (Quirk et al. 1972
and derived works) became available. Quirk et al.’s seminal Comprehensive
Grammar of the English Language (1985; CGEL) will be used as the basis for
many terminological decisions.
When the Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (CamG; edited by
Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey Pullum) was published in 2002, its aim was to
“bridge the large gap that exists between traditional grammar and the partial
descriptions of English grammar proposed by those working in the field of lin-
guistics” (CamG xv). Thus, while the book upholds a tradition of comprehensive
and descriptively adequate grammars, it marks a deliberate departure from
many traditional analyses “to take account of the progress that has been made
by linguists in our understanding of English grammar” (CamG xv). While its
strong descriptive basis and its use of established terminology justifies its inclu-
sion among the other reference grammars, its grammatical model is inspired to
a great extent by studies in generative transformational grammar and other
theoretical frameworks. Of all the grammars used here, it offers the most com-
prehensive and detailed list of criteria for the identification of subjects and thus
is the most important source for Section 2.3.2 below.
The discussion will advance in chronological order and thus start with Jes-
persen’s model. His definition of subject at the grammatical level remains rather
vague and contains vivid imagery in addition to dubious criteria:
||
16 For the sake of simplicity, Jespersen’s writings are treated as uniform in this chapter alt-
hough there are differences between his big grammar (1909–1949) and his 1924 and 1933 books
used here. The divergence is of no particular relevance for our purposes, though.
17 In the context of this study, the monolingual edition was used. The first edition, with com-
parisons to Dutch, was published in 1945 in the Netherlands. Shortly after the publication of
the English version it was already criticised for its “neglect of contemporary (American and
post-Saussurian) linguistics” (Aarts 1987: 69).
10 | Theory
Clearly to understand what the word subject means in its grammatical application, it will
be well to recur to what was said in the chapter on the three ranks. In every sentence there
are some elements (secondary words) which are comparatively fluid or liquid, and others
(primary words) that are more firmly fixed and resemble rocks rising out of the sea. The
subject is always a primary, though not necessarily the only primary in the sentence;18 this
amounts to saying that the subject is comparatively definite and special, while the predi-
cate is less definite, and thus applicable to a greater number of things. (Jespersen 1924:
150)
What exactly definite means in a predicate and how special can be crafted into a
grammatical test is not elaborated upon, but Jespersen observes that there is a
general “disinclination to take as subject a word with the indefinite article”
(Jespersen 1924: 154) unless the latter is an instance of a generic article.
The easiest test for subjecthood according to Jespersen is “taking the verb in
the form in which it is found in the sentence, and asking Who (or What) fol-
lowed by it: Tom beats John. Who beats? Tom” (Jespersen 1933: 98). Problematic
cases are discussed a few pages later:
If we analyse sentences like

He happened to fall.
He is sure to turn up.
He is believed to be rich,–
there can be no doubt as to the grammatical subject: it is he. But notionally the matter is
not so simple: we cannot in the usual way ask: “Who happened?” “Who is sure?” “Who is
believed?” We must either complete these questions by adding to fall, etc., or else we must
ask: “What happened?” “What is sure?” “What is believed?” We thus discover that the no-
tional subject is really a complete nexus, in which he is the primary, and fall, turn up, and
be rich respectively is the secondary (adnex). We may express this in an unidiomatic way
by saying that the notional subject, which is thus split in two, is he-to-fall, etc. (Jespersen
1933: 107f)
Jespersen also describes sentences of the type
(2) The path was easy to find.
in which the subject of the sentence, The path, is the object of find at the same
time, although he proposes no further theoretical account of such phenomena.
||
18 In Jespersen’s terminology, primaries are similar to heads in many contemporary works:
“In the combination extremely hot weather the last word weather, which is evidently the chief
idea, may be called primary” (Jesperson 1924: 96ff). This makes his definition of subject even
more difficult to grasp, as most grammarians (and probably also Jespersen himself) would
analyse not only the primary weather in The extremely hot weather caused hundreds of deaths.
(www.veryen.org) as subject but the entire underlined [NP].
In analogy to his treatment of the sentences in the long quote above, “to-find-
the-path” would probably have to be regarded as notional subject.19
For copular sentences in which two nominal elements can be interchanged,
Jespersen (1924: 153) offers a test to determine the subject of the sentence: For
him, the subject and the predicative element in (3a) and (3b) are interchangea-
ble. In these cases, sentences of the structure exemplified in (4a) and (4b) have
to be formed. Since (4a) is acceptable and (4b) is not, it follows that Miss Cas-
tlewood is the subject in (3a) and in (3b).
(3) a. Miss Castlewood was the prettiest girl at the ball. (Jespersen 1924: 153)
b. The prettiest girl at the ball was Miss Castlewood. (Jespersen 1924: 153)
(4) a. I look on Miss C[astlewood] as the prettiest girl at the ball. (Jespersen
1924: 153)
b. *I look on the prettiest girl at the ball as Miss C[astlewood]. (Jespersen
1924: 153)
This test thus wins over the obvious positional criterion as concord and the who-
question do not deliver distinctive results. It is doubtful whether this is a test of
grammatical status, though, as it actually checks whether one element is predi-
cated of the other and predication is a logical more than a grammatical concept.
Subjects of the [V-ing] type are generally called gerund in Jespersen’s termi-
nology. [NP_V-ing] and [NP’s_V-ing] are treated as gerundial nexus (1933: 327f).
Jespersen claims that [NP_V-ing] is often preferred in subject position because
the [NP] is felt to be the subject of the whole sentence and thus should be in
common case. This line of argument fails to account for the fact that in non-
subject positions [NP_V-ing] is also more frequently found than [NP’s_V-ing].
However, for our purposes, the most modern and important statements in
Jespersen’s writings are about what a subject is not. While he acknowledges
that often the subject provides given information (“relatively familiar element”
[Jespersen 1924: 145]) and the predicate new information, he stresses that “[t]his
may be true of most sentences, but not of all” (Jespersen 1924: 145) and accord-
ingly rejects a definition of the grammatical element subject based on infor-
mation structure. His remarks on the positional criterion show a similar careful-
ness:
||
19 See Section 7.4 for a more detailed discussion of such structures.
12 | Theory
It will be well to point out that word-order is not always decisive, though in many lan-
guages there is a strong tendency, and in English a very strong tendency, to place the sub-
ject first. (Jespersen 1924: 151)
To prove his point that the very strong tendency is not a hard and fast rule, Jes-
persen cites the counter-examples in (5) himself:
(5) a. Great was his astonishment when he saw the results (Jespersen 1924:
151; his italics)
b. A scoundrel is Tom. (Jespersen 1924: 151; his italics)
Furthermore, he also shows the limitations of a semantically defined subject:
The subject cannot be defined by means of such words as active or agent; this is excluded
by the meaning of a great many verbs, e. g. suffer (he suffered torture), collapse, as well as
by passive constructions […]. (Jespersen 1909–1949, vol. 3: 206)
We can thus see that Jespersen is fully aware that such criteria are prototypical
in character rather than defining criteria.
Zandvoort, on the other hand, adopts a traditional semantic definition of
subject without giving any indication of possible mismatches between the syn-
tactic and the semantic level:
Most sentences of more than one word consist of two nuclei, one indicating the person or
thing about whom or which a statement is made (or a question asked), the other contain-
ing the statement or the question asked. The word (or words) indicating the person or
thing referred to is (are) called the SUBJECT of the sentence; that (those) containing the
statement (or the question) the PREDICATE. (Zandvoort 1972: 196)
He then goes on to list example sentences with italicized subjects, most of

which are straightforward, apart from some without a finite verb in them (“He a
gentleman!” [Zandvoort 1972: 196]), which would probably cause problems with
some grammatical criteria (e.g. concord) but are generally of minor importance.
Quirk et al. (CGEL 724–726) do not attempt to define the term subject; they
do, however, list its characteristic features, which will be discussed in more
detail in Section 2.3.2. It will become clear that these properties are meant to
describe a prototypical subject and are neither necessary nor sufficient criteria.
The model used by CGEL assumes a constituent structure (not necessarily
with binary divisions) and makes use of established terminology.20 Furthermore,
||
20 See for instance Herbst/Schüller (2008: 167–172) for a critique of the traditional term object
as used in CGEL.
it uses syntactic, semantic and pragmatic criteria for the definition (or rather
identification) of subjects, which is probably the most serious point of criticism
from the point of view of modern linguistics, even though many concepts from
theoretical linguistics (such as semantic roles) are used. The authors are aware
of all the subtleties uncovered by linguistic research and of the many exceptions
to their rules; since their description of the English language does not claim to
be a theoretically stringent model, it cannot be overly criticised for providing
prototypical features instead of a clear-cut definition.
As mentioned above, CamG is the reference grammar that incorporates the
most recent advances in theoretical linguistics as will become apparent in the
following short overview of their grammatical model.
Although Huddleston/Pullum adopt a constituent grammar approach to
language, their grammatical model is similar to valency grammar (see Section
2.2.2 for details) in that they see the verb as central element in the clause, i.e.
“ultimate head of the clause” (CamG 50). Within their constituent structure
model Huddleston/Pullum postulate “heads and dependents” (CamG 24) in
their phrasal categories, thus incorporating dependency grammar elements. In
their terminology, the head of a clause is the predicate, and the head of a VP is
the predicator.21 This is terminologically and conceptually much closer to Chom-
sky’s 1965 and [1981] 1993 models than CGEL is, as is their treatment of the sub-
ject as an external complement. They attribute a special status to the subject,
which is a “type of complement that is clearly distinguished, syntactically, from
others” (CamG 53). Subject and object are contrasted in the following way:
[The subject] is an external complement in that it is located outside the VP. It is an obliga-
tory element in all canonical clauses. The object, by contrast, is an internal complement
and, as just noted, is permitted – or licensed – by some verbs but not by others. (CamG
53; their emphasis)
While this could be read to mean that subjects are not licensed by verbs, the
treatment of subordinate clauses in subject position suggests the opposite: “The
prototypical subject is an NP; all verbs (and VPs) allow an NP as subject, but
some license a content clause as well” (CamG 957). The type of clause is also
determined by the verb:
||
21 Compare also Aarts/Aarts (1982), who modify the Quirk et al. (1972) model to contain a
predicate which includes a predicator and predicator complements of various types, thus
attributing a status to the subject similar to that in CamG.
14 | Theory
When a clause functions as complement in the structure of a larger clause, the verb of the
latter determines what kind of subordinate clause is permitted – whether declarative, in-
terrogative, or exclamative, whether finite, infinitival, gerund-participial, and so on:
[13] i Whether we go abroad / *That we go abroad depends on the cost. [...]
Example [i] shows that depend licenses an interrogative clause, but not a declarative, as
its external complement [...]. (CamG 220; their italics)
In fact, Huddleston/Pullum argue “that what licenses a subject of this kind [i.e.
content clauses] is often not the verb alone, but the verb in combination with
one or more complements” (CamG 958).22 Examples (6) and (7) illustrate the
issue:
(6) a. John left me confused

b. John left me.
(7) a. That he died with $ 1.6 million in the bank left me confused.
b. *That he died with $ 1.6 million in the bank left me.
One could, however, argue for two different lexical units of the lexeme leave in
the sense of Cruse (1986: 80) in this case, which then again would mean that it
might just as well be the verb which licenses the subject. Whether this re-
striction is a syntactic phenomenon or rather a matter of semantic compatibility
could also be debated, as the difference between (8a) and (8b) below is arguably
analogous to the one between (7a) and (7b) above, even though an [NP] func-
tions as subject in both examples.
(8) a. This story really left me confused.

b. *This story really left me.
It is interesting to note that the centrality of the verb seems to apply to copular23
clauses as well, as can be inferred from their interpretation of
(9) That he was guilty was obvious. (CamG 23; their emphasis)
||
22 Oppenrieder (1991: 259) takes a similar position for German subject clauses.
23 In CamG only clauses featuring the verb be are copular clauses. The general construction of
this type – including those verbs that are called copulas in other grammars (e.g. seem, appear
in CGEL) – are called complex-intransitive (CamG 218 fn. 6). The rigid approach makes it diffi-
cult to assess the status of postverbal elements as in “Sue Brown provides an excellent example
of a woman who has achieved outstanding success in the world of business while bringing up a
large family” (CamG 255), where the constituent following the verb is treated as an object and
not as a predicative complement.
where they state that the underlined constituent “is centred, ultimately, on a
verb (was)” (CamG 23). This is in contrast to another statement:
Where the superordinate clause is complex-intransitive it is the PC [=predicative comple-

ment] that licenses the external complement: cf. Whether we go abroad / *That we go
abroad is dependent on many factors. This is one of the factors that makes a PC more like a
predicator than is [sic] an ordinary complement. (CamG 221 fn. 9)
The fact that the predicative element licenses the external complement does not
mean that the latter is a complement of the former, though:
(10) a. Kim is fond of animals. (CamG 252; their emphasis)

b. Kim loves animals. (CamG 252; their emphasis)
CamG explains that fond in (10a) “has the experiencer aligned with S [=subject],
a complement of the verb be, rather than of fond itself” (CamG 252) and goes on
to clarify the relationship of the elements in a footnote:
Since Kim is a complement of love but not of fond, it follows that while love is bivalent (has
two complements), fond is monovalent (has only one). However, as semantic predicates
love and fond are both dyadic (have two arguments). (CamG 252 fn. 27)
Thus CamG allows for divergent syntactic and semantic levels. The assignment
of a central function to verbs and of licensing abilities to complements of verbs
may be sensible but is not explained in a detailed enough way to allow a full
understanding of how the different mechanisms at work (e.g. valency, licens-
ing) interact.
Much as in CGEL, the subject in CamG is defined via a range of criteria
(which are listed below), but CamG is careful to include only “grammatical
properties” (CamG 236) and not semantic and pragmatic features.
To sum up, the concept of subject in descriptive reference grammars of Eng-
lish has evolved towards a multi-faceted notion that is defined based on a range
of features in the most recent works. These features will be discussed individu-
ally in Section 2.3.2 and an evaluation of such definitions is offered in Section
9.2.
16 | Theory
2.2 The role of the subject in generative grammar and in

valency/dependency grammar
2.2.1 Generative grammar
Noam Chomsky’s theory of generative transformational grammar (Chomsky

1957, 1965 and with major modifications [1981] 1993 and 1995) had revolutionary
impact on the study of language, not only in the United States but throughout
the world.24 While many of his original concepts and ideas were revised in later
works or abandoned altogether,25 the model which evolved from Aspects of the
Theory of Syntax (Chomsky 1965) or the one presented in Lectures on Govern-
ment and Binding (Chomsky [1981] 1993) were so influential and were the basis
of so many scholarly works cited in this study that they have to be introduced
here – at least briefly.26 The earliest of Chomsky’s published books (i.e. Chomsky
1957) will be largely ignored, though, as Chomsky (1965) contains an extended
and revised version of that model (see Sampson 2001: 141–164 for a very critical
account of the influence of Chomsky 1957 on linguistic research and the linguis-
tic community).
||
24 Whether revolutionary is the right word in this context is a question that caused a serious
and heated debate. After Kuhn’s publication of The Structure of Scientific Revolutions in 1962,
many adherents of generative transformational grammar claimed that there had indeed been a
‘Chomskyan revolution’ in linguistics. Critics denied this and a battle of publications started,
including for instance Winston’s (1976) “Did a (Kuhnian) Scientific Revolution Occur in Lin-
guistics?” (Answer: No.) or Newmeyer’s (1986) “Has There Been a ‘Chomskyan Revolution’ in
Linguistics?” (Answer: Yes.). Koerner (1989: 101–146) provides a critical discussion of the topic
and of the relevant literature; Kibbee (2010) – a Festschrift presented to Koerner – offers recent
perspectives on Chomskyan (R)evolutions.
25 Chomsky himself has become critical of some of these concepts over time:
Well, looking at it now, I think the minimalist critique of the past 10 years has given sub-
stantial reasons to suppose that none of these things exist: d-structure, s-structure, and LF
just don’t exist. There’s no X-bar Theory forming d-structure. Of all those levels, the only
ones that remain are PF and the semantic interface. The others, the strictly internal lin-
guistic ones – LF, d-structure, and s-structure – probably don’t exist. (Chomsky 2004: 152
– the cited passage is part of an interview recorded by Naoki Fukui and Mihoko Zushi on
November 22, 2002) [LF: Lexical Form; PF: Phonetic Form]
26 See Lyons (1991) or Horrocks (1987) for a detailed account of Chomsky’s model.
The role of the subject in generative grammar and in valency/dependency grammar | 17
2.2.1.1 Early generative grammar

In the so-called Standard Theory (i.e. Chomsky 1965), subjects play a minor part.
A subject is “a grammatical function rather than a grammatical category”
(Chomsky 1965: 68; his italics) such as an NP and as such is “redundant, since
the notions Subject, Predicate, Main-Verb, and Object, being relational, are
already represented in the Phrase-marker [reproduced as Figure 1 below] and no
new rewriting rules are required to introduce them” (Chomsky 1965: 69).
Fig. 1: Phrase-marker for ‘sincerity may frighten the boy’ (adapted from Chomsky 1965: 65)
In a hypothetical account, Chomsky proposes the definition of “Subject-of” in

English “as the relation holding between the NP of a sentence of the form NP⁀
Aux⁀VP and the whole sentence” (Chomsky 1965: 69). While it is fully in line
with the principles of a constituent structure grammar to model the subject
function as a part-whole relationship, one page later the relationship can hold
between an NP (or a noun, as there is no analysis offered) and a VP (or some
constituent the exact status of which is not made clear) or between an NP and a
predication:
(7) (a) John was persuaded by Bill to leave [...]

(c) what disturbed John was being regarded as incompetent
In (7a), John is simultaneously Object-of persuade (to leave) and Subject-of leave; [...] in
(7c), John is simultaneously Object-of disturb, Object-of regard (as incompetent), and Sub-
ject-of the predication as incompetent. (Chomsky 1965: 70)
18 | Theory
Thus, while Chomsky offers a tentative definition, he does not consistently fol-
low it in his own discourse. Three pages later he also offers a definition of an-
other relation, namely “Subject-Verb” as “the relation between the Subject-of a
Sentence and Main-Verb-of the Predicate-of the Sentence” (Chomsky 1965: 73).
After reviewing his hypothetical definitions, Chomsky comes to the conclusion
that “it seems unnecessary to extend the system of rewriting rules” (Chomsky
1965: 74) to include information on the Subject of a sentence or the Subject-Verb
relation. All these observations are related to the model’s grammatical deep
structure and Chomsky (1965: 220f, Note 32) argues that the notion Subject-of
cannot easily be extended to the surface structure and that a distinction of Top-
ic/Comment parallel to Subject/Predicate could possibly be made at the surface
level. Nonetheless, Chomsky seems to employ the traditional terminological
distinction between grammatical (i.e. surface structure) subject and logical (i.e.
deep structure, “underlying”) subject (e.g. Chomsky 1965: 23).
For the research questions outlined in Chapter 1, it is particularly important
to see that, “Verbs are not strictly subcategorized in terms of types of Subject
NP’s or type of Auxiliary, apparently” (Chomsky 1965: 96). Whether finding
counter-examples is enough to invalidate this claim is of course a matter of
debate. The line of argument presented in the following short excerpt renders it
incredibly difficult to reject any of Chomsky’s hypotheses on the basis of con-
flicting evidence within the generative framework:
It must be borne in mind that the general rules of a grammar are not invalidated by the ex-
istence of exceptions. Thus one does not eliminate the rule for forming the past tense of
Verbs from the grammar on the grounds that many Verbs are irregular; nor is the generali-
zation that relates Manner Adverbials to passivization invalidated by the fact that certain
items must be listed, in the lexicon, as conflicting with this generalization, if this turns out
to be the case. In either the case of past tense or that of passivization, the generalization is
invalidated (in the sense of “internal justification” – cf. Chapter 1, § 4) only if a more high-
ly valued grammar can be constructed that does not contain it. It is for this reason that the
discovery of peculiarities and exceptions (which are rarely lacking, in a system of the
complexity of a natural language) is generally so unrewarding and, in itself, has so little
importance for the study of the grammatical structure of the language in question, unless,
of course, it leads to the discovery of deeper generalizations. (Chomsky 1965: 218)
It is easy in such a model to relegate any non-conforming behaviour to the lexi-

con,27 to the periphery28 or – where it becomes even less relevant – to perfor-
||
27 The division of a grammatical model into a grammar and a lexicon component is one of the
major points in generative grammar, although the distinction is much older. Thus Bloomfield is
frequently quoted in this context: “The lexicon is really an appendix of the grammar, a list of
mance.29 Stefanowitsch (2010) on the other hand argues that an item-based

system can cover cases which follow general rules but that a rule-based system
cannot handle idiomatic structures, which is a serious challenge to any model
using the lexicon or periphery for exceptions.30 To sum up the 1965 position,
subjects are “secondary notions that are definable on the basis of phrase struc-
ture representations of sentences” (Davies/Dubinsky 2001: 1), thus not much
more than “epiphenomenal mnemonic terms” (Davies/Dubinsky 2001: 2).
Nonetheless the notion of subject has lived on in generative thinking. A
prominent indication of this is the introduction of the specified subject condition
(SSC) in Chomsky (1973), which is of no particular importance here and was
dropped in the 1981 model.31 It is noteworthy in this context that a condition is
||
basic irregularities” (Bloomfield 1935: 274). Bloomfield only covers morphology in the passage
around the quote (e.g. that oxen as well as ox has to figure in the lexicon) and makes no men-
tion whatsoever of unpredictable grammatical structures and the like, but his quote has often
been understood to mean the same thing as the generative extension to such an idea of the
lexicon, which is described with a vivid analogy by Di Sciullo/Williams:
[The lexicon] contains objects of no single specifiable type (words, VPs, morphemes, per-
haps intonation patterns, and so on), and those objects that it does contain are there be-
cause they fail to conform to interesting laws. The lexicon is like a prison – it contains on-
ly the lawless, and the only thing that its inmates have in common is lawlessness. (Di
Sciullo/Williams 1987: 3)
For a more detailed account of the evolution of the term lexicon and its use in different linguis-
tic schools see Neef/Vater (2006), who put “special emphasis on structural and generative
linguistics” (Neef/Vater 2006: 27), and Contini-Morava/Tobin (2000: xf). For a general overview
of research on the lexicon in the generative tradition see also the other articles in Wunderlich
(2006).
28 The observation is also made by Culicover/Jackendoff, who state that “’periphery’ tends to
become a tempting dumping ground for any irregularity one’s theory cannot at the moment
explain” (Culicover/Jackendoff 2005: 25). Note that the term periphery is an anachronism at
this point in the discussion as it was introduced only in later works (see Chomsky [1981] 1993:
9ff, 1986: 147).
29 See Chomsky (1965: 4) for the definition of competence and performance. A brief discussion
of the relevance of performance data to linguistic description will be carried out in Chapter 3.
30 Such a view was inspired by challenges to a dichotomy of lexicon and grammar on various
unrelated grounds (e.g. Bybee 1995 on morphology, Sinclair 1991 on syntagmatic relations) and
is in line with many recent theories that give up the distinction altogether. Goldberg (2006: 220)
for instance agrees with Langacker in that “[l]exicon and grammar are not distinct compo-
nents, but form a continuum of constructions” (Langacker 2005: 102).
31 Postal (1976: 170–179) gives an impressively large number of counter-examples and argu-
ments against the SSC which lead him to conclude “that the SSC is an artifact, rather than a
genuine principle of language or even a genuine principle of English grammar” (Postal 1976:
179).
20 | Theory
not a rule, which explains why in 1974 Chomsky himself subscribed to the
statement that “within the theory of generative transformational grammar (TG)
as understood by its original formulator, N. Chomsky, [… n]o transformational
rule can refer to notions like subject, etc.” (Postal 1976: 151). As Postal goes on to
show, not all of Chomsky’s followers had used the term with the same rigour
and many transformational rules had been stated that had to rely on the notion
of ‘subject’. Since Postal, one of the inventors of relational grammar (RG), firmly
believes in syntactic relations such as subject, he is rather harsh in his criticism
of the theory, although he is of course right in his observation of the lack of
rigour:
If it had been generally realized that TG in Chomsky’s sense precludes rules that refer to
the subject, some of the work involving formulation of such rules might have been cast in
the form of arguments showing the incorrectness of the theory. (Postal 1976: 152)
Most such rules also made no mention of the level at which the subject existed,
which is particularly problematic if a grammar allows for deep structure and
surface structure subjects, which leads to two possible referents of the term
(namely John and Jill in (11)) in sentences in the generation of which transfor-
mations such as the passive have been involved.
(11) John had been shot twice by Jill.
Thus, Postal quite rightly demands that “[t]o be precise, any description in
terms of subjecthood must specify the relevant level or levels at which the sub-
ject condition must be met” (Postal 1976: 156). McCloskey points out that most
of the 1970s treatments which make use of the notion of ‘subject’ attribute a
special status to it very much like ‘traditional’ grammar (and the opposite of
many valency accounts, see Section 2.2.2) in that “the NP-daughter-of-S will be
more prominent than any other argument position” (McCloskey 1997: 199).
Since his own research on Irish rejects such a position, he claims that “the As-
pects model is irredeemably English-specific” (McCloskey 1997: 200), which is
what led some researchers to the false assumption that subjecthood could be
regarded as a primitive of the theory of grammar.
In the 1970s, adherents of relational or functional categories brought for-
ward grammatical models as an alternative to mainstream generative transfor-
mational grammar. Relational grammar (Perlmutter/Postal 1974) and lexical
functional grammar (Bresnan/Kaplan 1982; LFG) were the most prominent pro-
posals. Their influence on Chomsky’s generative grammar remained limited,
though.
2.2.1.2 GB and Minimalism

With the incorporation of X-bar theory into the model of generative grammar in
Chomsky’s Lectures on Government and Binding ([1981] 1993), some of the criti-
cisms made against an English-centric view of the supposed universal proper-
ties of deep structure were successfully countered (see McCloskey 1997: 200f).
One of the major changes in the theory involved the abandonment of the cate-
gory S, which was replaced by InflP (Inflection(al) Phrase/Inflectional Projec-
tion, often referred to as IP) as the highest projection in the sentence:
InflP
Subj Infl1
Infl0 XP
X Complement
Fig. 2: Structure of a sentence in the GB model (adapted from McCloskey 1997: 201)
Thus subjects now were the NP (or later DP) in the specifier position of IP, which
allowed for cross-linguistic generalizations of no importance here. This position
again treats the subject as being more prominent than all other arguments in
the sentence. The new way of modelling sentences and their subjects also
helped capture certain properties of subjects in terms of the generative model,
for instance “the requirement that there be a structural subject” (McCloskey
1997: 202). The subject position can be assigned a theta role but does not have to
(Chomsky [1981] 1993: 36) and it is the only element that has to be expressed
even if no theta role has been assigned, so that “either the insertion of an exple-
tive element or raising of a nominal from some lower position” (McCloskey 1997:
202) is required. In Chomsky ([1981] 1993), the term subject is widely used as a
grammatical function and in various stages of the discussion. It is defined as GF
[NP,S] ([1981] 1993: 42) as shown above but in a different context the term SUB-
JECT (in upper case, as opposed to subject) is described as the “subject of an
infinitive, an NP or a small clause”32 ([1981] 1993: 209), which is a more depend-
||
32 To illustrate the scope of this term, a few of Chomsky’s sentences are reproduced here:
22 | Theory
ency-like view of subjects. Despite the fact that the subject position may be
assigned a theta role, it is still “a position not associated with a subcategoriza-
tion feature of a lexical head” (Chomsky [1981] 1993: 36), i.e. the lexical entry of
the verb does not contain formal specifications of the elements that can occur as
subjects. In this respect, which is Chomsky’s answer to one of the research ques-
tions formulated in Section 1.3, the model is opposed to valency grammar as
outlined in the next section.33 Still, regardless of the long discussion of subjects
in Chomsky ([1981] 1993), they do not have an actual theoretical status – an
observation also shared by McCloskey:
The theory provides theoretical grounding for the observed prevalence of operations rais-
ing nominal phrases into “subject position” but it entails no reference, direct or indirect,
to a theoretically primitive notion of subjecthood. (McCloskey 1997: 202)
By coincidence, the fact that Chomsky ([1981] 1993) uses the term subject far
more than a hundred times although it is not a primitive of the theory and could
be expressed in other terms is an indication of how difficult it is to discuss is-
sues in linguistic theory without reference to (often preconceived) traditional
notions everyone is (or believes to be) familiar with, even if the traditional term
is just used as a kind of shorthand to establish reference. Davies/Dubinsky even
claim that the use of the term in the “EPP [=Extended Projection Principle]34
elevated the notion ‘subject’ (albeit a configurationally defined notion) to the
level of a UG determinant of core grammar” (Davies/Dubinsky 2001: 4).35
||
(ii) he wants (very much) [for JOHN to win]
(iii) he believes [JOHN to be intelligent]
(iv) [JOHN’s reading the book] surprised me
(v) he considers [JOHN intelligent] Chomsky ([1981] 1993: 210)
The capitalised element is always the SUBJECT. This is particularly interesting in the case of
(iv) and (v) on which there is no agreement in the linguistic community.
33 In practice, valency grammarians often do not describe the subject either because it is
taken to be uninteresting.
34 The EPP states that subjects are obligatory even if no theta role is assigned to them. While
the issue is discussed in Chomsky ([1981] 1993: 38ff), the term was introduced slightly later: “I
will henceforth refer to the Projection Principle along with the requirement that clauses have
subjects as the Extended Projection Principle” (Chomsky 1982: 10; his emphasis).
35 Government Binding (GB) Theory is the theoretical background to many studies of individ-
ual phenomena related to subjects that were published in the 1980s, even if they challenge
certain positions. Thus Napoli (1989) provides a study of predication theory based on GB even
though she uses concepts that can be found in theoretically distinct approaches related to
valency/dependency grammar (e.g. Napoli 1989: 7).
In the years after the publication of GB theory, the notion of a “subject posi-
tion” was severely challenged by two independent movements which could be
regarded as theory-internal since they argued for changes in the model without
opposing the general framework as such in the same way Relational Grammar
and lexical functional grammar mentioned above did. The probably more influ-
ential of the two, the so-called “Internal Subject Hypothesis”, claimed – for
reasons that cannot be discussed here (see McCloskey 1997: 203–225 for a very
detailed account) – that subjects are actually base generated in the Verb Phrase
(VP) and end up in their position only after a movement operation. This position
is, among others, taken by Alexiadou/Anagnostopoulou (2001, 2007), who give
detailed reasons why the subject (or, in some languages the object) has to be
externalized from the VP. While this looks like a small albeit eccentric theory-
internal discussion, it has far-reaching consequences on the status of the sub-
ject:
One of the properties of the Internal Subject Hypothesis is that it blurs in a fundamental
way the distinction between internal arguments and the external argument (a distinction
introduced by Williams in 1981). If all semantic role assignment is accomplished within
lexical projections, then the structural difference between internal and external argu-
ments is lessened. (McCloskey 1997: 220)36
McCloskey (1997: 220) cites an interesting idea by Marantz (1984: 23–31) in this
context, namely that the subject is not an argument of the verb (whereas com-
plements of the verb are) but an argument of the VP as a whole (which is echoed
in CamG almost 20 years later, see the discussion above).37 Recent approaches,
most imporantly Kratzer (1996), try to model this behaviour through the intro-
duction of a further null element in the phrase structure tree which assigns the
relevant theta role.
The second challenge to the “subject position” proposed in Chomsky ([1981]
1993) is the so-called “Split Infl Hypothesis” which – as the name suggests –
claims that “Infl has a complex internal phrase structure” (McCloskey 1997:
216). Thus, according to Pollock (1989), who first suggested such an analysis,
there are reasons for splitting up the category ‘Inflection’ into an agreement and
a tense component. This in turn – in combination with often binary branching –
||
36 Since the GB model (and McCloskey, too) aims for universality, it should also be mentioned
that research on German (Oppenrieder 1991: 351) claims that S and VP are identical and that
accordingly the subject cannot be an external complement in German, either.
37 See Bresnan (1982: 348–353) for a critique of Marantz’ arguments (presented in his 1981
dissertation) and substantial counter-evidence.
24 | Theory
leads to more levels from which the subject can originate in the deep structure,
and positions outside of VP but not in the final (surface) “subject position” have
been suggested, among others by McCloskey (1996) on the basis of evidence
from Irish, a VSO language.38 Subjects may in fact undergo a series of movement
operations before they reach their final position.39
Similarly, according to Cardinaletti’s “specialization hypothesis” (1997: 50),
there is more than one subject position, the choice of which seems to depend on
the type of subject (weak/strong pronoun, pre-/post-verbal etc.). This approach
is extended in Cardinaletti (2004) and culminates in the following “cartography
of subject positions” (Cardinaletti 2004: 136):
Tab. 1: Cartography of subject positions according to Cardinaletti (2004: 136)40
SpecSubjP Subj° SpecAgrSP AgrS°* spec??P ??° spec?P ?°* SPECVP V°
DPs Weak Weak DPs DPs

pronouns pronouns
Strong pro Strong Strong
pronouns pronouns pronouns
Weak Predicate DPs
pronouns
(egli/esso)
It is noteworthy that Cardinaletti introduces a “subject-of-predication feature”

(2004: 126), which is then elaborated into a “subject criterion” by Rizzi and
Shlonsky (Rizzi 2006, Rizzi/Shlonsky 2006, 2007). The subject criterion –
named in analogy to other criteria Rizzi introduced into minimalist syntax (e.g.
||
38 It appears that no general agreement whatsoever has been reached as to the exact nature of
these elements within the generative community. Thus whether the tense projection (TP) dom-
inates the agreement projection or the other way round, whether there actually is an agreement
projection ARGP or only ARG, whether there are two ARG projections, one dominating TP and
the other being dominated by it, is still a matter of (heated) debate (see the introduction in
Boeckx 2006 for details).
39 Falk (2006a), who has a background in lexical functional grammar (LFG), also rejects the
notion of a single subject element on typological grounds: “Given the properties of mixed-
subject languages, the conclusion that subject needs to be factored into two distinct grammati-
cal functions, as we have done here, is inescapable” (2006a: 197).
40 There is also a cross-linguistic analysis based on Cardinaletti’s approach in Cardinaletti
(2014).
the Topic Criterion) – aims to replace Chomsky’s EPP. However, the basic idea
that subjects are assigned theta roles and not subcategorized for seems to re-
main unchanged even in the latest studies.
2.2.1.3 Generative Studies endorsing the subject concept

There are two studies worth mentioning here that are rooted in the generative
paradigm but depart from it on the subject issue in that they endorse a subject
function and regard it as a necessary element of the theoretical description ra-
ther than an epiphenomenon.
One of the most frequently cited studies on the definition of subject is Kee-
nan’s (1976) article “Towards a universal definition of ‘subject’”, which, as the
name suggests, is based in the paradigm of universal grammar.41 Keenan pro-
duces a list of some 30 criteria for the identification of subjects and insists that
“the subjecthood of an NP (in a sentence) is a matter of degree” (Keenan 1976:
307), which Pullum rejects as a “curious idea” (Pullum 1980: 1).42 As none of
Keenan’s properties is both necessary and sufficient, he claims that “an NP in a
b-sentence (in any L [=language]) is a subject of that sentence to the extent that
it has the properties in the properties list below. If one NP in the sentence has a
clear preponderance of the subject properties then it will be called the subject of
the sentence” (Keenan 1976: 312; his emphasis). Thus Keenan is in some way in
line with the gradient and feature oriented definitions given in the English ref-
erence grammars since he describes a prototype,43 but draws on evidence from a
wide range of languages. In consequence, not all of his properties are of rele-
vance to the definition of English subjects and some others can be rejected to
some extent with the help of counter-examples. For instance, the independent
existence of the entity referred to by the subject as opposed to the entities re-
ferred to by other NPs is asserted and illustrated using sentences such as (12a–
||
41 Of course, this is not the pure Chomskyan breed of universal grammar, as Keenan argues
for the need to include the concept ‘subject of’ (as the subject of a sentence, not a verb) in
universal grammar “in order for the many universal generalizations which use this notion to be
well defined” (1976: 305) – a position incompatible with the Chomskyan view that subjects are
not primitives of the grammar but only derived notions.
42 For methodological reasons, Keenan only looks at basic sentences (“b-sentences”) which
he defines as the most basic sentences expressing a “complete thought” (1976: 308). For him,
passives are, “in general, less basic than the corresponding actives” (1976: 310). See Johnson
(1977: 675f) for a critique of Keenan’s basic sentences and other aspects of his discussion.
43 See also Welke (2002: 137ff).
26 | Theory
c), where the subject “exists independently of the action or property expressed
by the predicate”44 (Keenan 1976: 313):
(12) a. A student wrote a poem. (Keenan 1976: 313)

b. He defined a term. (based on Keenan 1976: 313)
c. She proved a theorem. (based on Keenan 1976: 313)
d. The research project has emerged from a British Council Exchange
Link between the Departments of Geography at the Universities of
Keele and Zimbabwe. (HJ1 20312)
In (12d), however, the situation is reversed given that the British Council Ex-
change Link exists independently whereas the research project, which would
have to be identified as subject (at the grammatical level and potentially others,
too), does not. This would speak in favour of a verb-centred analysis where it is
the verb which assigns semantic roles (and possibly semantic properties) to the
clause elements and not a grammatical component that assigns these semantic
properties independently of the verb used.
Although Keenan identifies different groupings of his properties – e.g. case
marking properties, semantic role, and immediate dominance – he seems to
maintain a unity of the subject concept. For him, it appears, there is only one
subject in a sentence. A discrimination of subjects at different levels (grammati-
cal, notional, ... – see above) does not occur.
In sum, Keenan’s article is probably less helpful for the definition of the
subject in English than the reference grammars (CGEL and in particular CamG;
see Section 2.3.2), mainly due to his attempt to cover all languages.
With Predicates and their subjects, Rothstein (2001) presents her impressive
model of subjecthood, which is deeply rooted in the generative tradition, even
though she rejects the generative treatment of subjects:
The central idea […] is that the subject argument is special because it is a structurally se-
lected argument of a structurally defined constituent, and not a lexically selected argu-
ment of a lexical head (although a lexical head may constrain what can fill the subject po-
sition). (Rothstein 2001: x)
In her theory, whose principles were first put forward in 1983, the structurally
defined constituent in the quotation is the syntactic predicate, which is unsatu-
rated by default and needs a subject for saturation. This is a view which is strik-
||
44 Keenan’s criterion echoes Aristotle’s original distinction between subject and predicate
cited in Section 2.1.1.
ingly similar to Herbst/Roe (1996) in some respect, as they also separate syntac-
tic from lexical (i.e. valency) requirements for complements. Rothstein argues in
the same vein that subjects are obligatory even if there is no thematic reason for
them to be realised, i.e. if all semantic role requirements are already fulfilled.
Thus in (13), the subject is needed “despite the fact that the VP looks like a the-
matically saturated constituent” (Rothstein 2001: x).
(13) It seems that this sentence needs a subject. (Rothstein 2001: x)
Contrary to established generative theory, she claims “that it is this syntactic

definition of subject as ‘subject of a syntactic predicate’ which explains the
properties which subjects in English have,” (Rothstein 2001: xi) – a radical de-
parture from the idea that subjects are constituents in a tree that can be defined
via their position in this tree and stand in a relation to the clause as a whole.45
Rothstein also rejects any definition of subject that is related to aboutness
as “there is nothing about the world which makes it true that a proposition is
‘about’ a single element” (Rothstein 2001: 4) and she illustrates her claim with
examples of the type mentioned in Herbst/Klotz (2002) as well:
(14) a. John and Mary first met in 1989. (Rothstein 2001: 4)

b. John first met Mary in 1989. (Rothstein 2001: 4)
Of course she is nonetheless happy to “make the fairly non-controversial claim

[…] that the unmarked case in English is that the sentence subject gives the
sentence topic” (Rothstein 2001: 8) without accepting a definition that uses the
observation as a criterion.
2.2.1.4 Summary
To conclude this subsection it seems fair to state that today it is even less clear
what a subject is in generative grammar than it was at its outset.46 No uniform
concept has been adopted, and the refinement and extensions of the supposed-
ly universally applicable rules and positions have led to an immensely complex
||
45 This claim is made more verbose later in the book: “’subject’ is subject of a predicate and
not ‘subject of a clause’” (Rothstein 2001: 59) and “predication is a syntactic relation which is
independent of theta-role assignment holding between a predicate and a non-predicate (its
‘subject’)” (Rothstein 2001: 60). The latter statement is interesting as it appears that not the
verb but the entire predicate assigns theta roles, which is opposed to a valency view but in line
with the standpoint taken by Marantz (1984) or – for certain constructions – by CamG (957f).
46 For a detailed model of subjecthood in a minimalist framework, see Mohr (2005).
28 | Theory
apparatus for the generation of even the simplest English sentences. Even
though it is not a primitive of the grammar and a decreasingly sensible category
in their model, generative grammarians would still identify the same element as
surface subject in the vast majority of English sentences that most other ac-
counts would, too. A good summary of the development of the term in genera-
tive grammar is in fact provided by McCloskey’s (1997) introduction:
[I]n the tradition which extends from the “Standard Theory” through the “Extended
Standard Theory” to “Principles and Parameters Theory” and then to the “Minimalist Pro-
gram”, the notion of subject plays no formal role at all. Not only is “subject” not a primi-
tive term in these theories, but in their most recent instantiations it is not even clear that
there is any derived or defined notion which captures the traditional intuition of what a
subject is (as there was, for instance, in the theory of Chomsky 1965). What we have seen,
in a sense, is a progressive deconstruction of the traditional category “subject” so that the
properties which are supposed to define it are distributed across a range of distinct (but
derivationally linked) syntactic entities and positions. (McCloskey 1997: 197)
Davies/Dubinsky (2001: 8) point out that such proposals can be found ten or
twenty years earlier in relational grammar.
In relation to our research questions, we can thus state that subjects in gen-
erative grammar are not syntactically selected by the verb (i.e. not “subcatego-
rized”), even though they may be assigned a theta role.47 Such a view is incom-
patible with the approaches presented in the following section. On the other
hand, due to the Extended Projection Principle, dummy subjects48 can be pro-
vided by the grammar if no theta role for a subject is assigned. Such a position is
shared by many valency grammarians and is relevant for the treatment of ex-
traposed structures (see Chapter 7 for discussion).
||
47 Before the incorporation of theta roles into the model, semantic selection was proposed as a
means of restricting the use of any item as subject with any predicate:
Predicates are not (Chomsky (1965)) subcategorized for subject NPs – every predicate of
English takes a subject. Selection for complement types, however, extends to subjects, as
the examples in (i) and (ii) show:
(i) a. Who was shot in the fight last night is still unclear.
b. *Who was shot in the fight last night is unusual.
(ii) a. *For a man to be shot in a fight is unclear.
b. For a man to be shot in a fight is unusual. Grimshaw (1979: 314)
48 In the generative model, so-called subject raising may take place instead.
2.2.2 Valency models
The terms dependency and valency are often treated as a necessary pairing. Both
are usually attributed to Lucien Tesnière’s Eléments de Syntaxe structurale
([1959] 1965) and some of his earlier works, although the history of the terms is
not as straightforward as it may seem.49 For a full theoretical background of
valency/dependency theory see Heringer (1970, 1996), Welke (1988, 2011), Hel-
big (1992). For treatments of English, see Emons (1974, 1978), Allerton (1982),
and both Herbst et al. (2004) and Herbst/Schüller (2008) as the immediate
background to the present study. While Herbst/Schüller take a valency ap-
proach, their model is not a dependency grammar (see Section 2.2.2.3 for de-
tails).
Furthermore, the concept of valency is often extended to noun and adjec-
tive valency. Thus see Herbst (1983) for adjective valency in English and
Schierholz (2001) or Hölzner (2007) for noun valency in German. Teubert (2003)
is a general overview of noun valency and Groß (2003) of adjective valency.
Fischer (1997) offers a contrastive perspective on German and English verb va-
lency.
2.2.2.1 Basic tenets

To begin with, let us briefly introduce some basic concepts of valency theory,
starting with the idea of valency itself: “The basic assumption of valency theory
is that the verb occupies a central position in the sentence because the verb
determines how many other elements have to occur in order to form a grammat-
ical sentence” (Herbst et al. 2004: xxiv). Elements whose occurrence is specific
for a given valency carrier are called complements; all other elements in a sen-
tence are called adjuncts. The distinction between complements and adjuncts,
though not always straightforward,50 is fundamental to valency grammar. Fur-
thermore obligatory and optional complements can be distinguished.51 Allerton
(1975, 1982) introduces a third option in the form of a contextually optional
complement,52 which does not have to appear in a sentence if it is identifiable
||
49 For a detailed account of valency and dependency in Tesnière’s works see Askedal (2003),
who includes references to historical overviews as well.
50 See Somers (1987) for a thorough review of criteria and tests for complement status.
51 Adjuncts are by definition optional. Only few valency grammarians agree with Welke’s
(1988) distinction between optional and obligatory adjuncts.
52 Allerton speaks of indefinite deletion and contextual deletion; the term contextually optional
is preferred by Herbst, who says that “the use of the term deletion implies that the divalent use
30 | Theory
from the context, which is taken up by Herbst et al. (2004) and Herbst/Schüller
(2008).
The status of the subject in valency theory is that of a complement of the
verb.53 In German valency theory, the subject in active declarative clauses is
usually treated as an obligatory complement (e.g. Welke 2011: 55) because it has
to be present in such clauses and has nominative case marking. Such an ap-
proach is also taken in VALBU (Schumacher et al. 2004), which can lead to the
conclusion that active declarative clauses are apparently regarded as primary.
In a similar vein, Welke (1988: 69f) states that the valency of the verb in an ac-
tive declarative clause is the basic valency that is stored in the lexicon entry of
the verb in question and that verbs used in passive sentences show a valency
reduction.54 Herbst/Roe (1996) offer a different account: They argue against a
derivation of passive clauses from active clauses (and thus of passive valency
from active valency) and regard them as structural alternatives instead.55 If ac-
tive and passive sentences are structural alternatives and if the complement
that realizes the KILLER argument is not present in (15) below, it cannot be treat-
ed as an obligatory complement of the verb kill in (16) either since if we treat kill
as the same verb in both sentences, anything that is obligatory from the point of
the view of the verb would have to be present in (15), too:
(15) Hagrid’s roosters were killed! (HP2.216)
(16) a. Voldemort killed my parents, remember? (HP1.197)

b. *Killed my parents, remember?
||
represents a primary pattern which is modified through a process of deletion, which is a view
that we would not subscribe to. In particular, the term deletion seems inappropriate if it is
taken to mean ‘verbatim recoverability’ because no such requirement holds in this case”
(Herbst 1999). According to Helbig (1992: 99) and Heringer (1996: 162), contextual optionality is
the default case of optionality and pure optionality is less common.
53 Tesnière already states that the subject should be regarded as “un complément comme les
autres” (Tesnière [1959] 1965: 109). Wegener (1990: 153f) criticises this view for the description
of German from a generative position on the basis of a variety of arguments, the two most
important of which may be psychological reality (e.g. if we cite verbs, we use forms such as
“give sb. sth.”) and economy (since it is highly uneconomical to specify for nearly every verb in
the language that it takes a nominative complement).
54 Heringer (1996: 86) on the other hand assumes that the quantitative valency is constant in
the active and the passive voice in German.
55 This treatment has to be seen in connection with their introduction of three levels of neces-
sity discussed below.
It follows logically that the fact that (16b) is ungrammatical cannot be due to
Voldemort being an obligatory element of the verb kill in (16a). Accordingly,
there must be some other requirement, which was named structural necessity by
Herbst and Roe (1996). Thus the requirement that all finite active declarative
clauses have to have a subject in English56 exists at a structural level inde-
pendently of valency. In our example, kill has an optional complement that
represents the killed being and another optional complement that represents
the killer; nonetheless the killer, Voldemort, has to be present for structural
reasons in (16). The third level of necessity introduced by Herbst and Roe is
communicative necessity. At this level, elements that do not even have comple-
ment status can be obligatory.
(17) a. “Professor Dumbledore left ten minutes ago,” she said coldly.
(HP1.194)
Thus ten minutes ago in (17a) might well be necessary at the communicative
level if the sentence is taken as an answer to
(17) b. When did Professor Dumbledore leave Hogwarts?
even though it would have to be treated as an adjunct from a valency perspec-

tive.
2.2.2.2 Criticism and multi-level approaches to valency

The fundamental distinction between complements and adjuncts presented in
the previous section was seriously challenged in German linguistics from the
1980s onwards. While Helbig (1992) discusses the extension to logical, semantic
and pragmatic levels the concept of valency had seen in the 1970s and accord-
ingly distinguishes up to six levels of valency description, he still maintains the
distinction between complements and adjuncts, even if he is fully aware that
there are many issues and that the distinction thus may be a case of gradience
(Helbig 1992: 94ff; see also Somers 1984 and 1987). Similarly, the model em-
ployed in the VDE makes use of valency slots (roughly Helbig’s logical level),
semantic roles, a syntactic level and often lists semantic features of the slots in
||
56 This position is in fact compatible with Chomsky’s Extended Projection Principle (see
above) at first sight, but the perspective is of course different since in valency grammar the
subject is analysed as a complement of the verb and Herbst/Roe only make a statement about
the obligatoriness of complements, not about filling a non-theta slot with another element. See
also the discussion by Matthews (1981: 275–278).
32 | Theory
the notes on meaning. Despite the problems of the complement/adjunct distinc-

tion discussed in detail in the front matter of the dictionary, the distinction is
maintained. The most important reason for this choice is that both Helbig’s and
Herbst et al.’s approaches are mainly targeted at lexicographic applicability, so
didactic considerations have to play an important role in their models.
From a more theoretical perspective,57 Jacobs (1994) criticizes the prevalent
valency models58 and suggests a multi-dimensional concept of valency. His
alternative model was taken up a in a wide range of publications (see Welke
2011: 57ff for references) and forms the basis of many analyses and valency
models (for instance Ágel 2000: 167ff) even though it reads like a deconstruction
of the concept of valency altogether. In fact, he compares the term valency to the
terms subject and object in that they all are simplifications that combine several
phenomena that often occur together but are independent of one another in
principle into one idealized and overgeneralized concept (Jacobs 1994: 68). We
shall use the revised version of Jacobs’ model hinted at in the postscript to his
book to illustrate the multi-dimensional character of such a recent understand-
ing of valency. According to his analysis, the identification of complements of a
valency carrier is based on the following four independent relations59
– obligatoriness (“Notwendigkeit”; NOT)
– logico-semantic argumenthood (“Argumenthaftigkeit”; ARG)
– formal specification (“Formale Spezifität”; FOSP)
– semantic specification (“Inhaltliche Spezifität”; INSP)
Since ARG is a relation at the so-called logical level of linguistic description and
INSP at the semantic level, the two most relevant relations for the present study
– since it aims to be a study of syntax – are NOT and FOSP. Also, these two are
the highest-ranking elements in a grammaticalization hierarchy proposed by
Jacobs:
||
57 It makes sense to follow Ágel here: “Um theoretische Probleme adäquat angehen zu kön-
nen, müssen theoriebezogene und praxisbezogene Argumentation sauber auseinander ge-
halten werden“ [“To be able to tackle theoretical problems appropriately, theory-related and
practice-related argumentation have to be strictly separated.”] (Ágel 2000: 171).
58 His original manuscript was written in 1986 and circulated widely before its publication in
1994, but his analyses and interpretations were just as valid then. The published version con-
tains a postscript written in 1993, in which Jacobs modifies parts of his theory. Jacobs (2003) is
a further modification.
59 Jacobs’ model originally contained seven relations (1994: 14ff); Ágel (2000: 167ff) distin-
guishes five, but the four presented here are what one might want to call a common core.
{ NOT
FOSP }
> INSP > ARG
Fig. 3: Hierarchy of the grammaticalization of the argument relation (adapted from Jacobs
1994: 71)
Given that in the previous section we showed that basically NOT (i.e. obligatori-
ness; related to not being able to occur freely) is one criterion for complement
status and that FOSP (i.e. the formal determination of a complement by the
valency carrier) is the other, Jacobs’ criticism is not so much a deconstruction of
the idea of valency but rather a (necessary and important) wake-up call to re-
mind linguists that a mixture of relations (and accordingly criteria) is responsi-
ble for the many problematic cases of distinctions between adjuncts and com-
plements (see also Helbig 1992 for a discussion) and that the arguments
exchanged by researchers were often at different levels or focused on different
relations, which made a fruitful discussion impossible. Jacobs himself takes
back some of his criticism in the postscript and accepts valency as a prototypi-
cal bundle of relations (1994: 71).
2.2.2.3 The role of valency in grammatical models

While dependency models usually need some sort of valency concept, not all
models that make use of valency can be classified as dependency models. Many
German grammars are dependency models with a valency component, e.g. Wel-
ke (1988), Eroms (2000),60 Engel (2004). Eisenberg (2006) seems to tend more
towards constituent structures as the sentence is the highest ranking unit in his
graphs. For valency descriptions of English, the situation is different: Emons
(1978) uses a constituent structure model based on earlier work by Heringer on
German; Allerton favours a dependency model over constituency (1982: 22–25)
but also proclaims that “[i]t goes without saying that a constituency relationship
can hold between two valency structures” (Allerton 1982: 142), so it appears as if
the two kinds of analysis are intertwined in some way. Fischer (1997) based his
contrastive analysis of German and English on Engel’s dependency grammar for
German but acknowledges the merits of constituent structure and makes use of
it in one of his chapters. While not being in the tradition of valency grammar,
Matthews (1981) has a certain closeness to valency and dependency approaches
||
60 Eroms’ approach has to be classified as a dependency model although he represents
S[entence] as the top node in his diagrams.
34 | Theory
and tries to combine dependency with constituent structure models, which

results in diagrams of the following type:61
S[ V[pass]V NP[your sister]NP NP[the meat]NP ]S
Fig. 4: Combined dependency/constituency diagram for “Pass your sister the meat.” (adapted
from Matthews 1981: 91)
Such a view is in line with Welke’s position that sentences are always structured
in both ways (Welke 2011: 23).
Similarly, Herbst/Schüller (2008: 4–9, 11) prefer a constituent structure
model over a dependency model since their step by step division of sentence
elements enables them to account for certain pro-forms and other syntactic tests
(e.g. Herbst/Schüller 2008: 7), which would be more difficult in a strict depend-
ency model. However, they combine the grammatical aspect of constituency
and the lexical aspect of valency by incorporating both into their analytical
terminology, so that valency relations are present at the same time as a constit-
uent structure. Thus he in (18) is treated as subject complement unit (SCU) be-
cause it is “the clause unit that functions as the subject of the clause and is
realised by a complement of the governing verb” (Herbst/Schüller 2008: 165).
(18) And he conned me into posting his mail! (KCX 4990)
In copular clauses, some valency/dependency approaches treat the predicative

element as the head (see de Marneffe/Manning 2008 for an applied perspec-
tive), some posit a combined head which consists of the copula and the predica-
tive element (see for instance Heringer 1970: 180ff and the tentative proposal in
Herbst/Schüller 2008: 141f) and some reject the idea and treat the verb as the
highest ranking element (see for instance Engel 2004). The phenomenon will be
discussed in more detail in Chapter 6.
Concord is treated independently from verb valency by Herbst/Schüller
(2008) while Eroms (2000: 183ff) sees it as an indicator of the relationship be-
tween the finite verb (i.e. the auxiliary whenever present and possibly the finite
component of the lexical verb) and the subject in German, which leads him to
claim that the subject is not a dependent of the lexical verb but of the conjugat-
ed verb. It is important to note that he accepts that the main verb has a valency
||
61 See also Fischer (1997: 39) for alternative ways of presenting the same kind of information.
slot that is filled by the subject but that he sees it as immediately dependent on
the finite element (he also speaks of “Strukturvalenz” [‘structural valency’;
Eroms 2000: 139] in this context).
We can see that although valency and dependency are often treated as be-
longing together (particularly in German linguistics), this is not necessarily the
case. Järventausta also supports this view by making clear that the principal
difference between both approaches is that valency theory is a theory of the
lexicon and dependency theory a theory of syntax (2003: 783).
2.2.2.4 Note on the present study

Within Herbst’s model of valency theory (Herbst et al. 2004, Herbst/Roe 1996,
Herbst/Schüller 2008), the research question is whether the (item usually
called) subject is a complement of the verb or not. As briefly described above,
the issue had not been raised in German valency theory62 because the relations
called NOT (obligatoriness) and FOSP (formal specification) in Jacobs’ model
were both analysed as being met. Given the introduction of different levels of
necessity by Herbst/Roe (1996), one has to maintain that within Herbst’s model
NOT is not met for many subjects in English. For German linguistic theory, this
view is not necessarily a problem, since the nominative case markings that
German subject [NP]s show actually indicate an FOSP relation and many Ger-
man models then posit the same case for clausal subjects even though clauses
do not inflect for case. For English, [NP]s do not offer substantial evidence for
an FOSP relationship since they can occur with any verb and often do not show
case markings,63 and that is the reason why the present study aims to show that
an FOSP relation exists with the help of clausal subjects, the distribution of
which is more complex than that of [NP]s.
||
62 There are discussions of the problem, though. See for instance Järventausta’s telling title
“Das Subjektproblem in der Valenzforschung” (‘The problem of the subject in valency re-
search’) (2003). In fact, her questions are very much like those asked in this study. However,
she also observes that in German dependency grammar models, the subject always has com-
plement status: “Das Subjekt wird ohne Ausnahme zu den Aktanten gezählt” (‘The subject is
counted among the actants without exception.’) (Järventausta 2003: 785).
63 Even if they show case markings, these could be analysed as properties of their position in
the clause and would not have to be treated as assigned by the valency carrier. Due to the
much less rigid word order in German, such an argument would not work there.
36 | Theory
2.3 Towards a definition of subject in English

After the overview of theoretical approaches towards subjects presented above,
the present section aims to describe in a more systematic manner what is under-
stood by the term subject. It will present the criteria usually given for the identi-
fication and/or definition of subjects in grammatical descriptions of English and
discuss their validity as well as their relevance for the present study.
2.3.1 Sentence/Clause
For the definition of the term subject, it is necessary to refer to the entity in
which the subject occurs. Pre-theoretically, this unit is called a sentence, and
many grammarians make use of this term in one way or another.
For Jespersen, a sentence is “a (relatively) complete and independent unit
of communication” (Jespersen 1933: 106), which is a pragmatic notion we would
call utterance today rather than a grammatical definition of sentence, so it is of
limited use for us. Zandvoort’s grammar departed from this terminology over
time, since he removed the term utterance from later editions but still focused
on communicative units:
An oral or written communication is made up of one or more units, each of which contains
a complete utterance formed according to a definite pattern. Such units are called SEN-
TENCES. (Zandvoort 1965: 195; his emphasis)
An oral or written communication is made up of one or more units called SENTENCES. (Zan-
dvoort 1972: 195; his emphasis)
He then went on to delimit sentences from one another by means of orthogra-

phy and intonation.
CGEL is more modern in this respect and insists on a separation of levels:
More careful consideration of the relation between grammar, semantics, and pragmatics
will require further distinction of terminology. Thus we may distinguish SENTENCE (a
grammatically autonomous unit) from UTTERANCE (a unit which is autonomous in terms of
its pragmatic or communicative function). (CGEL 78; their emphasis)
However, the authors of CGEL state that “[t]he CLAUSE, particularly the inde-
pendent clause […], is in many ways a more clearly-defined unit than the sen-
tence” (CGEL 47; their emphasis), so that the subject is treated as a constituent
of a clause. We shall follow CGEL’s argument in the present study and distin-
guish between sentences and clauses where necessary. We shall also follow
Towards a definition of subject in English | 37
CGEL’s terminological distinction between a main clause (the whole of example

(19)), a subordinate clause (solid line), and a matrix clause (dotted line).
(19) Most British people believed that, whatever their own prosperity, the
fortunes of their country were bad and getting worse. (A66 1689)
The problem is, however, that CGEL does not offer a clear-cut definition of the
term clause, either. Using a range of clause elements and example clauses, their
concept of clause is elucidated via the clause structure and can probably be
grasped best in the sense of Wittgenstein’s family resemblance (Wittgenstein
1953: 32). Their generalizations about clause structure (“The verb element (V) is
the most ‘central’ element, and in all the examples above it is preceded by the
subject (S)” (CGEL: 50)) are clearly prototypical in character, as indicated by the
existence of clauses without subjects and verbless clauses, which are described
later in the grammar.
While Huddleston/Pullum’s definition of the clause as “a syntactic con-
struction consisting (in the central cases) of a subject and a predicate” (CamG
44) is compatible with CGEL’s account, the authors reject the division of sen-
tences into simple, complex and compound sentences because the distinction is
based on a mixture of two dimensions, i.e. embedding and coordination (CamG
45). They define canonical (= basic) and non-canonical clauses to begin with in
order to simplify the syntactic description and then “describe the rest deriva-
tively” (CamG 46), but it is made very clear that this is “only a descriptive de-
vice” (CamG 48) and that any view which treats derivation as a psychological
process has to be rejected. While CamG’s criticism is well-founded, it is largely
irrelevant for our study, so the terms complex and compound will be used
where necessary for easy readability.
To sum up, while clause is the preferred term over sentence, its definition is
prototypical in character and usually refers to subjects. Strictly speaking, this
would mean that the concept cannot be used in a definition of subject without
risk of circularity.
2.3.2 Criteria
The first 10 criteria presented below follow the detailed list of “[d]istinctive
grammatical properties of the subject” (CamG 236) given by CamG (236–239),
from where the headings are borrowed as well. Criteria 11 to 17 are based on
other works.
38 | Theory
1. Category
According to CGEL a subject is “normally a noun phrase […] or a nominal
clause” (CGEL 724). A restricted but not uncommon type of subject in the form
of a prepositional phrase or other “adverbial form” (CGEL 736) is also possible:64
(20) Will after the show be soon enough? (CGEL 736; their italics)
Similarly, CamG states that the “prototypical subject has the form of an NP”
(CamG 236). They show that in those cases where it is the only NP in the clause
or which functions directly in the clause, the form is a sufficient criterion. Sub-
ordinate clauses are mentioned as non-prototypical, as are other categories
which “appear as subject only under very restrictive conditions” (CamG 236).
2. Position
In CamG’s terminology, the default subject position is before the predicator,
except for inverted constructions, which are discussed below. Even if other
complements are fronted, the subject is the constituent before the predicator,
although an adjunct can intervene between the two (CamG 236f). CGEL takes a
similarly prototypical view when it states that the subject “normally occurs
before the verb in declarative clauses” (CGEL 724). For some structures, such as
the examples in (3) on page 11, the identification of the subject based on the
positional criterion is difficult since they may be treated as cases of inversion.65
3. Case
What little case marking left in English is relevant to the identification of sub-
jects as the distinct subjective (CGEL; nominative in CamG) forms (I, he, she, we,
they) are used in subject position of finite clauses and objective (CGEL; accusa-
tive in CamG) forms (me, him, her, us, them) in object position. CamG (237) right-
ly notes that case only plays a marginal role in identifying subjects. No mention
is made of sentences of the type exemplified by (21a) which are often treated as
the ‘correct’ version by purists – as opposed to the more frequent variant in
(21b):66
(21) a. It is I.
b. It is me.
||
64 Newmeyer rejects an analysis put forward by Bresnan, who claims that such uses are ellip-
tical and have in fact an underlying NP structure (Newmeyer 2003: 163).
65 See Patten (2016) for a recent detailed discussion of such structures.
66 See Palmer (1971: 15ff) for a detailed discussion.
In the first sentence, the postverbal element is in nominative case but is usually
regarded as the subject complement (Palmer 1971: 15) nonetheless. Given that
the semantic structure and information structure of both is identical, it would
be counter-intuitive, although theoretically possible, to argue that (21a) is an
inverted structure with the subject following the verb whereas (21b) is the ca-
nonical structure.
4. Agreement
As with case, agreement is of limited use in the identification of subjects as –
except for the verb be – the only contrast in person and number inflection is
“between 3rd person singular and any other person-number combination”
(CamG 237) in the present tense and in finite clauses. To determine the subjec-
thood of elements on the basis of inflection, CamG suggests a commutation test,
however. Thus replacing the personal pronoun They in (22a) with She to form
(22b) leads to a change of agreement on the verb, indicating that They is indeed
the subject in (22a).
(22) a. They accept your proposal.

b. She accepts your proposal.
For English there are numerous exceptions to the basic rules of concord that are
discussed in great detail in CGEL (755–767); for our purposes the issues with
nominal relative clauses and with a conflict between grammatical and notional
concord are of limited importance, though. For variation in concord with other
types of clausal subjects see the discussion under uniqueness (criterion 10 be-
low) and in Section 7.1.3.2.67
5. Inversion
Subjects follow the predicator (operator in CGEL 724) in “closed interrogative
main clauses and various other constructions” (CamG 237) and this again is
useful as an indirect test for subjecthood. Sentence (22a) can be turned into the
interrogative (22c), which confirms the subject status of They.
(22) c Do they accept your proposal?
||
67 For clausal subjects in German, Oppenrieder (2006: 901) even wonders whether agreement
exists or whether a neutral replacement form, i.e. 3rd person singular, is used.
40 | Theory
6. Open interrogatives
According to CGEL “[i]n wh-interrogative clauses, subject-operator inversion
also occurs except where the wh-element is itself the subject” (CGEL 725). Ex-
amples (23a–b) illustrate both cases:
(23) a. What have you been telling him? (HP1.187)

b. What has been going on? (HP1.82)
This property can thus also be used as a test to determine the subject status of
an element and is listed by CamG (238), too.
7. Tags
CGEL (725) and CamG agree that “[i]nterrogative tags attached to a declarative
clause contain a subject pronoun that agrees with the subject of that clause”
(CamG 238). Tags can be used as a relatively reliable test as well, given that they
also work if the canonical order of elements is reversed as in (24):
(24) Even clearer is the second point, isn’t it? (CamG 238)
8. Coordination
“Since its default position is external to the VP, the subject can enter straight-
forwardly into construction with a VP-coordination” (CamG 238). Examples of
the type given in (25a) are presented as evidence:
(25) a. He turned there and waved his gun at us. (B11 156)
Indeed, coordination of the type exemplified in (25a) creates problems for shal-
low syntactic structures such as the default CGEL model outlined above as
turned and there do not form a constituent of their own, being both immediate
constituents of the clause in structurally simpler sentences such as (25b).
(25) b. He turned there.
CGEL solves the problem by speaking of a (“very common”) coordination of

predicates (CGEL 948) despite the fact that the authors “find little need to refer
to the predicate as a separate structural unit in the description of English
grammar” (CGEL 79). CamG is consistent in this respect, but their model fails to
explain why coordination can occur between groups of elements that do not
have constituent status in their model, either, as in (26):
(26) [T]hey were working hard and long hours every day and they de-
manded and they deserved a higher wage. (HEM 272)
The underlined structures in (26) have to be treated as coordinated given that

they share the same direct object (“a higher wage”), but it would be hard to
conceive of an analysis that treats the two as constituents in clause structure.68
9. Obligatoriness
In CGEL, “[a] subject is obligatory in finite clauses except in imperative clauses,
where it is normally absent but implied” (CGEL 725). The structure in (27) could
be regarded as a (comparatively marginal) counter-example:
(27) Wish you were here. (CGEL 846)69
Another counter-example is diary style, which makes a passage such as (28)

appear perfectly normal, despite the “missing” subjects.
(28) Went to school. Found it closed. In my anguish I had forgotten that I

am on holiday. Didn’t want to go home, so went to see Bert Baxter in-
stead. (Townsend 2003: 58)
Thus the obligatoriness of the subject has to be seen in relation to ‘normal’,

‘unmarked’ and possible written clauses in careful style.
Similarly to CGEL, CamG states that “[i]n general, the subject is an obligato-
ry element” (CamG 238) but also mentions exceptions such as certain clause
types (imperative, non-finites) or casual style. The obligatoriness is then ex-
plained in more detail:
Whether a clause has an object or not depends on the lexical properties of the verb (e.g.
appear excludes one, while use normally requires one), but a subject is required in all ca-
nonical clauses. (CamG 238)
Without explicitly distinguishing levels of valency and structural necessity as

done for instance by Herbst/Roe (1996; see also the discussion in Section 2.2.2
above), the authors of CamG nonetheless make clear that the obligatoriness of
an element in subject position is determined by the clausal structure and
grammatical rules for forming English sentences rather than by the valency of
the verb governing the sentence. They deduce that this requirement leads to
||
68 CamG finds an easy way out by distinguishing basic coordination from non-basic coordina-
tion (CamG 238). Since the criterion for this distinction is constituent status, though, the argu-
ment is circular.
69 For further information on sentences of this type see the section on “Block language” in
CGEL (845–847).
42 | Theory
sentences in which it exists as a dummy subject without discernable meaning,

echoing Chomsky’s Extended Projection Principle (see Section 2.2.1).
In order to illustrate the obligatoriness of subjects, CamG makes use of what
they call a “maximal finite reduction”70 (CamG 239) of a sentence. Example (29a)
can thus be reduced to the maximally reduced finite variant (29c) in answer to
(29b), which tells us that She and has are obligatory in sentence (29a):
(29) a. Sue has eaten already. (CamG 239)

b. Has Sue eaten already? (CamG 239)
c. She has. (CamG 239)
The problem with this criterion is that it is based on CamG’s canonical clause,
and canonical clauses are the ones which contain subjects, so there is a certain
circularity in the argument. Similarly, since CGEL defines clause structure with
reference to subjects, so obligatoriness cannot be used as a criterion without
circularity.
10. Uniqueness
In CamG (239), only one subject is allowed per clause. This is in line with most
other accounts, if we stay at the same level of analysis. So-called extraposed
subjects are not treated as subjects in CamG and neither are what they call dis-
placed subjects in existential clauses.71 CamG also extends uniqueness to mean
that even coordination of subjects does not exist; the coordination in (30) is a
coordination of NPs instead.
(30) Sir William and her Ladyship have been noticing things, I can tell you.
(A0D 2300)
The approach is only possible because coordination in CamG is not restricted to

elements of the same syntactic category, it rather occurs between “elements of
syntactically equal status” (CamG 66), which could be phrases or clauses alike:72
(31) a. She'll be arriving [tomorrow or on Friday]. (CamG 66)
||
70 When CamG introduces the concept, it is referred to as “maximal finite reduction” (CamG
239), but the term “minimal finite reduction” (CamG 243) occurs as well, apparently for the
same structure.
71 See Section 7.1 for more details on their treatment of extraposition and Section 8.3 for exis-
tentials.
72 This is contrary to the position taken in Chapter 13 of CGEL, which only allows coordination
of NPs with NPs or of clauses with clauses.
b. You must find out [the cost and whether you can pay by credit card].
(CamG 45)
The criteria of which elements can be coordinated are discussed in the following
paragraph:
Coordinates must be syntactically alike, but the syntactic likeness that is required is in
general a matter of function rather than of category. Thus in the clauses She’ll be arriving
tomorrow and She’ll be arriving on Friday, the underlined phrases have the same function
(adjunct of temporal location), and this makes it possible to coordinate them, as in [(31a)],
even though the first is an NP and the second a PP. (CamG 66; their emphasis)
Relying on evidence from the functional level to justify a coordinated structure

at the formal level is, however, slightly dubious – and it is definitely in stark
contrast to Pullum’s otherwise quite harsh criticism of such arguments in gen-
eral:73
People do not confuse butter knives with screwdrivers, even though occasionally someone
who cannot find a screwdriver may use a butter knife to turn a screw. Yet in grammar
people just cannot keep syntactically relevant categories or classes of words separate from
the relational properties they have when used in particular constructions, and cannot
keep either separate from meaning. (Pullum 2009: 255)
It is not surprising that we find such coordination between formally different

elements in subjects, too:
(32) Ideas for innovation and adapting to change are more accepted by the
small organisation culture. (G0U 2018)74
The authors claim that “agreement and tags treat the coordination as a whole as
subject, not the separate parts” (CamG 239). However, there is counter-evidence
in the context of clausal subjects:
(33) Checking high bills and dealing with tree roots are among the topics
we cover. (CG5 47)
||
73 It has to be noted, though, that Pullum is not the author of the cited passage in CamG.
74 Although one might argue that in this case innovation and adapting to change are coordi-
nated prepositional complements, there is a reading which coordinates Ideas for innovation
with adapting to change as can be seen in the sentence Adapting to change and ideas for innova-
tion are more accepted by the small organisation culture.
44 | Theory
(34) Entering the transcendent and feeling the beautiful ideas of creativity
is to escape from the sad feelings of the child. (B1F 1497)
Whether two coordinated clauses take a plural verb or a singular verb (or the
respective tag) seems to be related to the question of whether the two clauses
are conceived as one unit of meaning (one action/event/entity/...) or as several
ones. Thus uniqueness in the strict sense laid out by CamG is an at least partly
questionable criterion.
11. Reflexive pronouns
CGEL shows that reflexive pronouns used as “direct object, indirect object, sub-
ject complement, or prepositional complement” (CGEL 725) agree with the sub-
ject:
(35) a. He killed himself. (HTU 5270)

b. *He killed herself.
They add that “[t]he same concord relation generally applies when the emphatic
genitive my own, etc is used” (CGEL 725; their italics).
12. Passivization
While CamG does not treat passivization as relevant to subjecthood, CGEL posits
a regular relationship between the underlined and the italicized elements in the
following examples:
(36) a. His father shot him.

b. He was shot (by his father).
There is a systematic correspondence between active and passive clauses in that the direct
or indirect object of an active clause becomes the subject of a passive clause while the
subject of the active clause is either omitted or made the complement in a by-agent
phrase[.] (CGEL 725)
13. Theme/topic
CGEL notes that “[t]he subject is typically the theme (or topic) of the clause”
(CGEL 726) with theme defined “in terms of position and prosody respectively”
(CGEL 1362). As the prosodic criterion is limited to spoken language and thus
difficult to verify in written corpora, the position criterion is the only relevant
one for our study: “THEME is the name we give to the initial part of any structure
when we consider it from an informational point of view” (CGEL 1361). Thus
their approach is in line with Halliday’s definition of theme as “the point of
departure for the message” (Halliday 1994: 34), but not all researchers would
agree as to the treatment of theme and topic as basically the same.75 However, as
the two often coincide (and often coincide with given discussed in the next par-
agraph) and given that they are less relevant to the description of clausal sub-
jects, which often contain both thematic and rhematic information anyway, the
distinction is of limited use for our purposes and need thus not be made.
Since in English adjuncts quite often occur as the initial part of a sentence,
counter-examples are not hard to find:
(37) After a while you fly out. (A05 738)
The underlined part is not the subject according to syntactic criteria, so we have
to be aware that the match of syntax and information structure that CGEL pro-
poses is an imperfect one.
14. Given information
What is given and what is new information in a sentence is a matter of context
and thus often cannot be determined by considering a sentence in isolation.
While the subject prototypically (in the case of (pro-)nominal subjects) contains
given information, clausal subjects express propositions of their own and thus
as a rule contain at least some more or less new information. That the subject
often contains given information is also acknowledged by Dowty:
In an adequate linguistic description, greater relative degrees of connectedness to previ-

ous discourse, givenness, etc., must be explicitly specified as a semantic correlate of
grammatical subject denotations (in English-like languages). (Dowty 1991: 564)
Again, CGEL makes use of an information-structural tendency to characterise

typical subjects, but as a defining criterion for a syntactic element, the property
is highly problematic.
15. Agentivity
According to CGEL, “[i]n a clause that is not passive, the subject is agentive if
the agentive role is expressed in the clause” (CGEL 726). If we take the classic
definition by Fillmore, agentive is “the case of the typically animate perceived
instigator of the action identified by the verb” (Fillmore 1968: 24; similarly CGEL
741). This is straightforward in many English clauses:
(38) My brother hit me with a stone. (C86 2832)
||
75 The terms theme and topic are used interchangeably in CGEL, with the authors fully aware
that some linguists use the term topic for what they call given (CGEL 1362).
46 | Theory
A problem arises in cases such as (39b) discussed in Herbst/Klotz (2002), where

the grammatical subject in intransitive uses combines the referents that occur
separately as agent and patient in transitive uses such as (39a):
(39) a. He met her in Paris.

b. They met in Paris.
Furthermore, the word animate in the definition causes problems if we have

clausal subjects since these usually represent facts, ideas, actions, … but not
people (and neither do many nominal subjects), but CGEL does not discuss
participants that are not realized by noun phrases in any detail (CGEL 740f).
As we have seen above, Jespersen presents counter-evidence for equating
subjects with agents (as in He suffered torture.). Furthermore, over 30 years of
research on semantic roles has shown that any delimitation of semantic roles is
highly problematic and to some extent arbitrary. The problem of the definition
of semantic roles is illustrated in detail by Dowty (1991: 553f for agent), who
proposes a distinction between only two prototypical roles he names proto-
agent and proto-patient (Dowty 1991: 572). In this model, the [that_CL] in (40)
would be rather a proto-agent than a proto-patient:
(40) That they have cost me no more than my time makes such decisions
much easier than if I had paid for them in gold. (A0G 1023)
Herbst/Schüller (2008: 158ff), by contrast, advocate a two-level approach to

semantic roles by distinguishing between participant roles, which are verb-
specific, and clausal roles, which are related to sentence structure. Subjects in
active declarative clauses thus automatically receive an agentivity-
interpretation.76 If we accept this model, we would have to do away altogether
with agentivity as a criterion for subject status to avoid circularity.77
But even if we were to accept the criterion, it has to be borne in mind that
all mappings of semantic roles and syntactic elements are to be seen as tenden-
cies (as also illustrated in great detail by Faulhaber 2011), so we have to agree
with Dowty:
||
76 For German, Reis (1982: 182) shows that subjects receive agentive interpretation by con-
trasting converse pairs of verbs (such as buy – sell). Oppenrieder (2006: 911f) on the other hand
claims that clausal subjects cannot be agents since – as opposed to [NP] agentive subjects –
they do not allow instrument roles to co-occur with them.
77 Herbst/Schüller do not use agentivity as a criterion for subjecthood, so there is no problem
of circularity in their model.
In this paper I have been at pains to argue that, while the Proto-Agent/Proto-Patient op-
position is CONNECTED to the grammatical opposition between subject and object, neither
opposition is REDUCIBLE to the other; nor is the association of subject with (Proto-)Agent
and object with (Proto-)Patient a necessary one. [...] The correlation of proto-roles with
grammatical relations in English-like languages is only a TENDENCY, not an absolute, and it
admits of quasi-violations (under relatively predictable circumstances). An example is the
lexicalization of 'conflicting' pairs like like and please and 'counterexamples' like receive
and undergo. (Dowty 1991: 610; his emphasis)
Thus we have to conclude that a semantic characterisation of subjects causes

problems when used in a definition of the term.
16. Concord with subject complement
In CGEL’s model, the underlined element in (41a) is called a subject comple-
ment, a term which roughly corresponds to predicative complement in CamG
(217) and other models:
(41) a. Caroline is my sister. (CGEL 725)
CGEL claims that the subject “normally determines number of the subject com-
plement when that is a noun phrase” (CGEL 725) and gives the opposition of
(41a–b) as evidence.
(41) b. Caroline and Vanessa are my sisters. (CGEL 725)
Later in the grammar (CGEL 767) the authors show that there are “exceptions”,
but if we take a closer look at the following example, it appears that the criteri-
on is not about syntactic agreement but rather semantic compatibility:
(42) They were the perfect couple. (CH2 5905)
The plural subject here does not require a plural predicative element, it only
needs a predicative element that expresses plurality semantically. While
“grammatical plurality is independent of semantic plurality” in English (Koya
1992: 63), they do of course often coincide, which may have led CGEL to the
formulation of this criterion. For some of the ‘exceptional’ cases CGEL offers an
explanation:
(43) The younger children are a problem. (CGEL 767)
With the help of (43) and other, similar ones the authors claim that the subject
complement “although nominal in form, has a characterizing function closer to
that of an adjective” (CGEL 767). Again we can see that there is a strong tenden-
48 | Theory
cy in CGEL to mix formal and semantic features in the description of the lan-
guage.
Given the rather dubious character of this criterion, it will not be used in the
subsequent chapters, also since agreement with the verb is usually easier to
determine in sentences with a subject complement (since forms of be occur most
frequently) and since it is the more reliable criterion.
17. Implied subject of non-finite subordinate clause
According to CGEL, “[t]he implied subject of a subjectless nonfinite or verbless
clause is normally identical with the subject of the superordinate clause” (CGEL
725). They use the following example for illustration:
(44) Susan telephoned before coming over. [‘…before Susan came over’].
(CGEL 725; their italics)
However, such a criterion is not applicable in the study of clauses the subjects
of which are non-finite subjectless clauses. In that case no prediction can be
made as to the implied subject’s referent. The following examples serve to illus-
trate that point:
(45) To hesitate would add to suspicions that the Fed cares more about
staying on good terms with the White House than about price stability.
(CR8 120)
The Fed (i.e. the Unites States Federal Reserve System) can be recovered as im-
plied subject from the same sentence.
(46) To take the scalp of a major southern hemisphere team would be huge
and would add to the achievement of beating the likes of France and
England here this year. (newspapers)
Here a Scottish Rugby player talks about an upcoming match of his team, re-
ferred to by “we” in the previous sentence, so although the team does not fea-
ture in the same sentence, it can easily be recovered as the implied subject of
the [to_INF] clause. In (47) below, the implied subject of “to hint at it” cannot be
recovered verbatim, even in the context of the newspaper commentary it was
taken from:
(47) There is, in royal circles, a superstitious terror of the word “abdica-
tion”, as if even to hint at it would begin the crumbling of the whole
edifice. (newspapers)
The most likely interpretation here is that the hinting at abdication by members
of the aforementioned royal circles would have the negative effect stated.
Example (48) appears to be a similar case since one might argue that the
subject to be recovered is “widowers” or “the surviving husband”:
(48) Since “griefe” was entered as a cause of death in the rolls of mortality
in the 17th century, it has been clear that widowers do worse than
widows. To lose a wife causes a 40 per cent increase in risk for the
surviving husband, compared to a third that figure for a wife in the
same position. (newspapers)
However, another likely interpretation is that a kind of general subject – anyone

basically – might be the subject. While this is hard to decide and may be a mat-
ter of debate, the general subject (i.e. ‘anyone’) interpretation is the only one
possible in (49), which is given with extended context to illustrate that the ref-
erent of the implied subject cannot be inferred from the surrounding text:
(49) Although he is the only sprinter to have won Group races at two, three
and four years, his supernatural speed never quite reaped him the re-
wards he deserved. Hence this why-the-hell-not crack at that elusive
Group One victory. ‘It’s a bit like a 30-year-old winning £ 6 million on
the Lottery and retiring. This is just a one-off – I wouldn’t want to keep
the old lad in training after that. But he’s sound as a pound. This
year’s sprinters lack a little bit in depth. And the owners think so
much of him they just want to give him one more go at it.’ To stand
close to a racehorse always brings a shock of delight, the more so
when he is a proud, strong five-year-old coming to peak fitness. In the
dim light of his box Mind Games’s coat still shines like Charbonnel
and Walker melting in a late summer sun. His muscles are tightly
packed like little crates crammed with books. (newsmerge)
In the passive, there is a further complication described by CamG (1435) which

is described for examples (32) to (33) on page 119 and counters CGEL’s claim.
Given that the criterion of implied subject does not work for clausal subjects
and is irrelevant for the study of the clausal subject of a finite main clause, it
will not be taken up in subsequent chapters.78
||
78 A similar observation for German subject infinitivals (as opposed to object infinitivals) was
made by Sternefeld (1985: 404f) and is followed up on by Oppenrieder (1991: 259f).
50 | Theory
18. Imperatives
Falk adds a further criterion based on imperatives when he claims “that the
addressee of an imperative is a subject” (Falk 2006a: 3) irrespective of the the-
matic role of the subject. Thus the addressee would be an agent in (50a), an
experiencer in (50b), and a patient in (50c):
(50) a. Go to school! (Falk 2006a: 3)

b. Freeze, if that’s what you want! (Parent to child who refuses to put on
a coat in freezing weather) (Falk 2006a: 3)
c. Be arrested by the municipal police, not the state police! (Falk 2006a:
3)
It would be more precise to reformulate Falk’s criterion to state that the argu-
ment of the verb that is not realized in imperatives79 is realized as subject in the
canonical clause irrespectively of the semantic role that subject has.
This criterion is listed for the sake of completeness, but since it only works
for subjects one can address, it is of no further relevance to the discussion of
clausal subjects in the present study and will thus not be drawn upon in the
subsequent chapters.
2.3.3 Use of terminology in this study
We are not free to define a notion like “subject of” in any way that suits our purposes.
There is a large body of lore concerning the notion, and any proposed definition must at
least largely agree with the traditional, and to some extent, pretheoretical usage of the
term. (Keenan 1976: 306)
Marantz (1984) rejects Keenan’s view that a definition has to mirror pretheoreti-
cal usage and questions the feasibility of such a definition, echoing work done
by Wittgenstein and Rosch:
What makes linguists think that their notion of “subject” is any different from that of
“chair” or “game”? If they cannot provide a definition or account of “game” that picks out
||
79 There are of course imperatives with an overt realization of the addressee:
Don’t you dare move a muscle! (HGT 3438)
For German, Ágel argues that “subjectless” imperatives are not subjectless but that the subject
is not realized at the macro-valency level (Ágel 1993: 43f). He assumes that the inflectional form
of the German imperative is a micro-valency realization of the respective complement.
all and only the entities considered to be games, they should not expect to discover a defi-
nition of “subject” that accounts for their intuitive concept of “subject”. (Marantz 1984: 2)
Marantz does not say that a definition is not possible, but he is right in stating
that what exactly the scope of any definition is cannot be regarded as a criterion
for judging the definition: “There can be no right definition of ‘subject’ or ‘pas-
sive,’ only a correct (or better) syntactic theory” (Marantz 1984: 3).
It is thus obvious that for the purpose of the present study it is impossible
(and probably unnecessary, too!) to find a definition that caters for all needs.
Generally, the criteria presented by CGEL and CamG form the background for
our use of the term subject, which has been shown in this chapter to be an
amalgam of syntactic, semantico-logical and pragmatic features. In this study,
the grammatical subject, i.e. the element defined by the grammatical criteria
discussed above, will be in focus, so subject refers to it by default. For the logi-
cal or psychological levels, the terms logical subject and psychological subject
will be avoided80 and we will find little need to refer to these entities at all. If we
have to, the terms agent and theme (following Halliday 1994: 32) will be used
instead.81 In problematic cases such as extraposition or existentials, the criteria
listed above will be reviewed individually.
As to the question of what a subject is a subject of, both constituency and
dependency ways of thinking will be allowed. In fact it would be misleading to
treat them as mutually exclusive, so we shall say that Harry in (51) is the subject
of the clause, of both verbs, and of both predicates:
(51) Harry moved in front of the tank and looked intently at the snake.
(HP1.25)
Such an approach is compatible with Matthews (1981), who states that “the
notion subject should be looked at in two different ways. On the one hand, there
is a subject as opposed to an object. […] On the other hand, there is a subject as
opposed to a predicate” (Matthews 1981: 104f). He illustrates the two readings of
the term subject with the following diagram:
||
80 Halliday quite rightly insists that “[t]here is no such thing as a general concept of ‘Subject’
of which these [i.e. syntactic, semantic and logical subject] are different varieties. They are not
three kinds of anything; they are three quite different things” (Halliday 1994: 32).
81 Halliday uses the term actor instead of agent.
52 | Theory
Fig. 5: Varying scope of the term subject illustrated by Matthews (1981: 104; adapted)
This is also in line with the distinction made by Croft (2001: 24) between the
syntactic role subject (part-whole relationship), which he adopts, and the se-
mantic relation subject (dependency subject-verb), against the existence of
which he argues.
For the purpose of the present study, the differentiation between these
types in the various chapters appears unnecessary since the term subject will be
used mainly to identify or refer to an element in a given clause. Thus it is suffi-
cient if the term establishes successful reference. Whenever there is a risk of
confusion (or where the status of the item is problematic), more specific terms
such as extraposed subject (Chapter 7) or displaced subject (Chapter 8) will be
used.
2.4 Summary
It became clear in the present chapter that most attempts to define the notion of
subject aim to characterise prototypical subjects with a range of criteria that
cause problems in borderline cases because of cross-classification issues. Due to
the long history of the term and its interpretation as either a semantic or a syn-
tactic concept, its use in various schools of linguistics is extremely divergent
and some theoretical approaches – most notable generative grammar – do not
use the concept as part of their theoretical model. The term is still used, but only
as a shorthand for ease of reference. The use of the tem subject in the present
study follows this general idea, i.e. even though the term is used to establish
reference to constituents/complements, no commitment to its theoretical status
within valency theory is made. Section 9.2 will discuss the question of the use-
fulness of the term in more detail.
3 Methodological Considerations
3.1 English
In the discussion so far, the word English from the title of the present study has
been taken for granted, even though the matter is by no means simple, given
the wide array of possible variation (see Crystal 2003, ch. 7 and 20–23). For our
purposes, the the most appealing approximation in this regard is Standard Eng-
lish, despite the fact that there are good reasons to be cautious of the term, as is
pointed out by McArthur: “A widely used term that resists easy definition but is
used as if most educated people nonetheless know precisely what it refers to”
(McArthur 1992: 982). For the purpose of this study, unless otherwise stated,
English will be used to mean Standard English as loosely defined by Crystal as “a
minority variety (identified chiefly by its vocabulary, grammar, and orthogra-
phy) which carries most prestige and is most widely understood” (Crystal 2003:
110).82 Given that he also states that “[m]ore than anywhere else, SE is to be
found in print” (Crystal 2003: 110), we can also justify the use of predominantly
written corpora in the present study. Generally, it will be assumed that British
Standard English and American Standard English have enough in common to
treat them as Standard English in a uniform way (an approach also taken by
CGEL 18f), so they will only be distinguished in this volume where there is a
noticeable difference between the two.83
For most of our description, written English is the major source of infor-
mation and thus the major mode that is discussed.
3.2 Data
The question of what data is appropriate for syntactic research has been widely
discussed in the linguistics community in recent years. There are two main
camps which cluster loosely around the extreme positions on a scale, with those
who see corpora as the only viable source of linguistic information at one end
||
82 One further criterion mentioned by Crystal (2003: 110) is the fact that Standard English is
used as an educational target, both within the respective English-speaking country and in
foreign language teaching abroad. This role follows, of course, from its high prestige.
83 Trudgill/Hannah (2008: 4f) however prefer to distinguish between two English as a native
language (ENL) varieties, British and North American English, with the former including also
varieties spoken in New Zealand or South Africa.
54 | Methodological Considerations
and those who regard corpora as a complete waste of time at the other end.84
Both extreme positions are questionable: It is undoubtedly true that corpus
research can lead to insights which are hardly visible to the naked introspective
eye. Sinclair’s analysis of naked eye (Sinclair 2004: 30ff) is a case in point as are
the descriptions of the behaviour of the verb cause presented in Stubbs (1995),
Klotz (2000: 189–195) and Stefanowitsch/Gries (2003: 220ff). Corpus analysis
can thus help to identify details which may be missed in a study based purely
on introspection.85
Nonetheless, some of the reservations against corpus analysis expressed by
its critics are not completely unfounded. One argument against corpora as
sources of linguistic information is that they are skewed:
Any natural corpus will be skewed. Some sentences won’t occur because they are obvious,
others because they are false, still others because they are impolite. The corpus, if natural,
will be so wildly skewed that the description would be no more than a mere list. (Chomsky
in a debate at the Third Texas Conference on Problems of Linguistic Analysis in English
1958, published in Hill 1962: 159)86
Chomsky’s example that there are bound to be more instances of “I live in New
York” than of “I live in Dayton, Ohio” (Chomsky in a 1964 discussion, cited by
Halliday 1991: 30) in a corpus of American English may be correct, but this ob-
servation does not render grammatical information from the corpus useless –
after all, both sentences follow the same grammatical pattern.87 But Chomsky
does not trust frequency information on grammatical items either:
Third, the notion “grammatical in English” cannot be identified in any way with the no-
tion “high order of statistical approximation to English.” (Chomsky 1957: 16)88
||
84 Fillmore’s (1992: 35) satirical depiction of “corpus linguists” and “armchair linguists” has
still some truth in it today. See also Aarts (2000: 5ff) for the different positions.
85 According to Chomsky, advances in linguistic theory can only be achieved if the right
questions are asked (see the interview in Aarts 2000: 5f), so he takes the opposite perspective,
i.e. that people are going to miss out on the interesting part of linguistics if they study corpora.
86 Even with the larger corpora produced from the 1990s onwards, Chomsky’s view on corpora
has not changed, which can be seen in the following exchange taken from an Interview in the
year 1996:
Interviewer: What is your view of modern corpus linguistics?
Chomsky: It doesn’t exist. (Aarts 2000: 5)
87 And Mair quite rightly remarks: “The corpus is not used to limit the database but to provide
data of superior quality” (Mair 1990: 3; his emphasis).
88 Leech comments on the problem as follows:
Data | 55
This leads us to the most critical problem of corpus analysis for the present
study: there is a problem with negative evidence. It is almost commonplace in
corpus linguistics research to stress that by its very nature, the corpus cannot
provide negative evidence.89 Yet Stefanowitsch argues convincingly that it is
possible by statistical measures “to distinguish between constructions that did
not occur but could have (these could be referred to as ‘accidentally absent’),
and constructions that did not occur and could not have (these can be referred
to as ‘significantly absent’ structures)” (Stefanowitsch 2006: 62). However,
clausal subjects are not frequent enough to allow the use of this methodology
(see Stefanowitsch 2006: 72).
Although it is an interesting fact as such if a construction is so rare that it
does not occur in a corpus of the size of the BNC, it may still be perfectly ac-
ceptable, as, for instance, a [to_INF] subject with force:90
(1) In some cases, the writer may not wish to rely on truth as a defense,
even though the alleged libelous statement is true, because to do so
would force him to reveal a confidential source. (academic)
In order to shed more light on constructions that are missing or rare in the BNC
(which may also be performance errors), larger but less carefully collected cor-
pora were consulted (see Section 3.2.2.1 below) and native speaker informants
were interviewed and asked for acceptability judgements (see Section 3.2.3). The
aim was thus to combine both methodologies in order to obtain the best from
both worlds: items that native speakers may not have been able to come up with
from the corpora and positive and negative evidence on constructions not fre-
quently represented in the corpora, which is an approach similar to the one
Johansson describes:
In spite of the great changes in the less than three decades since the first computer corpus,
there is one way in which the role of the corpus in linguistic research has not changed.
The corpus remains one of the linguist’s tools, to be used together with introspection and
||
However, Chomsky in his turn could not have conceived, in the 1950s, of a corpus of 500
million words capable of being searched in a matter of minutes or hours. While it is un-
likely that foreknowledge of such a phenomenon would have changed Chomsky’s view of
corpora at that time [...], we can see, in historical retrospect, how the availability of vastly
increasing computer corpus resources has enabled syntactic and lexical phenomena of a
language to be open to empirical investigation on a scale previously unimagined (Leech
1991: 13).
89 See for instance McEnery/Wilson (1996: 9).
90 See also Greenbaum (1988: 83ff) for a similar view.
elicitation techniques. Wise linguists, like experienced craftsmen, sharpen their tools and
recognize their appropriate uses [...]. (Johansson 1991: 313)
We will come back to the question of different types of data in Section 9.1, where
the problems encountered in the data collection for the present study will be
discussed.
3.2.1 A Valency Dictionary of English (VDE)
For much of the research done in this study, Herbst et al.’s Valency Dictionary of
English (2004) provides a starting point. Based on the Cobuild Corpus and sup-
plemented by native speaker data, it provides a thorough description of the
syntactic combinatory potential of more than 500 verbs, more than 500 adjec-
tives and more than 250 nouns. At the outset, the focus of the dictionary was on
postverbal complements, which – due to the limited size of the Cobuild Corpus
when the project was started – was of course a sensible choice. The information
on subjects (in particular on non-extraposed ones) present in the dictionary was
added later on the basis of native speaker intuition and thus has to be treated
with more caution than the rest of the dictionary. Nonetheless, the dictionary
makes available a wealth of information on which lexical items take clausal
subjects that could be exploited for the present study. For this purpose, the
release of the Erlangen Valency Patternbank (Herbst/Uhrig 2009) based on the
VDE was particularly helpful since it allows a systematic search of patterns
across valency carriers and thus provides a fresh and easy-to-access perspective
on the VDE Data.
3.2.2 Corpora
3.2.2.1 Representativeness
The most important corpus used for the present study is the British National
Corpus (BNC; completed in 1994), whose limitation to British English has to be
taken into account. In terms of representativeness of its population, “British
English”, the BNC is excellent within the limits of feasibility.91 It contains 90 %
written and 10 % spoken language. For American English, no such corpus was
||
91 See Burnage/Baguley (1996) for a portrayal of the BNC; for general information on corpus
design see Clear (1992), Atkins/Clear/Ostler (1992), Biber (1993).
Data | 57
available at the beginning of this study. With the American National Corpus
project still short of funding, the only available alternatives of sufficient size
were commercial Internet search engines, which face problems of representa-
tiveness since the World Wide Web represents all varieties of native and non-
native usage in completely obscure proportions, additionally distorted by
search engine spam. Thus special care was taken to double-check Internet ex-
amples with the help of native speakers more carefully than results from the
BNC.
A further set of opportunistically sampled and not publicly available corpo-
ra was used for the present study:
Tab. 2: Additional corpora used in the present study
Corpus label Content Rough size (in

million words)92
academic journal articles, doctoral theses, academic text archives 100

found on the Internet93
fiction TV transcripts, fiction and fanfiction found on the web, some 260
novels
popmerge acts of parliament, legal documents, 1911 Encyclopaedia 312
Britannica, web-derived corpus on transportation, collection
of encyclopaedia entries, ...
newsmerge British newspapers 270
britnews British newspapers 162
newspapers British newspapers 692
We can see that there is a strong bias towards newspaper language simply be-
cause it is easily available. The representativeness of these corpora should thus
not be overestimated94 despite claims by Schierholz (2001: 97f) that (German)
newspaper language is sufficiently representative of the standard language
since it contains the general vocabulary of the language and is not limited to a
particular domain, since there are many authors, which assures considerable
heterogeneity and since there is a whole range of topics, including even some
||
92 The numbers are very conservative in that punctuation marks, brackets, and the like were
not counted as separate words.
93 A detailed description of the academic corpus is given in Siepmann (2005: 26ff).
94 There is also some small overlap between the newspaper corpora.
technical language. While Schierholz’ arguments sound convincing, they are

not backed up by English corpus data. For instance, the four registers used in
most analyses by LGSWE (conversation, fiction, news and academic) often show
considerable differences, no matter which phenomenon is under scrutiny.95 This
observation is of course not meant to devalue the data in our newspaper corpora
– since the corpora are used mainly in order to find relevant examples and only
occasionally to make statements about their distribution, the effect of the lim-
ited representativeness should not adversely affect our results to a great extent
(see Schierholz 2005: 7–11 for further discussion).
Both British and American usage is present in the academic, popmerge and
fiction corpora and some portions of them may well include non-native use
since determining authorship is of course a major problem on the Internet.96 The
native speaker interviews should, however, have filtered out most unacceptable
uses (see Section 3.2.3 below but also Section 9.1 for a discussion of related
problems).
In the course of this study, the Corpus of Contemporary American English
(COCA) by Mark Davies became publicly available, which is a huge improve-
ment over simple newspaper corpora and search engines, but is still considera-
bly less balanced than the BNC.97 Since it was published after a large portion of
the data collection in the non-parsed corpora was completed and since it is not
available for download or in a parsed version, it could not be taken into account
to the extent it would have merited. A further set of corpora often used for syn-
tactic research is the Brown Corpus (see Francis 1965) family, all members of
which are also very well balanced but include only 1 million words each and
were thus too small to be of help for most of the questions addressed in the
present study.
3.2.2.2 Size and noise

We cannot expect that a corpus, however large, will always display an adequate number
of examples of the phenomena relevant to a particular topic, especially when the phe-
nomena occur relatively infrequently. (Greenbaum 1988: 83)
||
95 See for instance LGSWE (578) for noun phrase modification, LGSWE (358–397) for verb
complementation, LGSWE (476) for the passive voice, or LGSWE (487ff) for modal verb distribu-
tion.
96 See for instance Crystal (2011: 30ff).
97 Considering that COCA was constructed by Davies on a relatively small budget (compared
to the BNC), it is a tremendous achievement and surprisingly well balanced, of course.
Data | 59
Greenbaum’s statement was made at a time when the 7 million word Cobuild
corpus98 was state of the art, and when he cites studies using the 1 million word
Brown corpus and other corpora of that size. While it is still valid for the BNC
(completed in 1994), which is larger by 2 orders of magnitude, the problems of
size and the introduction of noise discussed in this section are slightly different
for even lager corpora. While the following passage will draw mainly on lexical
material for illustration, we would expect grammatical constructions to behave
alike and thus the problems to be highly relevant for the corpus data on the rare
phenomena examined in this study.
It is interesting to note that Zipf’s law (see Manning/Schütze 1999: 23ff for a
discussion) is also valid for a 100 million word corpus, so a rough 50 % (52.8 %
according to Hausser’s 2001: 292 count) of its types are hapax legomena, i.e.
words that only occur once.99 Some of these are typing errors (acieved, fivbe),
errors in automatic text processing (scientific/medical, scientist.), proper nouns
(Becel, Schweinfurth) and so on, but many of them are derivations (yak-like,
beaverish) or genuine words, such as anglicism, aspheric, audiophile. Statistical-
ly speaking, most of these words are over-represented in the corpus. They are
included by pure coincidence, and many others which occur with roughly the
same frequency in the language are not. Grammatical patterns seem to abide by
the same distributional rules, as observed by Sampson (2007: 7–10) in a study of
noun phrase structure. Similar conclusions can be drawn from the research on
the Valency Dictionary of English (Herbst et al. 2004) and the follow-up project
Erlangen Valency Patternbank (Herbst/Uhrig 2009), where a handful of patterns
occur with a wide range of verbs and a huge number of patterns occur only with
one verb.
Many of the grammatical constructions which had to be checked during the
research for this study are quite infrequent, so their non-occurrence or low fre-
quency within the corpus (if one is actually able to find them, see Section 3.2.2.3
below) cannot tell us very much about their acceptability. This can only be rem-
edied by larger corpora to a certain extent and that is why the additional set of
corpora presented in the previous section were used, too. However, very large
corpora face other problems: The research branch of the commercial search
engine Google released a list of n-grams (n=1 to n=5) based on a 1 trillion word
||
98 Within the Cobuild project, a larger unbalanced “reserve corpus” of about 20 million words
was also created in the 1980s (see Renouf 1987).
99 This of course depends on the definition of word. Using Kilgarriff’s BNC frequency lists, we
can confirm Hausser’s figures, but if we take a closer look at the list of hapax legomena, we can
see that many of them are numbers or due to segmentation errors.
corpus of English web pages, which is of course not particularly helpful for
research on clausal subjects due to the 5-word window (commas, hyphens, etc.
count as words, too). What is interesting to note, though, is that the researchers
who produced the n-grams set a cutoff point if a word did not occur at least 200
times. If one takes a look at the words which occur exactly 200 times, there are
many foreign words (Abfertigungsstelle, Abituriententag), numbers, proper
names, unusually capitalized words which occur more frequently in their regu-
lar form (ASSIDUOUS, BoomRang, BRiDe) and a lot of words with tokenization
errors (F.Javier, Fast-Twitch/pathology) or just curious strings (Febru-
aryMinutes16, FBgn0014020), but there are still some rare words, which actual-
ly do only occur 200 times in the data, such as konimeter.100 Thus in the light of
Internet data, where the corpus which is the basis for Google’s n-gram data set
is 1 million times (!) larger than the Brown Corpus, one has to rethink to what
extent Greenbaum’s assumption cited at the beginning of this section still holds
since it may be that the corpus contains everything one is looking for but lots of
“junk”, too. This is due to a problem which occurs wherever people try to ampli-
fy weak signals: By amplifying the low-frequency items (which would corre-
spond to small details in a digital picture or a weak signal in audio transmis-
sion), we also amplify the noise, which in our case would be performance
errors, typing errors, non-native usage and the like.
The World Wide Web, which is in turn much bigger than 1 trillion words (as
of mid-2008, a rough size of 1 trillion pages — not words! — were indexed by
Google),101 probably contains pretty much every verb within the top 500 verb list
with all its possible complement types, but it contains lots of “impossible” com-
plement types (“noise”), too. As there is no editing process, frequent errors may
occur more often than infrequent “correct” constructions,102 which makes it
necessary to have all examples found via Internet search engines double-
checked by native speaker informants (as mentioned above). This issue is likely
to become more problematic to the extent to which anyone can post on the In-
||
100 In the meantime, another set of n-grams has been made available by Google which is based
on 361 billion words of running text from the Google Books archive. Due to the fact that it is
created on the basis of edited text, the noise level is much smaller. See Michel et al. (2011) for
an overview.
101 Figure taken from Google’s Blog: http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/07/we-knew-
web-was-big.html, which also contains a short discussion of what counts as a web page. (Ac-
cessed 18 February 2009)
102 At the lexical level, it is easy to illustrate the problem: The misspelling pronounciation
occurs 104,937 times in Google’s n-gram list, whereas geminate occurs only 21,776 times and
anglicism even only 5,952 times. (All combinations of upper and lower case were checked.)
Data | 61
ternet. In social networks such as Facebook or in the microblogging sphere

(with Twitter in the lead), people write many things they would not write in
careful ‘official’ contexts such as school assignments, official letters and the
like.103 However, most grammatical description is based on carefully produced
language and does not take arbitrary variation into account (unless it is particu-
larly pervasive as in the case of non-concord of existentials discussed in Chapter
7).104
In addition, it is also important to check the origin of the website in ques-
tion and to use the same search engine site for comparisons. A search for “look-
ing forward to doing” and “looking forward to do” on google.de and google.com
led to the following results:105
Tab. 3: comparison of google.de and google.com for looking forward to doing/to do
Website Region “looking forward to doing” “looking forward to do”
google.de any 778,000 1,060,000

google.com any 776,000 357,000
Although both sites claim to search the entire web without regional limitations
(and with all filters switched off), google.de gives an almost three times higher
frequency for the variant “looking forward to do” – which most native speakers
of English would classify as “incorrect” – than google.com. Surprisingly, this is
not the case for “looking forward to having” vs. “looking forward to have”:
||
103 See also Crystal (2011: Chapter 3) for a discussion of the linguistic analysis of Twitter data.
104 Sampson claims that “what linguists are primarily interested in is language as an aspect
of human beings’ natural behaviour, including spontaneous speaking, rather than a well-
behaved subset of ordinary language that has been promulgated for ‘official’ purposes”
(Sampson 2007: 28). This insight has only partially reached the creators of corpora, though,
and not all linguists might agree.
105 All figures are the results of queries executed on 17 March 2009.
Tab. 4: comparison of google.de and google.com for looking forward

to having/to have with and without a filter for region
Website Region “looking forward to having” “looking forward to have”
google.de any 1,050,000 1,360,000

google.com any 1,050,000 1,360,000
google.com United States 853,000 96,600
What we can see here, though, is how important it is to increase the proportion
of native speaker data in web searches if we want reliable results valid for any-
thing close to “Standard English”.
Thus we can see that with greater size of corpora, there comes more data
but also a higher level of noise. Where the ‘signal’ is so infrequent that it re-
mains hidden in the noise, native speaker informants are needed to distinguish
between the relevant data and the noise.
3.2.2.3 Annotation
In corpus linguistics, the term annotation is used for the process of adding in-
formation which is not part of the text, or the result of that process (see, for
instance, Garside/Leech/McEnery 1997). The most basic types of annotation
include metadata at the text-level, such as the source of the text or its author,
and linguistic annotation at the word-level, such as the word class and possibly
the lemma. For our purposes, the latter information is extremely useful, as it lets
us refine corpus queries in order to reduce the number of unwanted hits in the
results. Lemmatisation is helpful in that it allows us to query all word forms
related to a lemma in one go, so we can avoid queries in which we specify all
alternatives manually such as “rise|rose|risen|rising” (which would also deliver
instances of the nouns rise and rose) if we are looking for the verb rise. Part-of-
Speech (PoS) tagging is one step more refined: A search for to as a word form
results in 2,599,205 hits in the BNC whereas a search limited to to as TO0 (to-
infinitive-marker) delivers 1,585,812 hits. The form that behaves in a similar way
(632,241 as a conjunction compared to 1,119,521 without word class restriction).
This sounds too good to be true – and indeed it is. Part-of-Speech taggers (i.e.
the computer programs which assign word class tags to words) are not 100 %
reliable. “The error rate of state-of-the-art taggers is between 2 and 5 %”
(Schmid 2008: 547), but even these impressive numbers mean that up to every
20th word is assigned the wrong word class. And of course, the errors are not
equally distributed: A PoS tagger makes only few mistakes on the word the,
Data | 63
which is used as a determiner in the vast majority of cases. This means on the
other hand that the error rate for ambiguous and accordingly error-prone words
such as that or to is much higher than the overall error rate suggests. Conse-
quently, one has to be aware of such issues when one relies on automatic anno-
tation, but usually the advantages outweigh the shortcomings.
The problem with annotation at the word class level is that it is impossible
to search for clause constituents. Thus a search for the conjunction that will
yield lots of results of non-subject [that_CL]s as in (2) because those are more
frequent than subject [that_CL]s.
(2) Official figures suggest that ACET provided care at home for up to one
in four of all those who died of AIDS in the UK last year. (A00 145)
One can of course limit the search to sentence initial that, which delivers sen-
tences such as (3) but fails on sentences like (4).
(3) That the local priests continued to play a significant part in the regu-
lation of local sexual morality from the beginning of the state is shown
by accounts of "boy meets girl" from the 1920s. (A07 846)
(4) Even so, that he was able to expel the powerful figure to whom he
may have owed much of his victory in 1016 must say something about
the effectiveness of the power base which he had succeeded in creat-
ing in England in the intervening years. (HXX 945)
In order to be able to find such cases in the corpora, we need to rely on gram-
matical parsing. Strictly speaking, PoS tagging is also a kind of parsing, but the
term is usually limited to a syntactic analysis of some kind when it is used in
corpus linguistics. Parsing is much less reliable than PoS tagging and parsers
are less readily available than PoS taggers. Few (and often small) corpora, such
as the Penn Treebank (Marcus/Santorini/Marcinkiewicz 1993) or the British
component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-GB) are made available
in parsed form, due to the manpower required for manual annotation or correc-
tion.
Every parser requires a so-called parsing scheme – essentially the grammat-
ical model underlying the piece of software. There is much less consensus on
what output a parser should produce than there is for PoS-taggers.106
||
106 Of course there is no universally agreed English tagset for all taggers, but many of the
often very fine-grained analyses offered by taggers can be transformed to capture more gener-
For a small part of the study (the extraction of extraposed sentences used
for Section 7.2.1), a version of the BNC parsed with a Dependency Parser devel-
oped at the University of Zurich (Schneider 2009) was used.
The parser mainly used in this study is the Stanford Parser (Klein/Manning
2003), a phrase structure grammar parser which can also deliver dependency
output (de Marneffe/MacCartney/Manning 2006) and provides PoS-tagging at
the same time. It was trained on the Wall Street Journal portion of the Penn
Treebank plus a set of sentences to include clause types underrepresented in
the Penn Treebank data.
The BNC and the internal academic, fiction, newsmerge, britnews and
newspapers corpora – i.e. more than 1.5 billion words – were parsed using Er-
langen University’s High Performance Computing facilities,107 then their de-
pendency representations were stored in a relational database to allow for rela-
tively fast queries.108 A web user interface was produced with visualization tools
and the option to add results from the corpus directly to a database that could
then be used for the present study (with additional information on extraposi-
tion, voice, comments, …).109 Only with such a tool at hand did the identification
of clausal subjects (particularly in canonical position) become feasible on a
sensible scale. Again, one has to bear in mind that the accuracy of parsing is
still rather limited,110 so neither precision nor recall are perfect, but in spite of
these limitations, the parsed corpora offer so many advantages over any non-
parsed corpus in the retrieval of clausal subjects that only due to them was it
possible for all the analyses in the present study to be carried out.
The problem is that the biggest of all sources of data available for our re-
search, the World Wide Web, is of course not annotated for word class or lem-
ma, let alone syntactically parsed. In addition, none of the currently available
||
alizations (there is – for example – a converter from the C7 to the C5 tagset; see Garside 1987,
1996, Garside/Smith 1997). Thus even if a tagger was programmed/trained to distinguish be-
tween prepositions, certain types of adverbs and certain types of subordinating conjunctions, it
is quite easy to lump them together if one decides not to make that distinction in a grammatical
description (as, for instance, CamG or Herbst/Schüller 2008 do).
107 On a standard office computer, the parsing of these corpora would have taken more than
12 months.
108 On the server used, the original version of the database took about 3 minutes for a query
of clausal subjects in canonical subject position and up to 15 minutes for a query of extraposed
clausal subjects, so for queries of extraposition, a regular expression search was often used
instead, even though it decreased precision.
109 It is the need for the research in this study that provided the impetus for a successor of the
database that is now available as the Erlangen Treebank.info project (Uhrig/Proisl 2011).
110 See Cer et al. (2010) for figures on the parsing accuracy of different parsers.
Data | 65
commercial search engines take sentence boundaries into account nor do any of
them offer case-sensitive queries any more111 – two features which at least would
have permitted queries of the type “. That” in order to find a sentence-initial
[that_CL] (and instances of sentence initial demonstrative that, of course). It is
for this reason that, despite its sheer size and the easy availability, Internet data
turned out to be of very limited usefulness.
3.2.3 Native speaker interviews
As pointed out above, a study such as the present one cannot depend solely on
corpus data. But then again, native speaker interviews are time-consuming and
expensive to do on a large scale, so a sensible way of combining the two means
of information had to be found for the present study. If we assume that we need
about 20 native speakers for reliable results112 and that we have to test every
item twice for every native speaker informant, as is suggested by Cowart (1997:
7ff and 67ff), testing every item that was tested for the present study (more than
1,150 sentences) would have resulted in over 45,000 individual judgements,
which would have been impossible to handle in the context of the present
study.113 Most of the example sentences for this study were checked by three or
four native speakers of English (see Appendix 27 for details) and only retested if
there was serious inconsistency. In addition, all sentence judgement tests took
place under the informal, uncontrolled, distorting conditions to which Green-
baum (1988: 87) objects.114
Furthermore, the native speaker informants were usually asked whether
they accept or reject a sentence. The five point scale that can be seen in the data
listed in the appendix is normally an interpretation of the answer given. Clear
yes or no answers were given a 5 or a 1; judgements of the type “Yes, that is ok,
||
111 See http://www.searchengineshowdown.com/features/byfeature.shtml version March
2008, accessed 17 February 2009.
112 The number is chosen deliberately small. Greenbaum (1988) uses over 40 for his experi-
ments, sometimes even over 100.
113 If we had wanted to verify each corpus example collected for the present study, the num-
ber would have to be at least three or four times higher.
114 Sentences were read to informants or, less frequently, submitted to them via email. By
some, these messages were answered on paper, by others via email. Some interviews took
place in the researcher’s office, some in the subject’s office, a few even in local pubs. Where the
sentences were not understandable out of context, the relevant context was retrieved from the
corpora. Invented examples were often crafted with the help of one of the informants.
but I would prefer a to-infinitive” or “It may not be wrong but nobody would say
it” receive a 4 or a 2 respectively, and “I don’t know” or similar answers a 3.115
Thus the native speaker interviews are of course by no means satisfactory
from an empirical point of view, but it should be borne in mind that the corpora,
not the interviews, are the primary source of data.
The fact that some of the native speaker informants were American and
some British can distort the results of the tests, but it turned out that with so few
informants, individual differences had much more influence on the judgements
than variety, and agreement/disagreement among the informants seemed not to
be tied to the country of origin.116
There is a certain wariness towards native speaker intuition in the corpus-
linguistics and (partly) the usage-based communities which is no doubt due to
the way in which intuition was used in the generative transformational para-
digm, which was at its heyday when Labov stated that “linguists cannot contin-
ue to produce theory and data at the same time” (Labov 1972: 199). There is
much less risk of that in a study such as the present one, where the author is not
a native speaker of English, where the native speaker judgements are used
merely to complement the corpus data and where at least three native speakers
were involved in most of the judgements.
3.3 Acceptability/Grammaticality
In a series of publications starting in 1987,117 Sampson has argued that the dis-
tinction between grammatical and ungrammatical structures is non-existent, a
claim that has triggered a lot of discussion (see for instance Culy 1998 for a re-
buttal and Greenbaum 1988: 94f for a general discussion and additional refer-
ences). The journal Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory even dedicated an
entire issue (2007/1) to the question with a target article by Sampson and re-
sponses by Pullum, Meurers, Stefanowitsch and others. Since judgement tasks
are performed for the present study, a short discussion of the matter is in order.
||
115 Since the scale is not an interval scale, no mean can be given (see for instance Albert/Marx
2010: 105ff).
116 The number of years spent in a German-speaking country may actually be a more prob-
lematic factor, but even that could not be shown due to the small number of informants. See
Section 9.1 for a further discussion of issues associated with the native speaker interviews.
117 Sampson’s 1987 article takes a less theoretical approach. It is more concerned with com-
putational models that make a distinction between grammatical and ungrammatical sentences.
Acceptability/Grammaticality | 67
When Sampson claims that a sentence such as the following is a meaning-

ful English utterance despite the fact that the last two instances of the deter-
miner the follow their head noun, he is certainly right:
(5) Norwegians put the article after the noun, in their language they say
things like bread the is on table the. (Sampson 2007: 20)
However, the issue is marginal, so if a grammatical model failed to predict sen-

tences such as (5) due to the odd noun phrase structure, it could still be a very
good model of English syntax. Stefanowitsch, who supports Sampson’s argu-
ment, brings forward language contact phenomena as an argument against the
grammatical/ungrammatical distinction (Stefanowitsch 2007: 59f), which is
probably a better example.
Still, native speakers seem to be perfectly happy to pass judgements on
what they think is correct and what is not. Not all of their intuitions may be
shared by all other native speakers of the language – and that is why the objec-
tion to individuals producing the data cited in their linguistic articles on the go
is quite well founded – but if we administer experiments of the type designed by
Cowart (1997), then we can safely assume that if there is overall agreement be-
tween subjects to reject a sentence, this reflects some sort of unacceptability.
Note that the term chosen in the previous sentence was unacceptability, not
ungrammaticality. It is unfortunate that neither Sampson nor Stefanowitsch
discuss in any detail this distinction presented by Chomsky (1965), who states
that “[l]ike acceptability, grammaticalness is, no doubt, a matter of degree [...],
but the scales of grammaticalness and acceptability do not coincide” (Chomsky
1965: 11).118 For him, grammaticality is related to competence whereas accepta-
bility is related to performance. Thus he can present grammatical strings of
words which are hardly acceptable:
(6) the man who the boy who the students recognized pointed out is a
friend of mine (Chomsky 1965: 11)
||
118 Although Chomsky uses the term grammaticalness instead of grammaticality, we shall
nonetheless use grammaticality in the discussion of his view for consistency’s sake. Note how-
ever that Chomsky’s choice, he claims, is a deliberate one:
I purposely chose a neologism in the hope that it would be understood that the term was
to be regarded as a technical term, with exactly the meaning that was given to it, and not
assimilated to some term of ordinary discourse with a sense and connotations not to the
point in this context. (Chomsky in a discussion; Paikeday 2003: 28)
From that point of view it makes sense to criticise the concept of grammaticali-
ty, since it predicts a structure such as (6) that is not usually used in human
communication and the usefulness of a grammar that does not model human
communication is rather limited. It is probably also correct that we will never be
able to predict exactly what is grammatical and what is ungrammatical in the
sense of Chomsky’s (1957: 13) statement.119 Thus there is an advantage of usage-
based approaches, which primarily try to account for the language as it is used
and are less concerned with the question of what bizarre constructions might be
possible if speakers had unlimited working memory.120
Thus, for the present study, we shall try to model valency aspects and treat
them as rooted “in a general linguistic theory of the occurring and the non-
occurring” (Stefanowitsch 2007: 69), i.e. a relatively usage-based approach.
Accordingly, if we want to make the distinction between grammaticality and
acceptability, no statements as to the grammaticality of any linguistic construc-
tion will be made since the present study does not posit an unobservable com-
petence of any sort. It is, however, useful for our purposes to be able to mark
sentences as unacceptable.121
At a less theoretical level, we can easily make a point for parting ‘correct’
from ‘incorrect’ sentences, since from a foreign language learning perspective
the distinction is crucial. Foreign language teachers must not leave sentences
such as the following one uncorrected, simply because a large number of native
speakers probably share the assumption that the sentence is plain wrong:122
(7) *My father wanted that she goes to the doctor.
||
119 In 1957, Chomsky claims that grammar is about separating grammatical from ungrammat-
ical sequences. But since he states, as cited above, that grammaticalness is to be regarded as a
scale in 1965, it does not appear as if Chomsky himself believes that the exact delimitation of
grammatical and ungrammatical structures will ever be possible.
120 In a way, the distinction between grammaticality and acceptability finds a certain parallel
in the distinction between System and Norm made by Coseriu (1973: 44) with the Norm being
what is common whereas the System contains everything that is possible from the point of view
of grammatical rules.
121 Langacker’s choice of wording for one of his starred sentences is worth noting: “In (32) we
observe that a finite complement in subject position is unhappy after an auxiliary verb in a
question” (Langacker 2008: 430; my emphasis).
122 Since teachers of English as a foreign language also have to take factors such as style level
into account and may be influenced by prescriptive rules, acceptability can of course not be
equated with what teachers allow.
Acceptability/Grammaticality | 69
There is no reason why linguists should not be allowed to make the same point
in their discussion of the verb want and state that (7) is unacceptable, for in-
stance to contrast it with verbs such as wish, as long as this statement is based
on sufficient data.
Thus the present study will make a distinction between acceptable sentenc-
es, unacceptable sentences (marked with an asterisk) and sentences of ques-
tionable acceptability (marked with a question mark) where necessary, despite
the concerns discussed above.
4 Clausal Subjects in active clauses
The aim of the present chapter is to identify restrictions on the formal realisa-
tions of subjects occurring with non-copula verbs in active declarative claus-
es.123 If such restrictions can be found, this will be taken as an indication for the
valency complement status of the subject. In a second step, the influence of
semantic factors will be minimised by looking at near-synonymous or semanti-
cally similar verbs. Finally, a case study on the interdependence between mo-
dality and the choice of subject will be carried out to show that other factors
than verb valency may be at work in selecting formal realisations of subjects.
4.1 Data analysis

4.1.1 VDE data
The Valency Dictionary of English (VDE; Herbst et al. 2004) is used as a starting
point for our analysis since it lists permissible clausal subjects for each lexical
unit identified. Of the 511 verb entries in the VDE, many are split up into several
lexical units or subsenses, so that there is a valency description for 1291 lexical
units in total.124 According to the dictionary, only 200125 of them take a clausal
subject of at least one of the following forms: [to_INF], [that_CL], [V-ing], [NP_V-
ing], [wh_CL],126 [wh_to_INF], [for_NP_to_INF]. The following diagram gives an
overview of the distribution of these seven forms of subjects across lexical units
in the VDE:
||
123 As mentioned above, this study is limited to English. For a crosslinguistic perspective on
clausal subjects see Schmidtke-Bode (2014, Section 6.4.2).
124 This count only comprises full valency descriptions. Idiomatic uses (“Further uses” in the
complement block of the VDE) and phrasal verbs are not included since for them, only post-
verbal complements are specified in the dictionary.
125 The list, however, contains only 199 verbs since no systematic indication as to which
clausal subjects are allowed are given for the verb be in the dictionary, which is a sensible
choice due to its status as a copula verb. Other verbs often treated as copula were included in
the list since the VDE listed restrictions on some. See the discussion at the beginning of Chapter
6 for a brief discussion of what counts as copula verb.
126 The use of the cover-term [wh_CL] in the present study follows Herbst/Schüller (2008).
However, many grammarians distinguish between (indirect) interrogatives clauses and nomi-
nal relative clauses (CGEL 1056ff) / fused relative clauses (CamG 987ff for the distinction).
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110589801-091
72 | Clausal Subjects in active clauses
VDE Lexical Unit Count

176
155
93 80
39 19 5
Fig. 6: Number of lexical units for the various types of clausal subject in the VDE
It is immediately obvious that [V-ing], [that_CL] and [to_INF] clauses occur with
a much higher number of verbs than wh-elements do, with the complex forms
[NP_V-ing] and [for_NP_to_INF] in between. In fact there is no single lexical
unit in the VDE which accepts wh-elements and no other clausal subject, while
there are such items for [V-ing], [that_CL] and [to_INF]. The full list can be
found in Appendix 1, but the top of the list (covering the lexical units starting
with a and b) will be reproduced here to illustrate what inspired the hypothesis
given at the beginning of this study, i.e. that the choice of subject is highly item-
specific.127
Tab. 5: Clausal subjects with verbs in the range a – b in the VDE
[to_INF] [that_CL] [V-ing] [NP_V-ing] [wh_CL] [wh_to_INF] [for_NP_to_

INF]
account(A) – + + + – – –
act(C) – – + + – – –
add(A) – – + – – – –
afford(B) – + + + – – –
agree(E) – – + – – – –
||
127 For all tables of this kind in the present study, attested and/or acceptable combinations
are indicated by a plus sign; unacceptable combinations are marked by a minus sign; incon-
clusive evidence is indicated by an o.
Data analysis | 73
[to_INF] [that_CL] [V-ing] [NP_V-ing] [wh_CL] [wh_to_INF] [for_NP_to_

INF]
allow(A) – – + – – – –
allow(B) – + + – – – –
amuse(A) + + + + + – –
annoy() + + + + + – +
appear(B) + + + + – – +
attract(A) + + + – – – –
attract(B) – + + + + – –
bar(B) – + + – – – –
become() + – + + – – +
begin() + – + + – – +
belong(A) – – + – – – –
bind(B) – + + – – – –
breathe() – + + + – – –
breed(C) – + + + – – –
bring(B) + + + + – – +
buy() + + + + – – –
It has to borne in mind, though, that the information on subjects in the VDE is
often based on native speaker intuition not complemented by corpus evidence,
given that the corpora used for the dictionary were not sufficiently large to al-
low sensible lexicographic treatment of the relatively rare issue of clausal sub-
jects. Thus, as mentioned above, the list compiled on the basis of the VDE can
be nothing more than a starting point for further analyses because it helps to
identify candidates for restrictions which then have to be verified with the help
of corpora (and possibly native speaker informants).
4.1.2 Corpus evidence
In order to verify the VDE data, the parsed corpora were searched for the follow-
ing patterns in order to find clausal subjects:128
||
128 csubj = clausal subject; aux = auxiliary; complm = complementizer; %ing: anything that
ends in -ing; see de Marneffe/Manning (2008) for a full description of the grammatical model.
[to_INF]: [verb] ---csubj-----> [not specified] ---aux-----> to

[that_CL]:[verb] ---csubj-----> [not specified] ---complm-----> that
[V-ing]: [verb] ---csubj-----> %ing
In order to keep the amount of data manageable, it was necessary to restrict the
selection to the three major types of clausal subjects, [to_INF], [that_CL] and [V-
ing]. Also, being the most frequent types of clausal subject, these seem to be the
most versatile as well, so semantic incompatibilities may be found less often
than with the rarer types.
All results were manually checked and relevant sentences were added to a
database. At this stage of analysis, all lexemes that occurred with more than one
lexical unit in the list were ignored for two reasons. First, the corpus does not
allow querying for specific lexical units, which makes checking for restrictions
on one of them difficult if the structure is attested with the other, due to massive
noise. Secondly, the division in different lexical units in the VDE follows lexico-
graphic principles and does not necessarily correspond to other linguistic anal-
yses, which again might be different depending on whether one is a “lumper” or
a “splitter” (see Goldberg 2006: 45). Thus any analysis relying on differences
between lexical units can easily be challenged as long as there is no generally
accepted method of identifying lexical units. The table shown above and given
in full in Appendix 1 was augmented with the results from the corpus queries to
form Appendix 2, which now shows fewer restrictions:
Tab. 6: Clausal subjects of the [to_INF], [that_CL] and [V-ing] type with verbs in the range a – b
in the VDE, augmented by corpus data
[to_INF] [that_CL] [V-ing] comment
account o + +
act + + +
add + + +
afford + + +
agree o – +
amuse + + +
annoy + + +
appear + + +
bar – + + [to_INF] and [that_CL] not attested
become + + +
begin + + +
Data analysis | 75
belong o – + [to_INF] only in one near-quotation from Shake-

speare’s Sonnet 23
bind – + + [to_INF] and [that_CL] not attested
breathe – + + [to_INF] and [that_CL] not attested
breed + + +
bring + + +
buy + + +
All ‘+’-signs from the VDE were kept and only the cells containing ‘-‘-signs in
the original table came under closer scrutiny. This means that if either the VDE
or the corpus contains a clausal subject, no restriction is given in the list. Thus,
as can be seen above, although the corpus search did not yield [that_CL] sub-
jects for breathe, the corresponding cell contains a ‘+’-sign since the VDE allows
this formal realisation.129
It cannot be stressed enough that this method introduces a strong bias
against restrictions and that many of the ‘acceptable’ examples are extremely
marginal, but this approach is deliberate to ensure that the arguments for re-
strictions in the present chapter do not conflict with any of the sources of data
used here and to avoid the impression that the data was prepared in order to
support the hypothesis that there are arbitrary restrictions.
4.1.2.1 Restrictions identified

Taking a closer look at the table in Appendix 2, we can see that the most striking
result is that all but one of the 140 remaining verbs (see above) allow a [V-ing]
clausal subject. This one verb is grieve, which is attested both with a [that_CL]130
and a [to_INF] in the corpus:
(1) a. It grieves me terribly that I was unable to reach out or do anything to

save my daughter. (newspapers)
b. To see Tullivers so neglected had grieved Thrush Green. (ASE 194)
||
129 Any verb that showed a restriction after the completion of the corpus search was checked
for all three types of clausal subject in the corpus.
130 No [that_CL] in canonical position was found, though, so an extraposed version is used as
an example here.
However, the verb grieve is not particularly frequent (roughly 3 instances per
million words in the BNC) and the patterns exemplified in (1a–b) are just about
present in the corpus, so we cannot be sure that this result is not a corpus arte-
fact. A modified version of (1b) with a [V-ing] can be formed:
(1) c. Seeing Tullivers so neglected had grieved Thrush Green.
Since (1c) is not unacceptable, the corpus may just as well be too small to con-
tain such an example.
In any case, even if the exception of grieve did hold, the data tells us that
whenever a verb allows for a clausal subject of any form, we can generally ex-
pect it to allow a [V-ing]. The reason may be that [V-ing] clauses are more noun-
like than [to_INF] and [that_CL] complements, even though every care was tak-
en in the corpus study to only include clearly verbal [V-ing] clauses (i.e. those
that showed complementation by an [NP] or similar structures).
On the other hand, if a verb allows for a [V-ing] clausal subject, this does
not tell us anything about other possible realisations of clausal subjects. For
instance, as predicted by the VDE, guide is only attested with a [V-ing] subject
but not with a [to_INF] or a [that_CL]:
(2) a. She once said that having acupuncture had guided her to a “new
level” in life, helping her to find love with Martin and giving her the
strength to cope with the death of her father last year. (newspapers)
b. *She once said that to have acupuncture had guided her to a “new
level” in life, helping her to find love with Martin and giving her the
strength to cope with the death of her father last year.
c. ?That she had acupuncture had guided her to a “new level” in life.131
In the case of matter, where the VDE only predicted a [that_CL] subject (as in
(3a)), we can see that it does readily occur with a [V-ing] subject, too, as in (3b):
(3) a. That they’re almost always awful hardly matters. (britnews)

b. Packing the right piece matters as much as wearing the right athletic
shoes. (newsmerge)
However, no [to_INF] could be found in the corpus, and in this case the result is
less likely to be a corpus artefact since matter is much more frequent than grieve
discussed above (roughly 50 instances per million words) and since the other
||
131 While this example is better than (2b), the native speaker informants preferred an [NP]
with The fact that.
Data analysis | 77
two realisations both occur at least around ten times in the corpus. Still, of
course, as discussed in Section 3.2 above, the figures are not high enough to
claim that they suffice to rule out a [to_INF] subject, but we can be more confi-
dent that such a use would be marginal than in the case of the [V-ing] for grieve
above.
Restrictions on the [that_CL] complement also exist, as for instance with in-
troduce, for which again the VDE analysis was confirmed. So we find [V-ing] and
[to_INF] subjects as in (4a–b) below, but the [that_CL] is less likely.
(4) a. Involving the Department of Education and the schools in the process
will introduce a wider awareness of road safety in the school. (GXJ
4163)
b. He was concerned that to include the large Asian countries in such a
scheme would introduce problems that the small nations could find
difficult to resolve. (GVK 125)
c. ?That they included the large Asian countries in the scheme intro-
duced problems that the small nations found difficult to resolve.
However, once more, the [that_CL] in (4c) cannot be ruled out categorically,
although native speakers seem to prefer the sentence with a “The fact that” [NP]
subject instead. Note, however, the meaning difference between (4b) and (4c),
which is due to the difference in the modality and factual character usually
associated with the two structures which will be discussed in more detail in the
case study in Section 4.2 below for [to_INF] subjects.132
4.1.2.2 Problematic cases

There is a whole set of verbs for which the VDE predicts a [V-ing] and a [that_CL]
subject but only the former was found in the corpora. They can be identified
from the comment column in the table in Appendix 2. The set contains the verbs
belong, bind, entertain, hang, interest, link, persuade and shape.133 These were
not counted among the verbs showing restrictions if no other restrictions oc-
||
132 In order to make (4c) as compatible with a [that_CL] as possible, it was rephrased in the
past tense.
133 The existence of such a set where corpus data and native speaker intuition do not coincide
can be interpreted in two ways. It could be regarded as an argument against native speaker
intuition (if we believe the corpus evidence) or it could be seen as an argument in favour of
bigger corpora (if we trust the native speakers). See also the discussion in Section 9.1.
curred due to the careful approach taken here, but in fact the corpus data here
strengthens our argument for the existence of restrictions.
Another highly interesting case from a valency point of view is presented by
take as in the following example, where the [that_CL] is found in subject posi-
tion although take does not usually allow a [that_CL] subject:
(5) That this may not be the case in certain instances does not take much
imagination to comprehend. (HP3 929)
The issue will be discussed in more detail in Sections 7.4 and 9.3.2.2.1, so all that
needs to be said here is that the [that_CL] in (5) will not be treated as a comple-
ment of the verb take but as a complement of the verb comprehend, even though
it functions as the grammatical subject in a sentence in which take is the main
verb.
4.1.2.3 Summary
In total, the combined analysis of the corpora and the VDE data showed that in
our list of 140 verbs, 29 show a restriction on at least one clausal subject realisa-
tion, even using the most conservative way of counting.134 (A list of examples is
given in the conclusion in Section 4.3.) Thus the data does suggest that there are
restrictions on the formal realisations of subjects depending on the verb. How-
ever, this does not necessarily mean that the restrictions may not be predictable
on semantic grounds, so in order to shed more light on that question, a com-
plementary analysis based on native speaker interviews was conducted.
4.1.3 Native speaker data
If we want to find out whether restrictions of the kind identified above are arbi-
trary syntactic restrictions, we will have to exclude semantic (and other) factors
as far as possible from our analysis. In order to do so – following the example
set by Faulhaber (2011) for postverbal complements – semantically similar verbs
||
134 The list contains in fact 31 verbs, but furnish was disregarded as the corpus analysis did
not yield any evidence for clausal subjects with that verb at all. Furthermore, the ones with
dubious examples (e.g. account, establish, pass, ...) were not counted either. Finally remain
was not counted for it is often treated as a copula verb and thus rather belongs in Chapter 6.
Data analysis | 79
were identified for which example sentences were crafted135 which then were
submitted to native speakers for acceptability judgements.136 All judgements are
available in Appendices 3 to 13.
The most promising pair of near-synonyms with possible arbitrary re-
strictions on the form of the subject are convince and persuade. According to the
VDE, both are expected to occur with [V-ing] and [that_CL] subjects but not with
a [to_INF]. In the parsed corpora, however, we find persuade only with [V-ing]
subjects and one instance with a [that_CL] whereas convince seems to allow all
three types:137
(6) a. In other words, watching the film persuaded me that despite the
intricacy of the life-producing process, it is not wrong to think of help-
ing it along in certain ways. (B1J 574)
b. That Prince Charles was absolutely committed to her and probably
had been since they first met, long before he married Diana, persuad-
ed me that I should see her as soon as possible. (newspapers)
(7) a. By itself, changing the party’s name will not convince a sceptical
electorate. (newspapers)
b. That Iraq never once even nibbled at the goodies has convinced the
administration that diplomacy was always doomed, because Mr Hus-
sein meant to hold on to Kuwait no matter what. (ABH 660)
c. Just to read the 893 case histories of Pritikin’s first patients reviewed
by the Loma Linda University in 1978 would convince anybody of
that. (academic)
However, the native-speaker judgements do not sustain the corpus analysis.

While acceptability is equally high for non-extraposed [that_CL] in both verbs
and similarly for [V-ing], the acceptance rate for non-extraposed [to_INF] is even
slightly higher for persuade than for convince. The little difference we can ob-
||
135 Despite all the problems associated with such invented examples, there is no alternative
given the range of factors that influence the structure of sentences. With corpus examples, it
would be impossible to rule out other influences. See for instance Hauser-Suida/Hoppe-Beugel
(1972: 65ff) for restrictions imposed by tense in German and the papers in Rohdenburg/Mon-
dorf (2003) for an array of relevant factors.
136 All native speaker data for the present section were collected in actual interviews. Great
care was taken to finish the judgement task on one verb before beginning with another in order
not to contrast otherwise identical sentences with different verbs directly and thus obtain more
‘natural’ (if that is possible in such an experiment) answers.
137 The example given as (7b) is the only one of a non-extraposed [that_CL] with convince.
serve between the two verbs in the native speaker data is related to isolated
phenomena which may be indeed due to the semantic differences between the
two. One native speaker remarked for instance that convincing can be more
easily done by circumstances or facts whereas persuading is prototypically done
by people. Such a hypothesis would account for the acceptability differences
between the following two pairs:
(8) a. Hearing her voice on the telephone convinced me that she was alive.
b. ?Hearing her voice on the telephone persuaded me that she was alive.
(9) a. ?For the company to promise him stock options may convince him.
b. For the company to promise him stock options may persuade him.
In the first pair, hearing her voice on the telephone is a factual element – evi-
dence in a way – which is better suited for convince whereas for the company to
promise him stock options in the second pair is an intentional act aimed at
changing the referent’s mind and thus better suited for persuade. However, in
the first pair, the difference in acceptability may just as well stem from a seman-
tic incompatibility of the postverbal [that_CL] with persuade, given that in the
following pair, no acceptability difference could be found:
(10) a. Yes, seeing the merchandise would convince me that you’re telling
the truth.
b. Yes, seeing the merchandise would persuade me that you’re telling
the truth.
We thus cannot reliably identify valency differences for the subject position of
convince and persuade with the help of the native speaker data collected here. If
we believe the native speaker informants, all three types of clausal subject are
acceptable with both verbs.
For the other verb groups formed for the present study, no differences in the
acceptability with the three major clausal subjects could be identified in the
native speaker studies, either: All verbs allowed all three types of clausal sub-
ject. Some verbs not included in the VDE were used in this part of the study, too,
since the number of semantically similar verbs in the VDE was not deemed large
enough to allow for a systematic study of such phenomena.
The groups used for the interviews were:
– annoy/offend/upset
– amuse/please
– confuse/shock/surprise/puzzle
Case study: modality and non-extraposed [to_INF] subjects | 81
However, the judgements on these were often far from unanimous and some-
times contradicted corpus data, so to what extent native speaker data can be
regarded as a reliable indicator of actual usage remains questionable. The issue
will be taken up again in a critical evaluation of the relationship between cor-
pus data and native speaker data in Section 9.1.
The evidence presented by Newmeyer (2003: 167), however, suggests that
there are in fact syntactic (rather than semantic) restrictions on the form of the
subject with some verbs in that these allow no [that_CL] but an [NP] with the
fact that. He specifically cites persuade as one of these verbs, for which we have
presented one counter-example above, but also give three others:
(11) a. The fact that / *That the weather was sunny persuaded Mary to do
some gardening. (Newmeyer 2003: 167)
b. The fact that / *That the WTO riots were violent impressed upon the
Italian police the need for extra precautions. (Newmeyer 2003: 167)
c. The fact that / *That we had one more applicant tipped the scales in
favor of our extending the deadline. (Newmeyer 2003: 167)
d. The fact that / *That I failed the exam decided me to study harder in
the future. (Newmeyer 2003: 167)
For (11b–d) no counter-evidence was found in the parsed corpora138 and the
native speaker informants agreed with Newmeyer’s analysis.139 This kind of
restriction then speaks strongly in favour of syntactic restrictions that cannot be
explained by semantics alone.
4.2 Case study: modality and non-extraposed [to_INF]

subjects
As mentioned above, during data collection a high proportion of modal verbs
were found in sentences with non-extraposed [to_INF] subjects, so this case
study sets out to verify that intuitive observation and present relevant data.
||
138 There is a [that_CL] subject for impress, but not for the reading in (11b).
139 Of course, Newmeyer himself is a native speaker of English, so whether he uses an aster-
isk or not can be regarded as a further native speaker judgement.
4.2.1 Theoretical background
This section will follow the approach taken by the authors of CamG (52), who
use the traditional distinction between two types of modality, epistemic and
deontic,140 and add a third dimension called dynamic modality.141 For our pur-
poses, though, it is enough to concentrate on epistemic modality and to contrast
it with non-epistemic types of modality.
In relatively broad terms, epistemic can be “interpreted as showing the sta-
tus of the speaker’s understanding or knowledge; this clearly includes both his
own judgements and the kind of warrant he has for what he says” (Palmer 1986:
51), so basically, epistemic modality is concerned with the likelihood of some-
thing being true (from the speaker’s perspective). By contrast, “[d]eontic modal-
ity typically has to do with such notions as obligation and permission, or – in
combination with negation – prohibition” (CamG 52). Finally, “[d]ynamic mo-
dality generally concerns the properties and dispositions of persons, etc., re-
ferred to in the clause, especially by the subject” (CamG 52), which “includes
the meanings of volition and ability” according to Verplaetse (2003: 154).142
While there is a whole range of devices available to express modality in
English, including full verbs (e.g. guess, allow), nouns (e.g. possibility, permis-
sion), adjectives (e.g. likely, forbidden) or adverbs (e.g. probably; see Hoye 1997
for a detailed account), the analysis in this section is limited to the most fre-
quent markers of modality, i.e. modal verbs.
||
140 Palmer (1986: 18) traces the distinction back to Jespersen.
141 Many scholars, however, have introduced further distinctions or decided to use different
terminology, so there is root modality with different interpretations of the term (see Nuyts 2001:
25), which in some readings is a cover-term for deontic and dynamic and thus synonymous with
agent-oriented modality as opposed to speaker-oriented modality (Bybee 1985,
Bybee/Perkins/Pagliuca 1994; see also Krug 2000: 41ff for a short discussion). Quirk et al.
(CGEL 219) rely on a gradient between intrinsic and extrinsic modality. While all of these con-
cepts may be helpful or even necessary for a fine-grained analysis of modality in English, the
point at stake here can be illustrated with much less-refined basic terminology.
142 While the prototypical elements of meaning such as truth (epistemic) and obligation (deon-
tic) are distinguished by most linguists, there has been considerable debate as to whether
volition should be subsumed under deontic or where to include necessity or ability.
4.2.2 Presentation of data
The parsed corpora were searched for non-extraposed [to_INF] subjects of all
the verbs discussed in the previous sections, i.e. verbs that allow at least one
type of clausal subject of the type [to_INF], [that_CL] or [V-ing].143 The results
were then checked manually and every sentence had to be specifically selected
to find its way into the database. The sentences in the database provide the
sample used in this chapter.144
In the sample, almost half of the verbs which are used with a [to_INF] sub-
ject are preceded by one of eight modal verbs,145 as can be seen in the following
table:
Tab. 7: Distribution of modal verbs in the sample of sentences with [to_INF] subjects
number of sentences percentage of sentences146
will 71 6.6 %
would 323 29.9 %
can 25 2.3 %
could 32 3.0 %
may 23 2.1 %
should 7 0.6 %
must 7 0.6 %
might 26 2.4 %
modal verbs total 514 47.5 %
no modal verb total 567 52.4 %
These results are remarkable as they show different values than the distribution
of modals over a corpus in general: “Verbs phrases with modals comprise 10–
15 % of all finite verb phrases in all registers” (LGSWE 456). Furthermore, the
||
143 The copula verbs be, appear, seem, become and remain were, however, discarded. For a
discussion of what counts as a copula verb see the beginning of Chapter 6.
144 If for a given verb only a few sentences with a [to_INF] subject were found, they were all
added to the sample. If a verb occurred frequently with [to_INF] subjects, only 8–10 were usu-
ally added to the database.
145 The list of modal verbs is based on LGSWE (486) with the omission of shall, which did not
occur in the collection of example sentences.
146 Due to rounding, figures do not add up to 100 %.
distribution of the modal verbs does not reflect the distribution in a general
language corpus (see also LGSWE 486). The following table compares the distri-
bution in the sample with the distribution over the whole BNC.
Tab. 8: Distribution of modal verbs in the BNC and in the sample of sentences with [to_INF]
subject
number in [to_INF] percentage147 number in BNC percentage

collection
will 71 13.8 % 328,424 23.8 %

would 323 62.8 % 278,522 20.2 %
can 25 4.9 % 261,778 19.0 %
could 32 6.2 % 159,818 11.6 %
may 23 4.5 % 112,397 8.2 %
should 7 1.4 % 108,970 7.9 %
must 7 1.4 % 69,752 5.1 %
might 26 5.1 % 59,026 4.3 %
The plot of these data shows that would and (to a much lesser extent) might rank
higher than in the overall BNC whereas can, should and must rank lower:
70%
60%
50%
40%
30% with [to-INF] subject
20% BNC overall
10%
0%
Fig. 7: Plot of the distribution of modal verbs in the BNC and in the sample of sentences with
[to_INF] subject
||
147 Due to rounding, figures do not add up to 100 % in both percentage columns.
Since this distribution is averaged over all verbs, it is also important to observe
that there are considerable verb-specific differences, as will be seen in the fol-
lowing two charts. Figure 8 charts the collected examples, between 10 and 15
per verb, so it has to be treated with caution due to the small numbers involved.
Figure 9 only counts instances of the selected modal verbs when they occur
within 1 to 3 words to the left of the verb in the BNC. This means it misses out on
many coordinated structures where two verbs “share” one modal verb and on
cases in which adverbials between and modal verb and main verb are 3 words
or longer:
(12) Hoare also agreed that he had been advised by the Director of Public
Prosecutions that charges of seditious libel against individuals attack-
ing Jews as a group would in all probability fail. (CS6 677)
On the other hand, the count erroneously includes cases such as (13) for the
verb harm.
(13) ‘Who'd want to harm Connon?’ (GUD 696)
Thus Figure 9 also represents tendencies rather than exact figures, but both
diagrams should nonetheless be reasonable approximations of the actual situa-
tion.
Sentences with [to_INF] subjects
say
fail
indicate
modal
threaten
non-modal
place
harm
0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100%
Fig. 8: Distribution of modal elements among selected verbs occurring with [to_INF] subjects in
the data collected for the present chapter
BNC frequency count
say
fail
indicate
modal
threaten
non-modal
place
harm
0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100%
Fig. 9: Distribution of modal verbs across all instances of selected verbs in the BNC
4.2.3 Interpretation of the data
The most striking feature found in the data is the extraordinarily high frequency
of modal verb use (particularly of would), if the [to_INF] occupies the canonical
subject position. This might be interpreted as being mainly due to inherent
semantic features of [to_INF] complements. Accordingly, the [to_INF] has been
linked with potentiality148 by many scholars:149
In general, a to-clause has a meaning that is more hypothetical or potential than the
meaning of the corresponding ing-clause (with the same verb). However, the specific
meaning difference between a to-clause and an ing-clause depends on the particular con-
trolling verb. (LGSWE 757)150
Thus although we can observe tendencies in the semantics of formal realisa-

tions such as [to_INF] or [V-ing], the verb that selects a certain complement
||
148 Some scholars (Coates 1983, Kleinke 2002) differentiate between potential/possible and
hypothetical events. In the following discussion, hypothetical is subsumed under potential.
149 See also, for instance, Quirk et al. (1972: 835f), Bolinger (1977: 73). However, Mair (1990:
36) shows that some of Bolinger’s (1977) asterisks are questionable, and our corpus evidence
supports this view. Rohdenburg (1992) discusses the issue historically and contrasts the con-
struction with the corresponding German options.
150 LGSWE’s statement is based on post-verbal complements in this context.
often plays a more important role. While Mair claims “that there is no modality
inherently associated with either infinitival or gerundial subjects” (Mair 1990:
86), the data presented here suggest the opposite. Mair’s data basis – hand-
collected examples from the Survey of English Usage – is simply not big enough
to single-handedly reject such claims.151 Still, as not even half of the uses in the
sample occur with a modal verb, there is clearly no single exclusive meaning
“potentiality” associated with [to_INF]s, as can be seen in (14):
(14) To urge Arabs to rise up and kill British troops in Iraq was despicable
and turned him into one of the most hated men in British politics.
(newspapers)
The quoted tendencies are, however, obvious enough in the present data. They
are statistically significant (p < 0.01) and should thus be accounted for by lin-
guistic theory. If we take a closer look at the data we can in fact observe that not
all modal verbs are highly frequent; only a certain class of modal verbs is chiefly
responsible for this result, namely modal verbs marking epistemic modality,
and then again those which are more on the “possible” end than on the “cer-
tainty” end of the epistemic scale.152 Thus would moves from second to the first
place in a frequency ranking (compared to the BNC), might from eighth to fourth
(together with can). The rarest modal auxiliaries in the study are should and
must, probably because they serve mainly as markers of deontic modality. In
our examples, deontic modality is – not surprisingly – relatively rare and all
seven uses of the modal auxiliary must are epistemic, as illustrated in the fol-
lowing sentence:
(15) To be so selfless after hearing she had cancer must have taken tre-
mendous courage. (newspapers)
The modal verb can, which can express possibility as well as ability, also occurs
less commonly in our sample of sentences with [to_INF] subjects than in the
BNC and most instances in our collection would have to be classified as markers
||
151 Mair (1990) only found 52 instances of non-extraposed [to_INF], the majority of which
presumably occurred with the copula be.
152 Even if one does not classify would as a marker of possibility but of hypothesis (Coates
1983: 5), the findings presented here are still valid given that “WOULD is often little more than
a marker of unreal condition” (Coates 1983: 211). This study, though, will follow Palmer (1990:
58) in classifying would as a marker of epistemic modality.
of possibility rather than ability, at least not in a strict sense of the term abil-
ity.153
(16) To tackle small problems can create big benefits. (britnews)
While most linguists would not classify such a use as epistemic (root possibility
in Coates 1983: 5, dynamic possibility in Palmer 1990: 81ff), its non-factual status
is compatible with the meaning of “potentiality” associated with [to_INF]s.
We can thus confirm the hypothesis that there is a certain meaning poten-
tial in [to_INF]s that expresses potentiality and goes along with modal verbs
compatible with this meaning component. It has to be made clear, however,
that any strong claims (i.e. that all [to_INF]s necessarily express potentiality)
have to be rejected, given the still more than 50 % non-modal uses in the sam-
ple. Such a strong claim is also rejected by Duffley:
This study has at least shown very clearly what the distinction between the gerund and
the infinitive is not. Neither the distinction between particular versus general nor that be-
tween reification versus hypothesis/potentiality, nor any of the derivative oppositions in
terms of factivity versus nonfactivity, referring versus nonreferring or validated versus val-
idatable, can account for the full range of meanings expressed by these two forms in their
use as subject of the sentence. (Duffley 2003: 349)
However, Duffley, who looks at a smaller dataset but in more detail, discusses
examples where the [to_INF] “is employed […] for its ability to prospectivize and
thereby evoke its events as merely hypothetical” (2003: 339) and finds “a power-
ful tendency for the to-infinitive to be used in contexts evoking nonreal events
(90 percent of its occurrences)” (2003: 349). The fact that hypothetical meaning
is neither necessary nor sufficient for the use of a [to_INF] is also backed up by
Duffley’s next observation: “However, the -ing form is also used to refer to non-
real events in one-third of its uses” (2003: 349).
That the overall, stronger tendency of the [to_INF] to occur with a potential-
ity meaning stated above is not uniform in character is shown by Figures 8 and
9. The propensity of a verb that is used with a [to_INF] non-extraposed subject
to occur with a modal verb appears to be item-specific and unpredictable.
Again, we are dealing with tendencies and not rules. The fact that say does not
occur with a modal in the sample whereas harm always does does not allow
strong claims such as that say never occurs with modals. In fact, a search of the
||
153 Palmer (1990: 85) suggests subject orientation as a term to overcome the restriction of the
term ability to animate creatures.
Conclusion | 89
entire corpus does indeed yield one instance of a sentence with would say which
does not figure in the 1082-sentence sample used for this chapter:154
(17) To be competitive again would say a lot for chemotherapy and the
cancer community. (newsmerge)
For some verbs, there seems to be an even more idiosyncratic distribution: The
43 sentences from the whole corpus which contain add with a non-extraposed
[to_INF] subject behave much the same way as the overall sample: slightly less
than half of the sentences occur with a modal verb, but none of the six instances
of add insult to injury do.155 As the numbers are quite small, this tendency – in-
teresting though it might be – is not statistically significant (p > 0.05).
4.3 Conclusion
In sum, we have found a substantial number of restrictions on clausal subjects
in the corpus data, which are summarized in the following table:
Tab. 9: Summary of restrictions on non-extraposed clausal subjects of active verbs
agree o – +
bar – + + [to_INF] and [that_CL] not attested
belong o – + [to_INF] only in one near-quotation from
Shakespeare's Sonnet 23
bind – + + [to_INF] and [that_CL] not attested
breathe – + + [to_INF] and [that_CL] not attested
charge – – +
||
154 Due to the high frequency of say in the corpus only a subset of the query results were
analysed originally.
155 One might be inclined to treat the (relatively) fixed expression add insult to injury as an
idiom and thus separate it from the lexical unit add used in the other examples, but this ap-
proach would be misguided as there is no discernable meaning difference between add in add
insult to injury and many other uses of add in the corpus. In a construction grammar approach
(Goldberg 2006) one could nonetheless treat the combination as a construction in its own right
if we assume that it is stored separately due to the frequency with which the items occur to-
gether.
charm – + + no [to_INF] and no [that_CL] attested, [V-ing]

only one example
check + – + [to_INF] only one example
compare + – +
compel – + + but [for_NP_to_INF] attested
concentrate + – +
demand + – +
depend + – +
entertain – + + [to_INF] and [that_CL] not attested; few real [V-
ing]s but lots of cases with "entertaining" as
predicative element
grieve + + – no [that_CL] attested non-extraposed, only
extraposed
grow – – + borders on copula for some uses (e.g. ‘grow
difficult’)
guide – – +
hang – + + no [to_INF] and no [that_CL] attested
interest – + + no [to_INF] and no [that_CL] attested
introduce + – +
link – + + no [to_INF] and no [that_CL] attested
matter – + +
pay + – +
persuade – + + no [to_INF] and only one [that_CL] attested
recall – – +
remain + – + borders on copula; extraposed [that_CL]
attested
replace – – +
shape – + + no [to_INF] and no [that_CL] attested
take + – + [that_CL] only in tough movement
wash + – +
Conclusion | 91
While the case for a restriction on non-extraposed [V-ing] subjects is weak,

[to_INF] and [that_CL] show significant patterns of non-occurrence in, after all,
1.5 billion words of parsed text.156
We have also seen that other factors besides verb valency, such as modality,
can play a role in the selection of the type of clausal subject, even though their
predictive power is limited.
In a small study of semantically similar verbs, some differences in the ac-
ceptability of the three major clausal subjects ([V-ing], [to_INF], [that_CL]) were
found for persuade and convince, but these are gradual and thus not necessarily
‘bulletproof’ counter-examples against a view that claims that the syntactic
form follows from the semantics alone. On the other hand, the range of seman-
tic features associated with the different clausal complements is so wide and
shows so much overlap that it is almost impossible to predict any restriction
with them. (It is of course always possible to claim that a certain feature is re-
sponsible for a restriction in a post-hoc manner.)
This is in line with Kleinke’s (2002) observations on the alternation between
the two principal non-finite clausal complement in English, [to_INF] and [V-
ing]. She finds that there is substantial semantic overlap between the two forms
and that often the difference is only in one single semantic feature, so that it is
often impossible to actually observe a semantic difference (Kleinke 2002: 304).
Accordingly, if in many cases there is no or hardly any semantic difference be-
tween realisations of clausal subjects, how complex would the semantic com-
ponent of a grammatical model have to be in order to systematically predict the
distribution of [that_CL], [to_INF] and [V-ing] shown above?
It would thus be quite difficult to conceive of a model that is based on a fi-
nite set of semantic roles (such as the generative model) and that is capable of
predicting the restrictions on clausal subjects shown in this chapter. Given that
research on postverbal elements has shown convincingly that such restrictions
exist,157 it would furthermore not be economical for a grammatical model that
has to account for such restrictions anyway to have a second mechanism for
subjects that works purely at the semantic level. Thus an item-specific treatment
of subjects of non-copula verbs in linguistic theory is very likely called for.
||
156 As discussed in Section 3.2.2, parsing errors may of course prevent us from finding all
instances in the corpus, but not finding a pattern is very likely an indicator of its extreme rarity.
157 See, for instance, Faulhaber (2011).
5 Analysis of subjects in passive clauses
If we want to determine whether there are arbitrary restrictions on the form of
subjects, a study of passive clauses may be particularly revealing. As many
theories derive passive clauses from active clauses or rely on a systematic struc-
tural relationship between the two, the role of the subject in the passive voice is
directly related to the constituent often called object in the active voice (see for
instance CGEL 726f, Aarts/Aarts 1982: 138ff, CamG 246f).158 Given that ample
evidence is available that such postverbal constituents are highly verb-specific,
it will be investigated in this chapter
– whether the same formal restrictions hold for the subjects of passive claus-
es,
– whether there are more restrictions,
– whether subjects are less restricted, or
– whether we simply find different restrictions than in the active clause.
The findings of this chapter are also relevant to the question in what way pas-
sives should be modelled: Can they be seen as derived from the corresponding
active clause or should they rather be treated as independent?
[NP] complements are by far the most frequent and versatile subjects in
passive clauses – just as in active clauses – and are thus least relevant for the
identification of formal restrictions.159 The focus will thus once again be on the
major clausal complements [V-ing], [to_INF] and [that_CL].
5.1 Short theoretical introduction

As mentioned above, the traditional view in grammatical description is to re-
gard the subject of the passive as related to or derived from the ‘object’ in the
||
158 The present chapter is only about English. For a cross-linguistic perspective on passives,
see Siewierska (1984).
159 However, not all verbs show postverbal [NP] complements in the same slot as the clausal
complements which can become the subject of a corresponding passive clause. Thus, for in-
stance, agree and aim also have passivizable complements in other valency slots. Some verbs
such as remark discussed in Section 5.2.2.3 have no pure [NP] complement at all (only preposi-
tional ones), but they allow [NP] subjects in the passive nonetheless (possibly with a stranded
preposition).
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110589801-113
94 | Analysis of subjects in passive clauses
corresponding active declarative clause.160 Thus the direct object Mary in the
active clause (1a) becomes the subject in the corresponding passive clause (1b):
(1) a. John killed Mary last night.

b. Mary was killed last night.
However, not all objects occur as subjects in the passive clause161 and not every-
thing that can occur as a subject in the passive clause is treated as object by all
accounts.162 One of the most influential approaches to posit derivation of pas-
sives from actives was the generative transformational account put forward by
Chomsky (1957: 77f), who made the notion of a ‘passive transformation’ popu-
lar163 (see also Stein 1979:11):
The idea of representing the English active-passive relation in terms of transformations

was not, however, revolutionary. Jespersen, for instance, had spoken of the ‘turning’ and
Poutsma of the ‘conversion’ of the verb form from one voice to another; but it was only in
the case of transformational theory that the use of transformation was extended, formal-
ised and systematically incorporated into a unified grammatical framework. (Svartvik
1966: 1f)
This derivative view was followed up by many researchers and can also be
found in approaches to valency theory. Thus Allerton states that “where two
structures are related with real regularity, as in the cases of active-passive”
(Allerton 1982: 31), one should recognise a transformational relation between
the two structures since having to describe only one structure is more economic.
It follows that in such a view of grammar a description of active clause objects is
also at the same time a description of passive clause subjects. As mentioned in
Section 2.2.2, most German valency grammarians – while not necessarily sub-
||
160 That it is the active declarative that is seen as primary is certainly due to the fact that the
declarative is the “most common sentence type” (Herbst/Schüller 2008: 149) and that active
sentences are more frequent than passive sentences: “Proportionally, passives account for c.
25% of all finite verbs in academic prose [...,] c. 15% [...] in news [...,] c. 2% in conversation”
(LGSWE 476).
161 So-called ‘middle verbs’ (CGEL 735f), ‘extent and measure phrases’ (CGEL 735) and ‘bene-
factive objects’ (Aarts/Aarts 1982: 140) are problematic cases. See also Herbst/Schüller (2008:
169–172) for a discussion of objecthood and passivizability.
162 CamG for instance does not call postverbal [that_CL] complements object, except for those
in complex transitive complementation (CamG 1017–1022). Another problem is the so-called
prepositional passive discussed in more detail in Section 5.2.2.3.
163 To be precise, the passive is derived from a deep structure that is shared with the active
clause, but at least in early transformational work the deep structure had a striking similarity
to the structure of the active declarative sentence.
Short theoretical introduction | 95
scribing to a view that derives one structure from the other – rely on the use in
the active declarative to describe the complement inventory of the verb. Thus a
passive sentence, for instance, can be related to the corresponding active sen-
tence by means of a so-called ‘valency reduction’ (‘Valenzreduktion’, Welke
1988: 69f, Helbig/Heinrich 1978: 11f).164 Again this means that passive clause
subjects are complements that occur postverbally in the active clause. However,
the authors of VALBU (Schumacher et al. 2004) are aware of the problems that
arise in such a derivative view and state that due to the quite different realiza-
tions of the semantic roles in the passive sentence compared to the active sen-
tence one could attribute two different complement inventories to active and
passive clauses and thus interpret valency as a property of verb forms (Schu-
macher et al. 2004: 55). For practical lexicographic reasons they discard the
separation of active and passive patterns in the dictionary, though.
Herbst/Faulhaber reject the primacy of the active clause, too: „Der aktive
Aussagesatz wird nicht als primär oder grundlegend gegenüber anderen
betrachtet“ [“The active declarative sentence is not regarded as primary to, or
more basic than, others.”] (Herbst/Faulhaber 2011: 415). Active and passive are
thus treated simply as structural alternatives. Nonetheless, a relationship be-
tween the two is acknowledged with regard to the complements that can be
used in the active and passive clause:
In passive clauses, the complement functioning as subject realizes a predicate comple-

ment unit in the corresponding active clause. While this is not to say that any of the two
sentence types is primary, the range of subjects in passive clauses depends on the verb’s
possible predicate complement units [...]. (Faulhaber 2011: 11)
This is in line with the approach taken by the VDE where, by default, active
patterns are given and the ability of individual complements to occur as a sub-
jects in passive clauses is indicated through a system of codes.
Lexical functional grammar (LFG), early accounts of which treated passivi-
zation as a lexical rule and not an operation on trees (as opposed to the genera-
tive transformational account), makes use of a principle of ‘lexical mapping’
(see Bresnan 2001: Chapter 14) to account for the relationship. Thus LFG can in
principle account for actives and passives independently from one another.
||
164 Similarly Sadziński, who states that a reduction of valency slots is characteristic of the
passive voice (Sadziński 2006: 971).
The same is true of a valency pattern approach, which does not rely on a
complement inventory but specifies patterns of clause structure.165 Such an
approach was suggested for English by Herbst (2007), is discussed in more de-
tail by Herbst/Schüller (2008: 137–141) and has been realised in the Erlangen
Valency Patternbank166 (Herbst/Uhrig 2009), where active and passive verb pat-
terns are listed separately (including the subject), so that no direct relation be-
tween passive clause subjects and active clause postverbal complements is
assumed.
5.2 Analysis
As our aim in the present chapter is to investigate to what extent the subject in a
passive sentence is lexically governed by the main verb, empirical evidence
from a variety of sources will be discussed. The VDE is the primary source when
it comes to the active clause and the ability of complements that are found post-
verbally in the active clause to occur as subject in the corresponding passive
clause. Furthermore, the VDE was used as the point of departure for the corpus
analysis, for which a multi-level process was used: In the first step a list was
compiled containing all verbs in the VDE that have at least one clausal comple-
ment which can occur as a subject in a passive sentence.167 The list was then
used as the basis for queries for clausal subjects of the [V-ing], [to_INF] and
[that_CL] type in canonical subject position in the parsed corpora presented in
Section 3.2.2. In a third step, evidence that was found to be in contrast to the
description in the VDE was submitted to a native speaker informant (NS1) for
screening in order to filter out performance errors. Examples discussed below
are taken from that list and were verified by another native speaker informant
||
165 A similar approach to German syntax is taken by Engel (2004: 104), who distinguishes
between Satzmuster (verb plus complements) and Satzbauplan (a Satzmuster with an indication
of the optionality of complements and additional semantic information). His patterns are
always established on the basis of the active sentence, though (Engel 2004: 104).
166 At present, however, since the Patternbank is based on the VDE, the data is not backed by
extensive separate corpus analysis of passives, though this would certainly be desirable.
167 The selection does not include the idiomatic phrasal verbs listed beneath many VDE verb
entries as no systematic description of complements in relation to valency slots is given in this
part of the dictionary entries. However, a cursory check hinted that a more thorough analysis
of, for instance, bring up, bring about, rule out might be worth the effort. The more idiomatic
type of what CGEL calls prepositional verbs (see discussion in Section 5.2.2.3) was not analysed
in detail as their valency structure in the complement block is usually not complete (only
postverbal complements listed under the heading “Further uses”).
Analysis | 97
(NS2).168 Further evidence is supplied by Faulhaber’s (2011) study of restrictions

on semantically similar postverbal complements of semantically similar verbs.
5.2.1 Passive clause subjects as subset of active clause complements
In the simplest case, the postverbal complements found in the valency slot that
corresponds to the semantic role ÆFFECTED (i.e. those often called ‘object’) can
occur as subject in a passive clause. Thus for complete, the VDE lists an [NP]169
and a [V-ing] complement in that position and uses subscript P to indicate that
both of them can act as passive subjects.
Fig. 10: Complement block for complete (VDE 164)170
The examples are straightforward and no restrictions whatsoever seem to apply

on the use in the passive:
(2) a. In addition, they completed the project within budget.

b. In addition, the project was completed within budget. (GX7 32)
||
168 The list was submitted in writing to NS1 and can be found in Appendix 15. NS2 was then
interviewed in person on the relevant data.
169 For reasons of consistency, the latest version of the complement labels found in
Herbst/Schüller (2008: 118ff) will be used so that [N] in the VDE becomes [NP], [to-INF] be-
comes [to_INF], etc.
170 The complement block of a VDE entry contains a list of complements, i.e. formal phrase or
clause labels, grouped by valency slots (I, II, III in this case). So slot I in this example is the one
for the active clause [NP] subject (indicated by subscript A), which is realized as [by_NP] in the
passive clause if it is present. Slot II for this example is obligatory (hence “obl”) and contains
what is traditionally described as the direct object, which can be realized either by an [NP] or a
[V-ing] complement, both of which can become subjects in the passive clause (indicated by
subscript P). Slot III offers additional complements that can occur in trivalent clauses (or diva-
lent passive clauses) but cannot occur in subject position at all.
(3) a. He added that they had not completed securing the posts before Gary
was fatally injured the following day.
b. He added that securing the posts had not been completed before Gary
was fatally injured the following day. (K2W 260)
Also, no other than the postverbal active clause complements can become pas-
sive subjects:
(3) c. *To secure the posts was never completed.

d. *That they secured the posts was never completed.
Tables of the following type will be given after each verb discussed in order to
summarise the findings:
Tab. 10: Summary of the findings for complete171
complete
slot complement PCUact SCUpass
II [NP] + +
II [V-ing] + +
II [to_INF] - -
II [that_CL] - -
With admit, the situation is markedly different as only two out of the six com-
plements listed in valency slot II can become the subject of a passive clause:
||
171 PCU stands for Predicate Complement Unit (i.e. a complement that occurs within the
predicate), SCU for Subject Complement Unit (i.e. a complement that occurs in subject posi-
tion).
Analysis | 99
Fig. 11: Complement block for admit (A) (VDE 15)
Thus, apart from the [NP], only the [that_CL] is perfectly acceptable in the pas-
sive:
(4) That some hospitals fail to reach the required state of cleanliness is
admitted and may be overly difficult to cure.
The [V-ing] that is acceptable in the active voice as in (5a) below cannot become
the subject of a passive clause as predicted by the VDE and demonstrated in
(5b), which is a all the more notable because [V-ing] subjects are extremely
versatile, as we have seen in Chapter 4 and will see again for passive verbs in
the next section.
(5) a. So far no group has admitted carrying out the murder.

b. *Carrying out the murder has never been admitted by any group.
Again, complements that cannot occur in the active clause cannot become pas-
sive clause subjects either:
(6) *To fail to reach the required state of cleanliness is admitted.
Tab. 11: Summary of the findings for admit (A)
admit
II [NP] + +
II [V-ing] + -
II [that_CL] + +
II [wh_CL] + -
II [Q/S] + -
admit
II [to N/V-ing] + -
II [to_INF] - -
The examples of complete and admit represent a large set of verbs for which the
possible subjects of the passive clause are a subset (i.e. some or all) of the post-
verbal complements found in the active clause. Most verbs in the VDE (and
possibly most verbs in the language) belong to this category. Of the verbs stud-
ied for the present chapter, the following conform to this prototype: announce,
avoid, confirm, decide, defend, delay, discover, enjoy, forget, ignore, include,
intend, link, mention, remember, show, stop, suspect, tolerate,172 value.173
Thus the evidence presented in this section supports the traditional view
that passive clause subjects can be found postverbally in active clauses.
5.2.2 Passive clause subjects not found in the active clause

5.2.2.1 Complement occurs only as passive subject
As mentioned above, most theories do not take into consideration the idea that
complements may occur as subjects in passive clauses but not as postverbal
complements in active clauses. However, the corpus search yielded substantial
evidence for such phenomena. The verbs with extra [V-ing] complement form by
far the largest group and will be illustrated here with the example of teach:
||
172 The verb tolerate is not included in the VDE but was shown by Faulhaber (2011: 187) to not
allow a postverbal [to_INF] even though semantically similar verbs such as bear and endure do
allow it. The restriction seems to hold in the passive as only one counter-example was found
which was rated marginal and dispreferred compared to [V-ing] by native speakers:
?He added: “The message has to go out that to win by cheating is ethically unacceptable and will
not be tolerated.” (newspapers)
It is likely that the only reason it was produced is the coordination between is ethically unac-
ceptable and will not be tolerated.
173 Some of these verbs have complements which are not passivizable according to the VDE
but were found as passive subjects in the corpora. A few were supposed to have obligatory
extraposition, but were found non-extraposed in the corpora. However, as all complements
that can occur as a passive clause subject occur in some active clause pattern, they were sub-
sumed under this category.
Analysis | 101
(7) a. Conducting a disciplinary hearing or interviewing potential employees

is best taught face-to-face because they rely on human contact. (brit-
news)
b. #She taught repairing cars.174
Tab. 12: Summary of the findings for teach
teach175
II [that_CL] + +
II [to_INF] + –
II [V-ing] – +
Other verbs in that group are attack, attempt, decide, ensure, estimate, ex-
plain,176 expect, help,177 influence, inform, learn, repeat.
There were two good examples of verbs with extra [that_CL] complements
as passive subjects, help and support, both of which are illustrated in (8) and
(9).
(8) a. That he was nearly always available as mentor was considerably

helped by the fact that unlike many scientists of his intellectual sen-
iority, he spent most of his time on the home ground of his department
rather than traveling worldwide to this or that “important” symposi-
um. (academic)
b. ?The fact that he spent most of his time at the department helped that
he was nearly always available as a mentor.
||
174 The sentence is acceptable in another reading irrelevant for our purposes, i.e. when re-
pairing cars is understood as an adjunct rather than a complement of teach, or, possibly, when
it is treated as a course title.
175 For brevity’s sake, only [that_CL], [to_INF] and [V-ing] complements are listed in the
tables since only these were verified with the help of corpora and native speaker informants
unless there is a special reason for listing another complement.
176 The VDE entry for explain features an [N(’s) V-ing] complement for active sentences,
though.
177 The verb help can of course occur with a postverbal [V-ing] in the active sentence, but only
in constructions of the type “cannot help V-ing” (which is treated as subsense  in the VDE).
Tab. 13: Summary of the findings for help
help
II? [that_CL] – +
II?178 [V-ing] –179 +
III [to_INF] + +
(9) a. That the secret ingredient to a longer life might be self-esteem is sup-
ported by other research confirming that heart disease and cancer are
more likely in those suffering from depression. (newspapers)
b. ?Other research supports that Miller’s calculations are correct.
Tab. 14: Summary of the findings for support
support
II [V-ing] + +
II [that_CL] – +
III [to_INF] – –
The case of settle follows the same pattern and is the only case in the VDE where
there is a complement that can only occur in the passive:180
(10) It was settled that very evening that she would produce Streetcar.
(VDE 749)
Data from the BNC confirms that the structure presented in (10) is used whereas
no postverbal [that_CL] occurs in an active sentence.181 The VDE gives the pat-
||
178 The [that_CL] and [V-ing] complements were grouped into valency slot number II on
semantic grounds.That they seem not to combine with a postverbal [to_INF] may argue in
favour of placing them in valency slot III, however.
179 See Note 177.
180 There are actually five more, but they are either more an artefact of the description than a
real phenomenon (lose, test, see), of dubious acceptability (pray) or erroneous (match).
181 In the large parsed corpora described in Section 3.2.2 there are seven instances of active
settle followed by [that-CL]. However, six of them were rejected by native speakers and one was
Analysis | 103
tern as “[it] be settled + that-CL” (VDE 749), which indicates obligatory extrapo-
sition.182 We thus have to add a distinction between extraposed and non-
extraposed subjects to the table.
Tab. 15: Summary of the findings for settle
settle
canonical extraposed
II [wh_CL] + + +
II [that_CL] – – +
II [V-ing] – – –
II [to_INF] – – –
Furthermore, read (in the subsense labelled γ in the VDE) is interesting in that it
allows a [V-ing], a [to_INF] and a [that_CL] as a passive subject, neither of which
occurs in the active:183
(11) a. Bringing it back is read as an admission that today’s deficits are going
to be with us for some time. (newsmerge)
b. However, to criticise the Government’s approach to pension planning
should not be read as a glorification of its predecessor’s efforts.
(newsmerge)
c. That the movie seems likely to get at least a sprinkling of Oscars next
weekend could be read as not much more than one of Hollywood’s
periodic outbursts of patriotism, and of the Academy’s weakness for
golden-toned period spectacle. (newspapers)
||
rated at best marginally acceptable:
?“Less talk, if you don’t mind, and more service,” he said at length, just when we had settled that I
would go to the ball, Allegra - who had, as usual, a rotten cold - would mind the till and Barbara
would take a well-earned break in the Eternal City. (newspapers)
182 In the parsed corpora, there are two apparent counter-examples, but one could also be
treated as adjectival and the other is from a non-native context.
183 There is a [wh-CL]P(it) in slot II, though.
Looking at the examples one may be inclined to wonder whether active uses of
this particular meaning of read exist, but they do as illustrated by (11d), alt-
hough the passive is more frequent in the corpus.184
(11) d. Like some Greek-speaking liberal Jews, the early Christians read the
prophets as foretelling a universal mission of the Jews to illuminate all
peoples. (ADC 34)
Tab. 16: Summary of the findings for read (γ)
read (γ)
II [NP] + +
II [wh_CL] + +
II [V-ing] – +
II [that_CL] – +
II [to_INF] – +
The verb blame deserves separate treatment because it is the only one in our test
set185 that allows sentential complements as passive subjects but no sentential
complement whatsoever in postverbal position in the active clause according to
the VDE – a finding which was confirmed by a corpus search of the BNC and the
newspaper corpora.
(12) a. Riding a bike is often blamed for producing thunder thighs. (news-
merge)
b. That this has been so severe was blamed on three things. (newspa-
pers)
Why it is that (12a–b) are acceptable remains mysterious and appears to be

completely arbitrary.
||
184 This sense of read is similar to the cases discussed in Section 5.2.2.2 below and might just
as well have been discussed there.
185 As pointed out above, only verbs that allowed at least one passivizable sentential post-
verbal complement were tested systematically. However, every single verb starting with a and
b was tested in order to check for a case such as blame.
Analysis | 105
Tab. 17: Summary of the findings for blame
blame
II [NP] + +
II [V-ing] – +
II [that_CL] – +
II [to_INF] – –
To sum up, this section has already presented conclusive evidence that com-
plements which do not occur postverbally in the active clause can occur as pas-
sive clause subjects, seriously challenging the traditional view outlined in Sec-
tion 5.1.
5.2.2.2 Possible influence of other valency carriers in the clause

Sentences such as (13a) below have attracted the attention of researchers for a
long time186 because the two postverbal elements are in a semantic relationship
to each other that is similar to that of a copular clause such as (13b), i.e. there is
some sort of predication.
(13) a. Mr Advani’s enemies consider him dangerous. (VDE 176)

b. He is dangerous.
In the generative literature, the postverbal elements in (13a) are usually treated
in terms of a small clause.187
Similar observations led the authors of the VDE to introduce a formally not
specified complement of the type [it + pattern of X], where X can be an [NP], an
[ADJ] or an [as_NP] or [as_ADJ] prepositional complement in another valency
slot of the verb. The [it + pattern of ADJ] complement is underlined in (13c):
(13) c. Thus he would not consider it appropriate to regard any individual as

having a fixed amount of intelligence. (VDE 176)
||
186 Aarts (1992: 36) traces the observation back to Jespersen, who treats the postverbal ele-
ments as a dependent nexus (see Section 2.1.2 for details on his terminology). Chomsky ([1955]
1975) also briefly discusses such sentences.
187 See Aarts (1992) for a detailed account; Giparaitė (2006) offers a more recent generative
perspective.
The idea behind such a treatment is that the extraposed [to_INF] in (13c) is
somehow governed by the predicative element appropriate (similar to the situa-
tion in copular clauses we shall see in Section 6.2). That there is some sort of
relationship of that kind can be easily shown if we insert incompatible comple-
ments as illustrated below. In (14a), there is a perfectly acceptable copular sen-
tence in which the [that_CL] follows an [NP] headed by fact. However, a
[for_NP_to_INF] complement is incompatible with fact, which renders (14b)
unacceptable.
(14) a. It is a fact that Brexit is a success.

b. *It is a fact for Brexit to be a success.
The fact that the sentences in (15) show a parallel behaviour to those in (14)
even though the constituents in question are both used as postverbal comple-
ments indicates that the restriction imposed on the clausal complement by fact
holds in such a construction, too.
(15) a. They consider it a fact that Brexit is a success.

b. *They consider it a fact for Brexit to be a success.
Let us now return to the passive of that construction. The [it + pattern of X]
complement can also occur there with the same restriction between the two
elements:
(16) a. It is considered a fact that Brexit is a success.

b. *It is considered a fact for Brexit to be a success.
Furthermore, a non-extraposed version – though comparatively rare – does

occur, too. And, what is particularly interesting, the restriction between fact and
the clausal complement still holds:
(17) a. That housing will decline is considered a fact like Isaac Newton’s
laws.188 (housingpanic.blogspot.com)
b. *For housing to decline is considered a fact like Isaac Newton’s laws.
Thus a model of passive clauses of that sort has to account for restrictions im-
posed on the subject by elements other than the verb. For sentences such as
(17a) above, one could feel reminded of copular clauses such as (14a). However,
the analogy only holds for [NP] and [ADJ] complements in the postverbal posi-
||
188 The attachment of like Isaac Newton’s laws is ambiguous. It could be treated as a postmod-
ifier to fact but also as an adjunct in the sentence.
Analysis | 107
tion and not for [as X]189 or [to_INF] complements. The latter is particularly in-
teresting in that the restriction identified above still holds even if fact is the
predicative noun within a [to_INF] postverbal complement:190
(17) c. That housing will decline is considered to be a fact like Isaac New-
ton’s laws.
d. *For housing to decline is considered to be a fact like Isaac Newton’s
laws.
We can also show that it is still not the verb consider which restricts the form of
the passive subject, as [for_NP_to_INF] complements as in (17d) above can oc-
cur if we change the predicative noun in the postverbal [to_INF] clause:
(17) e. For him to do that was considered to be a brilliant idea.
In the corpus data analysed, most of the verbs that can occur in such a pattern
do not impose many restrictions on the passive clause subject themselves, so we
find [V-ing], [to_INF] and [that_CL] alike with many of them.
The case of regard is similar to consider in syntactic and semantic structure,
but it occurs less commonly with a postverbal [to_INF] and needs an [as_NP]
instead of an [NP] complement.191 Again, all three major clausal subjects occur
in the passive:
(18) a. To be a single mother in Pakistan is regarded as a disgrace. (news-

merge)
b. That the present Queen came so close to topping the poll could be
regarded as a substantial achievement. (newsmerge)
c. Blowing up the Provos' store of the plastic explosive, Semtex, is re-
garded as a possibility. (newsmerge)
The case of judge is particularly interesting if we want to compare active clause

postverbal complements and passive clause subject. Faulhaber (2011: 184f)
||
189 The symbol X here stands for a choice of potential elements that can occur as a comple-
ment of the particle as, e.g. NP, ADJ or V-ing without claiming that all of them are possible for
all verbs.
190 Aarts (1992: 68ff) discusses the relationship between sentences such as (17a) and (17c)
within a generative framework. There seem to be competing views as to the question whether
the latter is derived from the former by inserting to be or whether there is a process of be-
deletion that derives the former from the latter.
191 See also Herbst’s (2009) analysis.
shows that in the active clause judge does not allow a [V-ing] complement in the
ÆFFECTED valency slot whereas a [to_INF] is possible.192 Compare:
(19) a. Fertility conditions play a part then, and as hard pruning provokes the
greater growth response, we should judge to ease back a little on
poor, dry soils compared with more fertile conditions. (CMM 799 cited
by Faulhaber 2011: 185)
b. *?You should judge doing this. (Faulhaber 2011: 185)
However, in the following sentence, we find a [V-ing] passive clause subject

with judge:
(19) c. Breaching Commons security and flour-bombing the Prime Minister

will be judged even by many supporters of Fathers 4 Justice to be a
protest too far. (newspapers)
At first sight, this may look as if simply fewer restrictions apply in the passive
than in the active (as with the verbs discussed in the previous section), but the
existence of the [V-ing] in the active as in (19d) below points in another direc-
tion:
(19) d. In the computer assisted methods (both CAPI as CSAQ) respondents

were more positive about data-privacy, and judged answering sensi-
tive questions as less unpleasant. (academic)
It appears as if judge does not block the choice of the [V-ing] in the trivalent
active pattern and accordingly neither in the divalent (optionally trivalent) pas-
sive shown in (19c) above. This is in fact strong evidence for a small clause
analysis: If both postverbal elements form a small clause constituent and if the
verb only opens up one slot for such a constituent, it may not exert influence on
the “subject” of the small clause. While for the active clause, such an analysis is
immediately appealing even outside the generative framework, within which it
is most prominently discussed, the situation is not as straightforward in the
passive clause. For linguists using a surface-oriented approach, the underlined
constituent in the following sentence is the subject of the verb consider.
(20) That man was considered a fool. (Aarts 1992: 160)
||
192 Example (19a) illustrates a structure Faulhaber found but which is not listed in the VDE
for this lexical unit.
Analysis | 109
In such a view, an analysis that regards “That man ... a fool” as a small clause is
unintuitive and would have to make use of a discontinuous verbless clause
constituent. In a generative approach, the phenomenon is easier to account for
as Aarts illustrates with the help of the D-Structure (reproduced as 21a) and the
S-Structure (reproduced as 21b) of (20):
(21) a. [NP e] was considered [SC that man a fool] (Aarts 1992: 160)
b. [NP that man]i was considered [SC ti a fool] (Aarts 1992: 160)
These structures can be read as follows: The NP that man is the subject of the
small clause at D-Structure and is then raised to the subject position of the ma-
trix clause (which is empty at D-Structure) so that only a trace co-indexed with
the raised subject remains in the small clause at S-Structure. While this is cer-
tainly elegant, such an analysis is not sensible in usage-based approaches,
which – for good reasons – doubt the existence of empty/null elements193 and
reject the idea that elements in a sentence may be in a different place in an un-
derlying structure. We shall try to reconcile surface-based valency grammar
with the evidence presented here in Section 9.3.2.
Apart from consider we find assume, declare, describe, feel, find, judge,
prove, recognize, regard and take in such passive structures.194
There is a related structure with verbs taking a postverbal [to_INF] comple-
ment where the ones just discussed often allow nominal, adjectival or preposi-
tional complements. It appears that the verbs associated with this structure, just
like the ones discussed before, exhibit considerably fewer restrictions on the
passive clause subject than expected.
Let us begin with the discussion of guarantee. According to the VDE guaran-
tee allows for a [to_INF] and a [that_CL] complement in the active clause. Only
the [that_CL] can become subject of a passive clause. However, we find all three
major clausal complements as passive clause subjects of guarantee in the corpo-
ra:
||
193 In Goldbergian construction grammar, for instance, “[n]o underlying levels of syntax, nor
any phonologically empty elements are posited” Goldberg (2006: 10). Sinclair/Mauranen argue
in a similar vein that “now that many linguists respect the actual wordings of corpora, and are
committed to describing the text and not some rewritten version of it, notions that there are
some words missing or that the text cannot be understood as it stands are no longer tenable”
(2006: 150; the statement is about so-called ‘ellipsis’).
194 Make as in “Linking up with peers abroad is made dramatically easier using the Internet.”
(newsmerge) is a superficially similar case, but the semantic structure is different. To be able to
distinguish such structures, Herbst/Schüller (2008: 139) propose valency constructions, which
are pairings of valency patterns and participant structures.
(22) a. Knocking two small reception rooms into one is virtually guaranteed
to create value, as is enlarging a family kitchen so they can eat in it.
(newspapers)
b. But even to raise the question of what comes after Downing Street is
guaranteed to halt conversation in mid-track with any of Blair’s ad-
visers. (newspapers)
c. That the believers’ understanding of Christianity is truly what God
wills it to be is guaranteed by the Holy Spirit, as, again, Jesus prom-
ised explicitly. (newspapers)
While (22c) is the straightforward passive we would have expected, the structure
of (22a–b) is very similar to sentences with a semi-auxiliary (CGEL 143). In fact,
we could easily replace be guaranteed to with the semi-auxiliary be bound to in
both of them without a tangible change in the structure of the sentence. This
would, however, suggest that the [V-ing] and the [to_INF] are not selected by
guarantee but by the verb following it in the infinitive. Since “the nonfinite con-
struction following these verbs can often be replaced by a that-clause with an
indicative verb” (CGEL 1204) as illustrated in (23a–b) for report, the subject and
the predicate in the [that_CL] have to be somehow compatible. Since the post-
verbal construction in (23b) is a predication that might be regarded as a small
clause, such an interpretation is indeed plausible.
(23) a. The police reported that the traffic was heavy. (CGEL 1204)
b. The police reported the traffic to be heavy. <formal> (CGEL 1204)
c. The traffic was reported to be heavy. (CGEL 1204)
Other verbs of that type include say, suppose, think and understand. CGEL in-
cludes only be supposed to in the group of semi-auxiliaries but also states that
“[t]he boundaries of this category are not clear” (CGEL 143). According to CGEL
(1203) no corresponding active version of the type shown in (23a) above can be
constructed for say and think.195 While for say196 this is certainly correct, a query
of the BNC yields more than 20 counter-examples where think is used in the
active voice in such a structure, such as (24a).
(24) a. He knew that she thought him to be a stiff and unimaginative person.
(GW2 3246)
||
195 Similarly, the pattern representations in the VDE depart from the usual (active) format.
They read “be said + to-INF” (VDE 720) and “be thought + to-INF” (VDE 869).
196 The fact that say can occur in this particular passive pattern is an idiosyncratic property in
itself and has to be represented lexically. (Compare *He is written/told to have left early.)
Analysis | 111
In fact, we can even find an active counterpart for the structure with passive
subject [to_INF] for think. (The structure was presented for guarantee in (22b)
above.)
(24) b. They would support the union if they thought it to be in their interest
to do so. (AC2 2297)
c. To do so was thought to be in their interest.
Thus even though most of the verbs discussed in the second part of this section
seem to prefer the passive, we can observe a similarity to the verbs of the con-
sider type covered at the beginning of the chapter in that a small clause analysis
is possible and thus once again the postverbal element seems to exert influence
on the passive clause subject.
However, even though we found considerably fewer restrictions in the pas-
sive clause subject than we would have expected, not all verbs discussed in this
section seem to occur with all types of subject. Thus for example advertise was
only found with a [V-ing], for report there was no [to_INF], and understand only
occurred in the pattern with a postverbal complement as discussed here with a
[V-ing] subject but allowed the other forms when used without a postverbal
complement. It has to be stressed, though, that the corpus evidence is by far not
sufficient to base serious arguments on these three cases.
Thus the picture that emerges is rather patchy and suggests that, for the
verbs studied here, secondary postverbal “valency carriers” are at least as re-
sponsible for restrictions on the passive clause subjects as are the verbs them-
selves. It thus makes only limited sense to produce summarizing tables of the
kind shown in the previous sections, as tables would need three dimensions for
a given verb (complement, active/passive, and secondary valency carrier) and a
lot more corpus evidence would be needed to fill such tables reliably. Given that
there were a few verbs for which not all complements were found as passive
clause subjects, a more detailed study of such phenomena would be desirable
once even larger corpora become available. A tentative proposal for the model-
ling of such structures is presented in Section 9.3.2.
5.2.2.3 Prepositional passive

Furthermore, there is a set of verbs which allow a [V-ing] in the active only with
a particle as in (25a), but allow it in the passive without the particle as in (25b),
sometimes with the particle ‘stranded’ after the verb.
(25) a. These two groups agree on rejecting many economic policy prescrip-
tions of the ‘wets’ but disagree on the role of the state. (A6F 1021)
b. Officially, lifting the embargo has been agreed in principle, but “now
is not the time”. (newspapers)
c. Officially, lifting the embargo has been agreed on in principle, but
“now is not the time”.
For (25b–c) it would be difficult to argue for a semantic difference. Examples of

further verbs showing the same behaviour are aim, allow, arrange, look and
remark. The case of look is interesting because there is one sentence that sug-
gests that it can take a [to_INF] as subject in the so-called prepositional passive
(CGEL 1164) construction:
(26) I don’t think we are the new race of philistines that some fear, but we
do live in a time when to be serious about a non-profit-making venture
is looked on as madness – and our consumer society would have us
believe that the arts and spirituality have less to communicate than a
mobile phone. (newspapers)
The VDE predicts in fact a similar structure but only in an extraposed variant
and only for an [as_ADJ] postverbal complement.197 Nonetheless, the pattern for
look is comparable to the case of consider discussed above apart from the fact
that there is a particle after the verb, so we may hypothesize that madness in
(26) could possibly also determine the [to_INF] subject.198
The fact that the particle is found after the verb in the passive and not in
front of the subject is one reason for CGEL to treat such verbs and their particles
as a single unit called prepositional verb (CGEL 1155ff).199 Herbst/Schüller (2008:
120f) show convincingly how the rejection of prepositional verbs makes the
||
197 As to the particle, the VDE is inconsistent: In the complement block, passivization is only
allowed with on, in the pattern block it is only allowed with upon.
198 Despite a superficial similarity, the particle after the verb is not a particle of the type that
is used to form phrasal verbs (or so-called phrasal-prepositional verbs). See CGEL (1150–1167)
for a detailed discussion and criteria for the distinction of phrasal verbs from the structure
discussed here (“prepositional verbs” in their terminology).
199 While this solution does offer certain elegant analyses, as discussed below, it should be
borne in mind that all those verbs which allow an [as X] complement discussed in the previous
section would have to be treated as prepositional verbs (type II) in CGEL’s terminology, which
is highly problematic because a single unit is less intuitive if it is discontinuous and some of
the most important arguments for prepositional verbs (e.g. preposition stranding in the pas-
sive) are not relevant to such cases.
Analysis | 113
analysis of active sentences much simpler, and Herbst opposes such an analysis
along the same lines for the VDE when he states that “[f]rom a valency stand-
point the identification of prepositional verbs is neither theoretically convincing
nor is it economical for lexicographic purposes” (VDE xxvi) although he
acknowledges that passives are an argument in favour of a prepositional verb
analysis. Neither description offers a discussion of how the postverbal particle
in (26) above can be accounted for theoretically in terms of valency and partici-
pant structure, but Herbst states in the same context that “prepositional phrases
can be seen as complex complements consisting of more than one constituent”
(VDE xxvi). Then again it would be difficult to argue that the [to_INF] and on in
(26) form a discontinuous prepositional phrase since no non-discontinuous
version exists with the preposition realized.
The case of [that_CL] passive subjects is particularly noteworthy. Let us
briefly compare possible active and passive clause patterns as discussed by
CGEL (1178). The standard pattern for prepositional verbs in the active is as
follows:
(27) a. They agreed on the meeting. (CGEL 1178)
However, “when a prepositional verb is followed by a that-clause or a to-

infinitive clause, the preposition disappears, and the prepositional object merg-
es with the direct object of the monotransitive pattern” (CGEL 1178). This ex-
plains why (27b) is not possible and has to be expressed as (27c):
(27) b. *They agreed on that they would meet. (CGEL 1178)

c. They agreed that they would meet. (CGEL 1178)
Yet such an analysis is highly unintuitive for the active pattern, as it would
claim that the verb in (27c) is a prepositional verb the preposition of which is
obligatorily absent (as confirmed by (27b)). However, it is more appealing for
the passive: “Yet the preposition omitted before a that-clause can reappear in
the corresponding passive [...], even in extraposition” (CGEL 1178). As predicted
by their analysis, all four of the following sentences are possible:
(27) d. That they should meet was agreed on. (CGEL 1178)
e. That they should meet was agreed. (CGEL 1178)
f. It was agreed on eventually that they should meet. (CGEL 1178)
g. It was agreed eventually that they should meet. (CGEL 1178)
This behaviour speaks strongly in favour of a prepositional verb analysis. On

the other hand, it is difficult to argue for a prepositional verb without preposi-
tion in (27c) since it is impossible to know which preposition is omitted and
accordingly which prepositional verb we are dealing with – for agree, both on
and upon are acceptable.200 Thus a model where two synonymous prepositional
verbs agree on and agree upon exist leads to absurd problems for instance in
determining which of the two is used in (27c).
The situation is even more complicated in the case of remark. The entry in
the VDE places the [that_CL] in another valency slot than the [on_NP] and [up-
on_NP] complements:
Fig. 12: Complement block for the general sense of remark (VDE 673)
If we follow the CGEL analysis outlined above, we would expect the particle in
(28a) to be optional:
(28) a. That the moral imperative was not a sufficient condition has already
been remarked upon. (CS7 1331)
b. That the moral imperative was not a sufficient condition has already
been remarked.201
There is a meaning difference between the two, though. In the latter, the
[that_CL] is the complement listed in the VDE and thus corresponds to the fol-
lowing active sentence:
(28) c. They have already remarked that the moral imperative was not a
sufficient condition.
||
200 See also Herbst/Faulhaber (2011: 415): “Es werden keine (oder möglichst wenige) Annah-
men über zugrunde liegende syntaktische Strukturen oder ‘fehlende’ bzw. ‘getilgte’ Elemente
gemacht.” [“No assumptions (or as few as possible) will be made about underlying syntactic
structures or ‘missing’ or ‘deleted’ elements.”]
201 Due to the heavy initial clausal subject, the sentence verges on the border of non-
acceptability, but this could be remedied by adding a heavy by-agent phrase, which was omit-
ted to form a structure analogous to (28a).
Analysis | 115
Thus in (28b) the [that_CL] expresses the content of the remark (which corre-
sponds to slot II in the VDE) whereas in the original sentence (28a) the [that_CL]
expresses the topic of the remark (which corresponds to slot III in the VDE).
Consequently, the corresponding active clause to (28a) is not (28c) but (28d)
below:
(28) d. They have already remarked upon the fact that the moral imperative
was not a sufficient condition.
Although this sentence is made up, the structure is sufficiently common in the
corpora to base an argument on it. We can observe that the fact is used to allow
a combination of the particle upon and the [that_CL]. The passive suggests that
the fact is not necessary from a semantic point of view, so if CGEL’s rule quoted
above were correct, we would expect upon to disappear in the active and not the
fact to appear. Neither would we expect a change in meaning when the particle
is omitted in the passive. Thus the explanation offered by CGEL is elegant in the
case of agree but not tenable for remark.
We have to conclude that a satisfactory analysis of the structures discussed
in this section is hard to come by since a complement inventory based valency
analysis cannot explain why a preposition that was missing in the active sen-
tence appears in the passive (as with argue), and CGEL’s analysis, which can
account for such phenomena, needs to posit underlying structures, which are
highly implausible from a usage-based point of view. Furthermore, CGEL’s
analysis wrongly predicts the syntactic behaviour of cases of the remark type
when there is a semantic distinction lost through conflation. However, a valen-
cy pattern-based approach that separates active and passive voice could be
used to model this behaviour, as will be suggested in Section 5.3 below.
5.2.3 [to_INF] vs. [V-ing]
The availability of [to_INF] and [V-ing] subjects in passive clauses merits a sepa-
rate discussion for the simple reason that we do find arbitrary restrictions as to
their use postverbally in the active clause (see Faulhaber 2011: 170–189)202 and it
is highly relevant for the question of the valency status of the subject to see
whether such restrictions can be found in passive subjects, too.
||
202 However, see also Egan (2008) who says he was surprised “how neat this distribution
actually is, how form and function seem to go hand in hand, in an area sometimes said to be
characterised by no little degree of chaos and arbitrariness” (Egan 2008: 308).
The first interesting case is allow (in the sense of ‘permit’), which does not
permit postverbal [V-ing] complements in the ÆFFECTED valency slot of the
active clause:203
(29) a. The committee is empowered to allow such a request for humanitari-

an reasons. (VDE 29)
b. *The committee is empowered to allow implementing the necessary
measures.
And while allow204 does have a prepositional [for N/V-ing] complement, it is not
in the ÆFFECTED valency slot, as is illustrated in (29c), and cannot occur as
passive subject.
(29) c. Time [ÆFFECTED] should therefore be allowed for visiting some of

the major scenic attractions as well as the oldest working whisky dis-
tillery in the world, Bushmills. (VDE 30)
However, we do find convincing evidence for [V-ing] in the passive subject posi-
tion, as illustrated by (29d–e).
(29) d. Other instances of racial prejudice can be found in the fact that the
church used by the black community is used by the white men as a
gambling den in the week although using a white church for such
purposes would not be allowed, if even thought of. (HPG 338)
e. It says an assault on a person over 18 would be illegal whereas hitting
a child is allowed under English law. (newspapers)
||
203 Faulhaber presents the following example as evidence against this restriction:
The weighting screen presents twenty options including on-line help, and saving of changes,
while others allow sorting of data, changing of titles, reversing of the XY ranges and so on. (A19
1063; also cited in Faulhaber 2011: 180)
The fact that sort, change and reverse do not have a valency slot for of when used as verbs
renders a nominal analysis more likely in this case, though.
In the BNC, only one example of a clearly verbal [V-ing] is found after allow:
This allows one complete message command of four characters to be sent each frame and at
the minimum frame rate allows up-dating the channel pulse width settings some forty times
every second. (C92 1796)
A cursory search in the parsed corpora did not yield any further hits. Thus although we cannot
rule out the acceptability of the [V-ing] in postverbal position, its extremely low frequency and
its non-indication in the VDE suggest that such a structure would still be marginal.
204 As the present section is concerned with allow in its ‘permit’ sense, the other meanings
described in the VDE will be ignored.
Analysis | 117
It appears as if the passive subject [V-ing] in (29e) is related to the postverbal

[to_INF] complement in the active clause (29f).
(29) f. The law allows people to hit their child.

g. *The law allows people hitting their child.
Although the [to_INF] complement does sometimes occur as a passive subject, it

is dispreferred. There are 4 instances of [to_INF] passive clause subjects in the
parsed corpora, and while native speakers did not agree as to their acceptabil-
ity, they all preferred a [V-ing] over the [to_INF] in the corpus examples such as
the following:
(29) h. ?Sir Philip said there was no problem with Mr Cameron sometimes
meeting donors in his office, but to advertise for funds in return for
meetings was not allowed. (newspapers)
i. Sir Philip said there was no problem with Mr Cameron sometimes
meeting donors in his office, but advertising for funds in return for
meetings was not allowed.
The following table summarizes the findings for allow:
Tab. 18: Summary of the findings for [to_INF] and [V-ing] with allow (A ‘permit’)
allow (‘permit’)
II [V-ing] -? +
II [to_INF] + -?
We can see that the choice between [to_INF] and [V-ing] is highly voice-
dependent.
It is particularly interesting to compare these results to the near-
synonymous verb permit. Faulhaber (2011: 180) shows that in the active, the [V-
ing] in (30a) cannot be replaced with a [to_INF] as in (30b).205
||
205 It has to be noted that permit does allow a [to_INF] complement in postverbal position, but
only if it is preceded by an [NP] complement, whereas allow can have a single [to_INF] accord-
ing to Faulhaber (2011: 181).
(30) a. Congressional negotiators have imposed limits which may permit

building only two more of the bombers. (VDE 585)
b. *Congressional negotiators have imposed limits which may permit to
build only two more of the bombers.
In the passive voice, however, the [to_INF] readily occurs as extraposed subject
in sentences such as (30c) as predicted by the VDE. The VDE also claims that
extraposition is obligatory, though, which is doubtful in the light of (30d).
(30) c. It is not permitted to sound a car horn after a certain hour.206 (HWA
3119)
d. But to deny customary and reasonable care or to deliberately starve or
dehydrate someone because he or she is very old or very ill should not
be permitted. (academic)
Example (31) below shows that the [V-ing] can also occur as passive subject, so
the active clause postverbal [V-ing] seems to correspond to both of the passive
clause subjects [V-ing] and [to_INF].
(31) Surely photocopying such details should not be permitted. (newspa-

pers)
Tab. 19: Summary of the findings for [to_INF] and [V-ing] with permit
permit
II [V-ing] + +
207
II [to_INF] - +
Again, the choice between [V-ing] and [to_INF] is different in the active and the
passive. Also, we find a difference in the passive between allow and permit
which is a strong indicator that the form of passive subjects is determined by the
valency of the verb and not by some general principle of semantic compatibility.
This finding is backed up by the behaviour of blame, help, support and teach
discussed in Section 5.2.2.1.
||
206 Native speaker informants commented that this sentence is acceptable but restricted to a
specific (rather formal) style level.
207 See however Note 205.
Analysis | 119
CamG (1435) presents further arguments for an item-specific (or verb-group

specific) view of [V-ing] and [to_INF] as passive clause subjects. They claim that
“[p]assives with gerund-participial subjects are uncommon” which – in the light
of the evidence discussed in the present chapter – seems to be a slight over-
statement. But they present an interesting reason for a restriction on passive [V-
ing] subjects, which are allowed with the verbs in (32a) but not with the ones in
(32b):
(32) a. Taking out a mortgage wasn’t considered/recommended/suggest-

ed. (CamG 1435; my emphasis)
b. *Painting the house was begun/kept/hated/intended/remembered
by Sam. (CamG 1435; my emphasis)
Note that there is a difference in the interpretation of the corresponding actives. In Sam
remembered painting the house the understood subject of paint is recovered from the ma-
trix clause: it was Sam who painted the house. In Sam recommended taking out a mort-
gage, however, the subject of take is not specified syntactically but has to be contextually
recovered. It is this type of gerund-participial construction that most readily allows passiv-
ization. (CamG 1435)
However, such a generalization seems to hold only partially. There is evidence

for [V-ing] complements used as passive clause subjects with verbs of the type
where the subject is recovered from the matrix clause, e.g. avoid, complete,
enjoy, plan, practice/practise. The following is one of the many examples found
in the parsed corpora:
(33) Wearing an open-necked shirt with a suit is best avoided by anyone

over 30, unless you are Tim Jefferies, Bryan Ferry or George Clooney -
on whom a dark suit and a plain shirt look great. (newspapers)
For [to_INF] complements, CamG claims that (except for the cases discussed in
Section 5.2.2.2) “infinitivals are restricted to a few catenative verbs (e.g. decide,
desire, hope, prefer), and then only in extraposed position” (CamG 1435).208 This
statement is in principle in line with our findings apart from the [to_INF] subject
we found for permit. The VDE, however, allows [to_INF] passive clause subjects
for a lot more verbs.
||
208 Langacker (2008: 430) also observes a “resistance of infinitival complements to passiviza-
tion.”
To sum up, the choice between [V-ing] and [to_INF] subjects in the passive
is highly verb-specific and is only partially related to the choice of postverbal
complements in the active clause.
5.3 Conclusion
Given that the basis for the discussion of passive subjects is usually the active
declarative clause, the fact that some postverbal elements in the active clause
cannot occur as subjects in the corresponding passive clause has been dis-
cussed in great detail in the linguistic literature (see for instance CGEL 159–171).
However, due to this active-centric perspective, the fact that some passive
clause subjects cannot occur as postverbal complements in the corresponding
active clause has received much less attention in grammatical description and
theory. The present chapter has made available ample evidence to confidently
state that such phenomena do exist in English, though. In fact, the number of
verbs which exhibit such behaviour is sufficient to suggest that some systematic
treatment in the grammar is called for to account for it (and that it is thus not
enough to dismiss the problem as ‘exceptions’). So, to come back to the ques-
tions asked at the beginning of this chapter, it is not a matter of whether there
are more, fewer, the same or simply different restrictions. We find all four phe-
nomena, depending on the verb chosen.
The logical conclusion for any model of grammar must be to give up the
derivation of the passive from the corresponding active clause, although it is of
course sensible to posit a regular relationship between active and passive claus-
es since it holds for a majority of passive clauses. A valency model that de-
scribes a complement inventory (as is done in the complement block of the
VDE) could be made to account for such phenomena with minor modifications,
i.e. not only possible subjecthood in active and passive clauses would have to
be specified for the complements but also whether they can occur postverbally
in active and passive clauses.
However, a model that is based on valency patterns (as mentioned above)
has considerable advantages over the valency complement view. Not only does
it allow a treatment of active and passive as structural alternatives without
claiming the primacy of one over the other, it also can cover the prepositional
passive issue discussed in Section 5.2.2.3, for which a complement-based valen-
Conclusion | 121
cy approach has to fail.209 However, a purely formal pattern-based approach

cannot account for the case of remark discussed above in Section 5.2.2.3, as we
find two [that_CL] complements in different semantic roles. Thus a pairing of
form and participant roles (whether drawn from a general or a verb-specific set
is irrelevant here) in the sense of the valency constructions introduced by
Herbst/Schüller (2008: 139) is called for to model such syntactic behaviour. In
addition, the sentences of the guarantee and consider type discussed in Section
5.2.2.2 suggest that item-specific restrictions are not only based on the verb but
possibly also on a predicative element in such structures. See Section 9.3.2 for
the question of how to model such relationships in a valency approach.
We can thus conclude that the range of permissible passive clause subjects
is highly item-specific and has to be specified as a lexical property of the verb,
preferably in terms of patterns that are independent from active clause patterns
and include information on participant roles.
||
209 The VDE provides plenty of evidence for such a view as there are numerous patterns
which are listed as only occurring in the passive. Examples include be drawn + against N, be
drawn + to-INF, be employed V-ing, be fastened + by N <--> to N, be fed + from N, be formed + of
N, be found + ADV, be heard + to-INF, be quoted + at N, be seen + to-INF, be set + to-INF, be set
+ with N, be spoken + for, be struck + dumb (+ by/with N), be sworn + into N.
6 Analysis of subjects in copular clauses
The treatment of copula verbs in a separate chapter is necessary because they
do not show the same valency restrictions as non-copula verbs. Be – the princi-
pal copula in the English language – allows subjects (and also postverbal com-
plements, see CGEL 1171ff) of any form. The sentences in (1) illustrate different
formal realisations of the subject:
(1) a. She is a busybody who likes talking and has cultivated her own style.
(A06 912)
b. To substantially increase sale and to produce reasonable profits is a
considerable achievement. (K4S 1434)
c. Singing along isn’t a big success. (HH0 3997)
d. That the number of refugees is increasing so dramatically is a major
cause for concern. (K41 828)
If such sentences are described simply as divalent uses of the verb be, which
requires a subject and a predicative element (noun phrase or adjective phrase in
these examples), then be cannot account for restrictions of the kind found in
(2b–d):
(2) a. Pakistan’s support for US operations is considered crucial because it

is adjacent to Afghanistan. (newspapers)
b. *That Pakistan supports US operations was adjacent to Afghanistan.
c. *To support US operations would be adjacent to Afghanistan.
d. *Supporting US operations is adjacent to Afghanistan.
Given that be allows all relevant subject realisations, as seen in (1b–d), the fact
that the subjects in (2b–d) are incompatible with the predicate cannot be a
property of the verb. It must be the adjective adjacent that does not allow a
clausal subject, very much in the same way as it does not allow the nominal
subject in (2e).
(2) e. *Pakistan’s support for US operations is adjacent to Afghanistan.
The reason why all these subjects are unacceptable is a semantic incompatibil-
ity between the subject and adjacent, which has traditionally been treated un-
der the heading of selectional restrictions in generative transformational gram-
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110589801-143
124 | Analysis of subjects in copular clauses
mar (Chomsky 1965: 94ff, 114ff)210 or in terms of semantic valency (Helbig 1992:
7–9). What this chapter sets out to verify is whether syntactic restrictions on the
subject depending on the predicative element also apply.
6.1 What counts as a copular clause?

In the introduction to this chapter, the expression copula(r) was used without
further definition, as if the term were uncontroversial. As far as be is concerned,
there is no problem with that; everyone agrees that be is “the principal copula”
(CGEL: 1171).211 But while Quirk et al. include a whole range of verbs in that cate-
gory (e.g. appear, look, seem, remain, become, get, etc.), Huddleston/Pullum
insist on restricting the term to the verb be. They propose “the term ‘complex
intransitive’ for the more general construction, partly to bring out the parallel
between [complex intransitive and complex transitive constructions], partly
because complex-intransitive verbs other than be are not mere syntactic copulas
but do express semantic predication” (CamG 218). Due to their largely similar
syntactic behaviour, this chapter will follow the practice of CGEL in calling such
verbs and clauses copula(r) in a broad sense where possible and make distinc-
tions on a lexical basis where necessary.
6.2 Theoretical treatment of copula verbs and copular clauses

In a valency model, if the adjective determines the form of the subject212 it usual-
ly follows that it must be a valency carrier.213 One could of course argue that the
subject requires the adjective, but requiring actual lexical words instead of more
abstract classes ([NP], [that_CL], [to_INF]) is less appealing for a model of syn-
tax. In Eisenberg’s (2006: 34) terms, predicative elements in German copular
clauses govern nominal subjects categorically, i.e. if there is a member of the
||
210 See also Matthews (1993: 162ff) for discussion.
211 We shall use the term copular clause to refer to clauses in which a copula verb functions as
the main verb.
212 Generative grammar models such behaviour with the help of a mechanism called c-
command (see Eroms 2000: 63f for discussion).
213 Dik (1983: 128f) proposes a similar structure. He suggests a process of copula support,
which introduces a copula verb and thus “accounts for the occurrence of be in cases in which a
non-verbal predicate such as clever is used as the main predicate of some predication” (Dik
1983: 129).
Theoretical treatment of copula verbs and copular clauses | 125
category predicative element, a nominal subject is automatically permitted. For

clausal subjects, he assumes lexical governing of the conjunction dass (“that”),
i.e. if an adjective governs the conjunction, this is a lexical property of the adjec-
tive.
The property of predicative elements to select subjects is by no means a re-
cent discovery,214 and while it has been taken as a fact for over thirty years in
some lines of research in German linguistics,215 there are many open questions
as to the exact nature of the relationship between the different constituents/
dependents and head(s). One option would be to continue seeing the verb as
primary valency carrier and the adjective as a secondary valency carrier. This
approach is advocated by Helbig (1992: 111) at the level of syntactic valency.
Thus in
(3) My teacher is happy with my progress.
Helbig would see My teacher and happy as immediate dependents of is, and with
my progress as a dependent of happy:
is
My teacher happy
with my progress
Fig. 13: Syntactic structure of (3) in Helbig’s model (adapted from Helbig 1992: 111)
At the semantic level, however, he sees the predicative element as the valency
carrier:216
||
214 Mair (1990) uses the terms adjectival and nominal predicate.
215 See Herbst (1983: 19f) for references. Zifonun/Hoffmann/Strecker also follow this route in
their treatment of clausal subjects in German copular clauses: “Hier selegiert der nicht-verbale
Teil, das Adjektiv oder das Substantiv, das Subjekt” (Zifonun/Hoffmann/Strecker 1997: 1451).
[“Here the non-verbal part – the adjective or the noun – selects the subject.”]
216 Helbig attributes no semantic content to the copula and treats the predicative element as
representative of the whole predicate.
(is) happy
My teacher with my progress
Fig. 14: Semantic structure of (3) in Helbig’s model (adapted from Helbig 1992: 111)
It follows that, in Helbig’s view, the adjective is not responsible for the form of
the subject at the syntactic level, so any formal restriction on the subject related
to the predicative adjective must be purely due to semantic restrictions. It has to
be noted, though, that Helbig does not address the problem of clausal subjects.
Eroms (2000) sees the subject as dependent on the finite verb (or the cate-
gory INFL), basically for reasons of concord. For the verb sein (‘be’), he main-
tains a structural valency (Eroms 2000: 139) of two and states at the same time
that, logically, sentences of the following type have to be analysed as contain-
ing a monovalent predicate:
(4) He is ambitious
“Unabhängig von logischen Überlegungen” (‘independently of logical consid-

erations’), Welke (1988: 159f) attributes no valency to the copula purely for se-
mantic reasons and thus rejects Helbig/Schenkel’s ([1969] 1973)217 position, who
see the copula as valency carrier and opt for hierarchical valency relations (ba-
sically as advocated in Helbig 1992 cited above). Welke’s stemma is similar to
Helbig’s semantic level; apart from more brackets to indicate the irrelevance of
grammatical elements, the most notable difference is that he puts the particle
with next to the adjective and not next to my progress, which is in a way contra-
ry to the concept of valency presented in Section 2.2.2.
(is) happy (with)
(My) teacher (my) progress
Fig. 15: Representation of (3) in Welke’s model
||
217 Welke cites the 1982 edition, which, just like the 1973 edition used for the present study, is
an identical reprint of the original 1969 edition.
Theoretical treatment of copula verbs and copular clauses | 127
Another option might be to regard the copula verb as the actual valency carrier
and have it inherit certain valency requirements/restrictions from the adjective
as a secondary valency carrier. One could also postulate a direct valency rela-
tion between adjective and subject, but in this case the subject may be required
by two valency carriers (the verb and the adjective). Concord may be an argu-
ment in favour of a verb-centered analysis (as with Eroms), but not all scholars
agree on this.
(5) The man who marries young is happy. (Napoli 1989: 9; her emphasis)
Napoli, who works with a semantic approach rooted in Government and Bind-
ing Theory, maintains that in (5), “happy alone, not is happy, is the predicate.
[…] Is is present in [(5)] purely to satisfy needs of the syntax and does not con-
tribute to the semantic interpretation in the same way semantically full lexical
items do” (Napoli 1989: 9; her italics).
Such a semantic interpretation in fact relegates the copula to an inferior sta-
tus, a position shared by the computational model used for the parsed corpora
(see Chapter 3), the Stanford typed dependencies representation (de Marnef-
fe/Manning 2008):
happy
nsubj cop prep_with
teacher is progress
poss poss
My my
Fig. 16: Stanford typed dependencies representation of (3)
Here, is is a dependent of happy via a cop (=copula) relation.

CamG (2002: 217) makes a distinction between the semantic and the syntac-
tic level that parallels that made by Helbig discussed above:
From a semantic point of view a PC [=predicative complement] tends to be more like a

predicator than an ordinary complement such as a subject or object. [...] syntactically, a
PC is a complement, but semantically it characteristically has a predicative function.
(CamG 217)
(6) a. Ed seemed quite competent. (CamG 217)

b. She considered Ed quite competent. (CamG 217)
c. Ed was considered quite competent. (CamG 217)
On the basis of sentences (6a–c) they “speak of Ed not as the subject of the PC
but as its predicand” (CamG 217; their emphasis) in order to capture the gener-
alization that quite competent is predicated of Ed in all three sentences although
Ed is not a subject in (6b) but an object.218 In this analysis, Ed is the subject of
the verb seemed or of the predicate as a whole.
In a footnote, Huddleston/Pullum (CamG 217, fn3) also mention what they
call predicative elements as adjuncts, which is an issue that has been widely
discussed in the relevant literature. The examples (7a) and (8) are instances of
the structure in question.219
(7) a. Peter died a millionaire. (Aarts/Aarts 1982: 129)
(8) He wrote most of his poetry drunk. (CamG 217)
While the semantic relationship between a millionaire and Peter or drunk and
He is identical to that of quite competent and Ed in (6a–c) above, it could hardly
be justified to treat died and wrote as copula verbs. From a valency point of
view, this structure raises the interesting question whether the predicative ele-
ment in (7a) should be treated as a valency carrier in the same way as it is in (7b)
in some of the approaches mentioned above.220
(7) b. Peter is a millionaire.
As the verbs died and wrote would definitely be analysed as valency carriers in a
valency approach, treating a millionaire as valency carrier in (7a) in analogy to
(7b) would result in two valency carriers both requiring the subject Peter. In
addition, the optionality of the predicative element also argues against its status
||
218 In a small clause-analysis, one could in fact argue for the status of Ed as a subject in the
postverbal small clause of (6b). See Section 5.2.2.2 for a brief discussion of small clauses.
219 Cases such as “He saw him dead.” (GLV 189) could be regarded as related problems in a
small clause-analysis. In both cases the optional adjective adds a new predication to the clause
without an explicit copula.
220 It is problems such as these where Argument Structure Constructions as posited by Gold-
berg (1995) are an interesting alternative since they permit structures of the type shown in (7a)
without having to include the pattern in the lexicon simply because the construction (in the
sense of the sequence of verb arguments) carries meaning of its own and combines (“fuses”)
with the valency structure of the verb if the two are compatible.
Data Analysis | 129
as a valency carrier.221 Nonetheless selectional restrictions between the subject

and the predicative element can be observed:
(7) c. *Peter died a tree.
The matter is further complicated by the lack of such structures with non-NP
subjects, so it is impossible to make a statement about syntactic valency. Still, it
appears reasonable to treat neither selectional restrictions nor predication as
sufficient criteria for postulating a valency relation.
6.3 Data Analysis

To investigate the influence of predicative elements in copular clauses on the
form of subjects in some more detail, two systematic studies and two case stud-
ies will be carried out, one for adjectives and one for nouns. The systematic
studies cover extraposed subjects for the simple reason that they are the un-
marked and by far more frequent case (see figures in Sections 7.3.4 and 7.3.6).
Furthermore, the study of extraposed clausal subjects can be performed in a
systematic way because for them a considerable amount of data is available pre-
analysed in the form of (native speaker assessment based) Herbst (1983) as well
as the (corpus-based) VDE (Herbst et al. 2004) and its spin-off, the Erlangen
Valency Patternbank (Herbst/Uhrig 2009). Thus, particularly with the help of
the latter database, it is possible to easily identify “suspicious” cases among the
544 adjectives and 274 nouns treated.
Since for non-extraposed clausal subjects no such resources were available,
they are discussed in case-studies that cover a much smaller set of lexical items,
which of course reduces the chance of finding relevant restrictions.
All studies are based on corpus data which was augmented by native
speaker interviews. The systematic studies draw on data from a manual inspec-
tion of instances from corpora of roughly 780 million words222 found with que-
ries of the following type in Bonito (Rychlý 2007) and BNCweb (Leh-
mann/Schneider/Hoffmann 2000, Hoffmann et al. 2008):223
“[Ii]t” []{1,6} “typical” “not”? “to” [pos=“V.*”] within <s>
||
221 There are, however, obligatory elements with a similar semantic structure. See Note 23 on
page 15 for an example from CamG that is treated as object there.
222 Besides the BNC, the academic, popmerge and newsmerge corpora presented in Section
3.2.2.1 were used for this research.
223 For the CQP syntax of BNCweb, the <s> has to be replaced with a plain s.
This query retrieves all sentences in which It or it is followed, with a maximum

of 6 words intervening, by the noun or adjective in question followed an option-
al not and then by to and a verb (or, alternatively, by that for [that_CL] (without
not)).224 The case studies rely on the parsed corpora of more than 1.5 billion
words described in Section 3.2.2.3.
6.3.1 Adjectives and extraposed clausal subjects
Our first systematic study covers the two most important extraposed subjects,
[to_INF] and [that_CL], both of which are highly frequent with adjectives. Of the
544 adjectives listed in the VDE/the Patternbank, 220 allow the [it] + [to_INF]
pattern225 and 142 the [it] + [that_CL] pattern. As many allow neither and many
both, a preliminary count results in 38 which allow a [that_CL] but no [to_INF],
and 119 which allow a [to_INF] but no [that_CL]. Both groups will be dealt with
separately. A systematic treatment of extraposed [V-ing] subjects was not car-
ried out since, in the light of the discussion by CGEL (see Section 7.1.1), it was
considered to be marginal. However, given that the Patternbank lists only 13
adjectives which can occur in such a pattern, we can be quite sure that re-
strictions apply there, too, and probably on a greater scale. For instance, there
is the specific behaviour of worth, which takes a [V-ing] extraposed subject but
no [to_INF] or [that_CL].226
In the VDE, a total of 249 adjectives occur with either a [to_INF] or a
[that_CL] extraposed subject but not with a [V-ing] in the same position. Check-
ing all 249 adjectives in the corpora and then with the native speakers would
||
224 It is obvious that [that_CL] complements without that were not found with this method of
querying. Even the parsed corpora did not allow such queries at the time the data for the pre-
sent chapter was gathered. See however the Erlangen Treebank.info project (Uhrig/Proisl 2011)
that allows queries with negated elements due to a newly developed piece of software (see
Proisl/Uhrig 2012 for details).
225 3 adjectives allow for the pattern in 2 lexical units each, thus the total lexical unit count is
223.
226 The exact theoretical status of this construction remains unclear, though. Since we can
have It is worth ensuring that kitchen staff are not tempted to leave the dirty cutlery soaking until
morning. (A0C 964) but not *Ensuring that everything is locked up is worth., one might be tempt-
ed to analyse the construction as an impersonal construction and not as an instance of extra-
position (see discussion in Section 7.1.2). However, given that we can have a tough movement-
like structure with worth (see Section 7.4), an extraposition analysis is probably to be preferred.
Data Analysis | 131
have resulted in at least 1,500 extra native speaker test items,227 which would
not have been possible – and would probably have been quite unnecessary – in
the context of this study.
6.3.1.1 [that_CL] but no [to_INF]

Appendix 17 lists the 37 relevant adjectives identified based on the Erlangen
Valency Patternbank.228 A first verification using the Patternbank shows that of
these 37, 6 (awkward, credible, incongruous, typical, unusual, urgent) allow a
[for_NP_to_INF] or [for_NP] + [to_INF] pattern. We can exclude unusual due to
the problematic analysis in the VDE. There, the example of the + [to_INF] pat-
tern given would possibly fit the [it] + [to_INF] pattern (i.e. extraposed subject)
better:
(9) Wasn’t it unusual to have been so aware of the nuances of class divi-
sion at that age? (VDE 910)
A corpus search shows that of the remaining five cases all allow a [to_INF] with-
out the [for_NP] component, too:
(10) a. As we get older and perhaps more worldly, it is sometimes awkward

to admit that we ever believed such nonsense, and even more difficult
to admit that not everything we imbibed was bad or wrong. (AE8 198)
b. Having spent years attacking her as the author of awful policies, it is
not credible to claim now that her departure hardly matters. (EDT
304)
c. It would be incongruous to see her as an influence on later writers
who may never have heard of her. (AN4 3156)
d. It is rather typical to have slight variations in mythological stories –
usually related to family relationships – appear in ancient stories. (fic-
tion)
e. It suddenly became rather urgent to find out how much Mrs Sweet
knew. (GUF 1307)
Thus 31 examples are left as candidates for restrictions. Corpus evidence of

these occurring with [to_INF] clauses along with some invented examples and
||
227 The figures assume that we would have to test about 1.5 example sentences per adjective
with four native speaker informants.
228 One of the 38 examples mentioned above, heartbroken, is due to a lexicographic error in
the VDE and is thus ignored in this chapter.
the respective native speaker judgements can be found in Appendix 18. Not
surprisingly, acceptable structures were found in the corpora that were not
listed in the Patternbank, but the proportion of rejections (usually not by all but
by some informants) is considerable, so many of them seem to border on the
verge of unacceptability. This can be taken as an indicator that – given that
extraposed subjects with adjectives are fairly common – the VDE (and conse-
quently the Patternbank) has a relatively broad coverage of the established uses
of the construction.
The corpus examples that were accepted by all native speaker informants
seem to be straightforward enough, such as a the following example:
(11) ‘It seems particularly unfortunate to find within the elegant and
modern buildings of Feltham, so carefully landscaped, all the defects
of poor regimes’ (Home Office 1989). (CRT 41)
Some others were found to favour a certain syntactic environment, so for in-
stance obvious was only fully accepted by all informants when it occurred with
seem as a copula verb (with which it seems to occur more frequently in this
construction), although most native speakers also accepted sentences with be:
(12) a. So when Steve came back from the office it seemed obvious to ask him
to wash the dishes and scrape the remains of our vegetarian lasagne
off the baking tray. (newsmerge)
b. It is fairly obvious to say there are two classes of buildings to be stud-
ied — those which still stand, and those which have been destroyed,
fallen down, or otherwise disappeared. (B1P 555)
Furthermore, plain is only attested followed by to see + [that_CL] as in (13) be-

low, so an analysis that treats to see as an additional complement of plain and
the following [that_CL] as the extraposed subject may be a viable alternative, in
particular as no non-extraposed [to_INF] is attested.
(13) It is horrifyingly plain to see that the Mondays229 are in a tragic state,
and the excellent photographs highlight this tragedy. (CK4 3249)
A complex adjective analysis similar to the one briefly mentioned in Section 7.4
on tough movement could also be considered, but due to the transparency of the
construction, an analysis in terms of lexical specification (Herbst/Uhrig 2010:
||
229 The sentence is about a band called Happy Mondays.
Data Analysis | 133
131) may be preferable (see Section 9.3.2 for a brief discussion of this structure
with plain).
Then there are cases on which the native speakers did not agree at all, such
as positive or the invented example for characteristic below. To make sure our
conclusions do not rely on problematic cases, even these will be treated as ac-
ceptable in our analysis.
(14) a. ?It’s positive to win, but for every winner there are countless losers,
and who wants to think about those? (academic)
b. ?It would be characteristic to see him do that. (invented)230
Despite all the acceptable and problematic data, it is still possible to identify
adjectives which do not allow an extraposed [to_INF] subject at all, such as
apparent, certain, conspicuous, indisputable, manifest and notable. One might
be inclined to state that these form two relatively homogenous semantic groups,
one with adjectives that have to do with noticing (apparent, conspicuous, mani-
fest, notable)231 and one with certainty (certain, indisputable) and that it can be
predicted on the grounds of their semantics alone that they occur with facts
only, and accordingly with [that_CL] complements only since facts are usually
expressed by [that_CL] complements whereas [to_INF] clauses express potenti-
ality.232 While the whole argument may work prototypically (and the semantic
groups are in fact quite neat and noteworthy!), such a hypothesis must be re-
jected here on the grounds that we can find adjectives which fit into these
groups just as neatly as the others do but do not show the same syntactic re-
striction. For the ‘noticing’-group we have seen above that obvious does in fact
allow [to_INF] complements,233 and since it is a very good near-synonym for
apparent or manifest, we can observe that the semantic prediction becomes
||
230 Note that characteristic allows a [to_INF] if preceded by an [of_NP] as in It was charac-
teristic of her creative and theoretical writings to establish original links between various
intellectual movements of the transitional period she lived in. (GTD 1647)
231 If we decided not to treat plain to see as an instance of extraposed [to_INF] subject but as a
complex adjective or as an adjective with an obligatory [to_INF] complement, we could add it
to this group, too.
232 See the discussion of [to_INF] in relation to modality in Section 4.2.
233 As noted above, obvious does have a preference for seem (and possibly other markers of
epistemic modality such as perhaps) when it occurs with an extraposed [to_INF] subject, but
since even a search of the 1.5 billion words parsed corpora for a nominal subject it with the
copula seem and a [to_INF] complement did not yield relevant results for the queried adjectives
(apparent, manifest and certain), these seem not to occur in the construction even under the
same modality conditions.
untenable. The situation is similar for the ‘certainty’-group, where correct, sure
and true can be cited as counter-examples. While sure, semantically a good
match for certain, allows neither [that_CL] nor [to_INF] extraposed subjects,
correct and true come close to the meaning of indisputable in the following ex-
amples of extraposed [to_INF] clauses:
(15) a. For this reason it may not be correct to relate thermodynamic quanti-
ties obtained from one cooling curve to those obtained by another as
has been pointed out by Gee (1966). (H0U 821)
b. It is true to say that regular rail travellers in Britain know their own
country better and in greater detail than those who travel by any other
form of transport. (VDE 884)
Thus the prototypically correct semantic explanation can at best predict

tendencies but fails to account for the exact facts.
6.3.1.2 [to_INF] but no [that_CL]

The picture Appendix 20 gives for adjectives followed by an extraposed
[that_CL] that can only occur with an extraposed [to_INF] according to the
VDE/Patternbank is even more colourful (i.e. varied) than the one given for the
previous section.234 Not only is there a smaller proportion of sentences that all
native speaker informants accept, it also becomes very obvious that the native
speakers have different personal preferences (which will be briefly discussed in
Section 9.1). Both observations are indicators of the problematic character of the
data collected from the corpus. Again it appears as if the coverage provided by
the VDE includes the vast majority of the adjectives established in that construc-
tion and that most of the ones we deal with here are less central. There are still a
few adjectives of which we can state, with varying degrees of confidence, that
they seem to allow an extraposed [that_CL] subject despite not being listed in
the VDE/Patternbank with it. We shall start with these clearly acceptable cases,
then discuss problematic instances and finally present evidence for arbitrary
restrictions.
The adjectives false, handy, harsh, hurtful, improper and inadequate seem to
be perfectly all right with a [that_CL] extraposed subject, as in the following
example:
||
234 Appendix 19 gives a list of all candidate adjectives from the VDE.
Data Analysis | 135
(16) It was hardly the tour operators’ fault that the Jamaica test was aban-
doned and it may seem harsh that they have to compensate those who
missed out on cricket watching. (newsmerge)
The cases of accurate, excessive, foolhardy, irrational and negligent are less clear
since for each one of them, only one example (given in (17)) was accepted by all
native speaker informants alike, either because only one was found in the cor-
pora, as for excessive, foolhardy and negligent, or because other examples were
rejected.
(17) a. Nor is it necessarily accurate that doctors’ lax prescription habits are
to blame, for this is to underestimate the staggering adaptability of
bacteria allowing them to survive in any environment. (newsmerge)
b. It does seem excessive that there are six dissertations under way on
Apollonius Rhodius’ Argonautica and none on Ennodius, but perhaps
there I betray a prejudice. (academic)
c. From that point on Strauss lived in semi-disgrace and, in retrospect, it
seems both courageous and foolhardy that he should have attempted
an opera on a pacifist subject to a libretto by an exiled anti-fascist Jew
in 1938. (newsmerge)
d. A few simple facts paint the real picture: It may seem irrational that
both the cost of labor and net wages could improve under the new sys-
tem, but that in fact seems to be the case. (academic)
e. One of the first acts of the newly free eastern European countries was
to commission their own national museums, so it seems almost crimi-
nally negligent that Scotland’s ruling elite preferred to spend most of
the past 50 years squabbling over narrow political definitions of na-
tionhood and the minutiae of devolution. (newsmerge)
Some adjectives were not attested in the corpora and were tested with invented
examples, but the responses were mixed. All instances are listed in Appendix 20
as well, so it will suffice to give one such example:
(18) ?It is constitutional that people are allowed to own guns in the US.
(invented)
As in the previous section, some adjectives seem to favour certain linguistic

environments. Thus proper (which in the construction we are dealing with often
occurs in the combination right and proper) seems to prefer a putative [that_CL]
as extraposed subject: In the BNC, all 9 sentences found with the query it {be/V}
proper that contained should in the extraposed [that_CL] subject and 8 out of the
10 instances found with it {be/V} right and proper that did so, too. All examples
tested with improper also had a putative should in the [that_CL]. The examples
tested with proper and an indicative verb instead were generally accepted by the
native speaker informants but not unanimously. Herbst (1983: 146) gives a se-
mantic explanation of this preference, i.e. that what the [that_CL] expresses in
putative uses is rather a notion or idea than a fact as in indicative examples.
Herbst takes this semantic difference as an argument in favour of a distinction
between two types of [that_CL], one of which can be replaced with an [if_CL] in
conditional contexts, but drops this distinction in later works such as the VDE.235
No systematic study was carried out on the acceptability or preference of
indicative vs. putative extraposed [that_CL] subjects, but there seem to be fur-
ther adjectives which favour this form of complement, for instance prudent.
Both proper and prudent also regularly occur with a subjunctive verb in the
[that_CL] in the corpora.
The evidence for counter-productive consists only of two examples, but
these are too interesting to ignore:
(19) a. Is it not illogical and counter-productive that the British electoral

system denies or impairs their voting rights? (AJ6 849)
b. Is it not counter-productive that benefit officers have been told to
push people on to invalidity benefit to bring down the claimant count,
which passes for Britain’s unemployment total, only to complain
about it and start looking for ways to scrap it? (newsmerge)
One native speaker informant rejected (19b) and accepted (19a) only due to the
coordination with illogical. What is most remarkable, though, is that both ex-
amples (from entirely unrelated sources) are in the form of a negated interroga-
tive clause – a rather striking coincidence, if it is one.236 Even the large parsed
corpora did not yield any further instances of counter-productive (or counterpro-
||
235 The distinction turns out to be problematic in the light of large corpora since putative
should and [that_CL] complements that can be replaced with [if_CL] complements do not nec-
essarily coincide. For instance, likely, which is listed as not being able to occur with an [if_CL]
in conditional contexts (Herbst 1983: 147) does occur several times with putative should in the
[that_CL] in the parsed corpora.
236 Since the inversion at the beginning of interrogatives triggers obligatory extraposition,
one might be led to hypothesize that [that_CL] subjects may occur with counter-productive in
canonical position and are only forced to extraposed position by the interrogative pattern, but
no single instance of a preverbal [that_CL] subject was found in the parsed corpora. (The
spelling variant counterproductive was checked, too.)
Data Analysis | 137
ductive) with an extraposed [that_CL] subject, so it was impossible to determine

whether these two sentences follow a rare but regular pattern.
For a majority of the corpus examples tested there was no agreement by the
informants. Two such examples will be given for illustration, but plenty can be
found in Appendix 20.
(20) a. ?The first one, I had a relationship with a guy who was really nice, but
we were both very difficult and disturbed people at the time and it
wasn’t suitable that we should have a baby. (newsmerge)
b. ?But Mr Luis Miyares, the director of the Fondo de Bienes Culturales,
which oversees art sales, says bluntly: We do not want them to suc-
ceed. In our society, health-care is free, education is free, funerals are
free, electricity, telephone and water are cheap. And if the artists re-
ceive all these benefits, it is correct that they pay us part of their in-
come. (newsmerge)
The second example seems to involve a non-native or translation context and is

noteworthy because correct is represented in the VDE with two lexical units, one
of which (correct (A) in the sense of ‘true’) is listed with extraposed [to_INF] and
[that_CL] whereas the second one (correct (B) in the sense of ‘acceptable, in line
with established conventions’) is listed only with a [to_INF]. The corpus exam-
ples that were accepted by all native speaker informants were all instances of
lexical unit (A). Example (20b) was the only instance of lexical unit (B) and was
rejected by two out of four native speaker informants.
A large number of adjectives were identified for which no [that_CL] com-
plements in extraposed subject position are attested and for which no single
native speaker came up with a sensible invented example. These are bold, care-
less, civil, clumsy, complacent, early, easy, economic, exact, expensive, extreme,
fruitful, fruitless, hopeless, inept, negative, radical, safe, sentimental, smart and
ungrateful. In this list no semantic groups of the kind identified in the last sec-
tion can be made out. The adjective negative provides an interesting example to
support our conclusion that there are quite arbitrary restrictions at work, since
positive shows a different pattern. The latter only allows a [that_CL] according to
the VDE, the former only a [to_INF], which is marked as rare:237
(21) a. And it’s very positive that this area continues to rise. (VDE 599)
||
237 A query of the parsed corpora confirmed the rarity but more than 10 good examples also
seem to confirm the acceptability of the construction.
(22) a. I think it’s offensive and negative to talk about somebody having a
black mark against their name or having a blackened character. (VDE
549)
For positive with a [to_INF], we saw above that the only corpus example – (14a)
reproduced below as (21b) – was not accepted by all speakers.
(21) b. ?It’s positive to win, but for every winner there are countless losers,
and who wants to think about those? (academic)
There are, however, more than ten good examples in the larger parsed corpo-
ra,238 so we shall continue to treat this construction as acceptable.
Since for negative with a [that_CL] the corpora used for this chapter did not
contain any example, the search was widened to the parsed corpora. One single
instance was retrieved – by a non-native speaker239 of English:240
(22) b. ?It was also negative that we didn’t play so well in the second half
because there were too many changes. (newspapers)
We can thus conclude that arbitrary restrictions on the use of the [that_CL] ex-
traposed subject with adjectives seem to apply and that they occur with more
adjectives than the restrictions on the [to_INF] extraposed subject clauses.
6.3.2 Nouns and extraposed clausal subjects
As will be pointed out in Chapter 7 extraposed subjects are predominantly

[to_INF] and [that_CL] complements. These will thus be the primary interest in
this section and due to the much smaller number of relevant nouns (compared
to the number of adjectives), they can be studied together in one section. Ex-
traposed [V-ing] clause complements will be dealt with separately due to their
much lower frequency and more limited acceptability.
||
238 There is a considerable number of [for_NP_to_INF] extraposed subjects, too.
239 In this example it was former England football manager Sven-Göran Eriksson.
240 We cannot even rule out the possibility that the example contains a typing error since
there seems to be the more established alternative to express the same meaning with a nomi-
nalised form of negative (contrasted beautifully with adjectival positive in the following exam-
ple): It’s positive that they’re trying to understand what the coaches and players are saying but
it’s a negative that they aren’t taking more action,“ said Millward. (newspapers)
Data Analysis | 139
6.3.2.1 [to_INF] vs [that_CL]

The Erlangen Valency Patternbank identifies 40 lexical units which occur in one
or both of the patterns [it] ... noun ... that_CL and [it] ... noun ... to_INF. This in-
cludes three pairs of lexical units belonging to the same lexeme (business, dis-
grace, job), the relationship of which will be discussed at the end of this section.
Table 20, derived from the Patternbank data, claims that there are only 6 (bless-
ing, blow, crime, luck, policy, will) out of the 40 lexical units241 that allow both
patterns.
Tab. 20: VDE/Patternbank data for extraposed [to_INF] and [that_CL] subjects; for lexemes with
multiple lexical units, the lexical unit in the VDE/Patternbank is given in parentheses
extraposed [to_INF] extraposed [that_CL]
achievement (A) – +
advantage + –
bet (A) – +
blessing (A) + +
blow (B) + +
business + –
case (C) – +
crime + +
custom + –
delight + –
disgrace (A) + –
disgrace (B) – +
duty (A) + –
error + –
fault – +
fun + –
goal (A) + –
habit + –
idea + –
illusion + –
||
241 The table contains 39 relevant lexical units since business (A) and (B) were grouped to-
gether (see Note 242) and since joke only occurs with a [V-ing].
importance – +
instinct + –
interest (B) + –
job (D) + –
job (special use – +
1)
joke (special use – –
1)
judg(e)ment – +
luck + +
mercy (α) – +
mistake + –
need – +
opinion – +
policy + +
practice (B) + –
purpose + –
responsibility – +
role + –
task + –
tendency + –
will + +
The table suggests that there are strong valency restrictions with the majority of
the nouns, but since only limited corpus data was available at the time the VDE
(which provides the data used in the Patternbank) was created, these results
had to be double-checked with the help of modern corpora. The results of the
corpus search are given in the following table:
Tab. 21: VDE/Patternbank data augmented with corpus results; for lexemes with multiple
lexical units, the lexical unit in the VDE/Patternbank is given in parentheses
achievement (A) + +
advantage + +
bet (A) + +
Data Analysis | 141
blessing (A) + +
blow (B) + +
business + –
case (C) + +
crime + +
custom + +
delight + +
disgrace (A) +
disgrace (B) +
duty (A) + +
error + +
fault + +
fun + +
goal (A) + +
habit + –
idea + +
illusion + +
importance + +
instinct + –
interest (B) + +
job (D) + –
job (special use – +
1)
joke (special use – –
1)
judg(e)ment + +
luck + +
mercy (α) + +
mistake + +
need + +
opinion + +
policy + +
practice (B) + +
purpose + +
responsibility + +
role + –
task + –
tendency + –
will + +
The situation has changed dramatically as there are very few ‘suspicious’ cases
left, although it has to be borne in mind that Table 20 is by no means ‘wrong’. It
merely covers the frequent established uses whereas Table 21 also includes
cases which border on the verge of unacceptability. Often, only one example
was found in the corpus, so in order to exclude ‘errors’ (see discussion in Sec-
tion 3.3 above), native speaker interviews were conducted, on the basis of the
corpus evidence. The following table reports the results:
Tab. 22: Data from VDE/Patternbank, corpora and native speaker interviews combined; for
lexemes with multiple lexical units, the lexical unit in the VDE/Patternbank is given in paren-
theses
extraposed extraposed Comment

[to_INF] [that_CL]
achievement (A) + +
advantage + +
bet (A) + + only with premodifier
blessing (A) + +
blow (B) + +
business + + lexical units (A) and (B) combined
case (C) o +
crime + +
custom + +
delight + o
disgrace (A) + see separate discussion
disgrace (B) + see separate discussion
duty (A) + o
error + +
fault + +
fun + + only one example from dubious
source for [that_CL]
goal (A) + +
Data Analysis | 143
extraposed extraposed Comment

[to_INF] [that_CL]
habit + –
idea + +
illusion + +
importance + + see discussion in Section 6.3.4.1
instinct + –
interest (B) + + all cases “in someone’s interest”
job (D) + –
job (special use 1) – +
joke (special use 1) – – only occurs with V-ing
judg(e)ment + +
luck + +
mercy (α) o + no agreement among informants
mistake + +
need + +
opinion + +
policy + +
practice (B) + +
purpose + o
responsibility + +
role + –
task + –
tendency + –
will + +
As expected, some of the corpus evidence was of limited acceptability, although

there were no instances on which all native speakers agreed in their verdicts on
all instances of a noun to reject the examples. The evidence is given in Appen-
dices 21 and 22. Sentences (23a–d) exemplify four such cases.
(23) a. ?Its message was simple: it was an Islamic duty that Abu Zeid be
killed. (newsmerge)
b. ?It is a great delight that the trade has stopped, even if the reasons
have nothing to do with animl [sic!] welfare. (newsmerge)
c. ?War has been my life, and although my loyalties lean toward its con-
tinuation, it would be a mercy to see it end. (fanfiction)
d. ?“It is our purpose that the dialogue leads to establishment of trust,

friendship and co-operation between the two countries,“ India’s for-
eign ministry secretary, Salman Haider, said. (newsmerge)
Such use may be non-native or a translation as is likely in the first example or it

may be due to differences in national varieties as in the last example. To be on
the safe side, no argument will be based on any of these dubious cases. The
same policy also leads to items being classified as acceptable in a certain con-
struction even if the evidence is relatively doubtful. Thus business242 is classified
as acceptable with an extraposed [that_CL] despite the complete absence of
corpus evidence because the native speaker informants accepted (24):
(24) It is none of your business that I plagiarized my PhD thesis. (invent-

ed)
At this point, a brief discussion of problems related to the distinction between

lexemes and lexical units in the tables used in this chapter is in order. The
nouns disgrace and job are listed separately with their two respective lexical
units since both accept different patterns (see Note 242 for a discussion of the
two lexical units of business). This would make a strong case in favour of the
view that valency is a property of the lexical unit, but one has to be careful us-
ing the VDE’s classification for linguistic description given that it was developed
primarily with the lexicographic application in mind:
The sense distinctions given […] do not aim to provide a description of word meaning
comparable to that of a general dictionary. Establishing senses according to their valency
patterns in some cases results in a rather different identification of senses than in conven-
tional dictionaries. (VDE xxxviii)
In the case of disgrace, however, the VDE classification mirrors that of other
dictionaries (Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English, 5th edition [LDOCE5],
Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, 7th edition [OALD7]), with the two senses
as defined in LDOCE5:
1 [U] the loss of other people’s respect because you have done something they strongly
disapprove of [...]
||
242 The VDE identifies two lexical units in the case of business. As both occur in the [it] + to-
INF and in the [it] + V-ing pattern, they were treated as one item for the purpose of this chapter.
One might argue that example (24) only represents the lexical unit business (B), which would
be a further hint at arbitrary valency restrictions, but on the basis of the limited evidence such
a conclusion would have to remain speculative in character.
Data Analysis | 145
2 be a disgrace used to say that something or someone is so bad or unacceptable that the
people involved with them should feel ashamed
Nonetheless any argument based on the different syntactic behaviour of the two
lexical units is dangerous as their semantics seem to show a certain overlap:
(25) a. Her behaviour has brought disgrace on her family. (OALD7, sense 1)
b. That sort of behaviour is a disgrace to the legal profession. (OALD7,
sense 2)
The meaning of disgrace in (25b) could also be regarded as a more familiar use
of the word used in (25a).243 However, the examples from the VDE are in line
with the meaning difference between the two senses, in that the first one takes a
more neutral, outside perspective whereas the second expresses a subjective
element of annoyance:
(25) c. Certainly it was no disgrace to lose to Ghana, an accomplished young

team. (VDE 237, sense A[=1])
d. It’s a disgrace that they want to deport an innocent woman like me,
when murderers are walking free from the justice system. (VDE 237,
sense B[=2])
The fact that it’s no disgrace seems to occur more readily with a [to_INF] but less
so with a [that_CL]244 confirms that sense B/2 might be associated with some sort
of additional pragmatic meaning of annoyance that cannot be expressed in the
same way under negation. To what extent this justifies different lexical units or
may just be treated as different meanings associated with different patterns is
debatable. So is in fact the question whether different senses of such words can
be postulated at all. Wiegand states on the issue: “Es gibt keine Wörter, die
polysem sind, sondern nur Wörter, die wir als polysem analysieren” (Wiegand
in a discussion at the Eighth International Symposium on Lexicography, May 2–4,
1996, at the University of Copenhagen; confirmed by personal communication)
[“There are no polysemous words, there are only words that we analyse as poly-
semous.”]. One should thus be aware that the distinction of different lexical
units is often arbitrary at least to a certain extent.
||
243 The fact that shame could be used as a synonym for both senses (and German Schande as
well) is another indicator of their semantic closeness.
244 In the parsed corpora, the [to_INF] is more than 10 times more frequent with no disgrace
than the [that_CL].
In the case of job, the semantic difference between the two lexical units is
clearer and will be illustrated with the relevant examples from the VDE:
(26) a. They are the policymakers. It’s their job to see that the tools get used
wisely. (VDE 448)
b. It was a good job a friend was with me to raise the alarm. (= it was
fortunate that) (VDE 448)245
Research in the parsed corpora confirms the distribution, i.e. neither instances
of the first meaning with a [that_CL] nor instances of the second meaning with a
[to_INF] were found. What to make of this result is very much theory-
dependent. If one regards lexical units as primary, one can posit a valency re-
striction on both lexical units. However, one could also argue that there is one
item job that can occur in both constructions and acquires a slightly different
meaning if it does. Whatever the theoretical treatment, though, the fact that job
shows such a behaviour is another indicator of the highly item-specific and
storage-related character of English subject selection.
So to sum up, we can observe that there are five246 nouns left which show
restrictions of the kind we were looking for in the revised version of our table:
habit, instinct,247 role, task, and tendency. It is worth noting that only restrictions
on the [that_CL] and not on the [to_INF] could be identified reliably.
6.3.2.2 [V-ing]
There is only a small number of nouns which frequently occur with an ex-
traposed [V-ing] clause complement. The Erlangen Valency Patternbank lists
business, fun, job and joke in the pattern [it] ... noun ... V-ing. All of these are
perfectly established usage and can be illustrated with examples from the BNC:
(27) a. More often the problem is to limit the list of recipients, for it can be a
costly business sending out fragile pottery or expensive jewellery.
(EX6 1180)
||
245 The American native speaker interviewed on the issue claimed that this meaning of a good
job must be British, and searches in COCA (Davies 2008-) and the BNC as well as the Longman
Dictionary of Contemporary English, 5th edition confirm this hunch.
246 Plus, possibly, job and disgrace, depending on whether one is willing to accept the divi-
sion into lexical units. The verb joke is treated in the section on [V-ing].
247 But note that instinct was accepted with a [that_CL] non-extraposed subject by native
speakers in spite of absence of corpus evidence in the case study in Section 6.3.4 below.
Data Analysis | 147
b. It was no fun loving a person like Memet, especially when he wouldn’t

commit himself to her in a civilized and law-abiding manner. (G1D
1614)
c. As you know it is a 24 hours job looking after a child/young adult with
special needs. (K97 18252)
d. It’s no joke being left with a young child to bring up on your own.
(H9D 2061)
No restrictions as to their acceptability seem to apply, contrary to CGEL’s view

that “[e]xtraposition of -ing clauses is in fact uncommon outside informal
speech” (CGEL 1393). Due to the indeterminacy between extraposed and right-
dislocated structures discussed in detail in Section 7.1.1, no such distinction will
be upheld in the present chapter. This is also reflected in the query used for the
research in the corpora in that optional commas and dashes are accounted for:
“[Ii]t” [word!=”[,\.;!?]”{1,6} “habit” “[,-]”? “not”? [pos=”V.G”] within <s>248
All nouns that occur at least in one of the two patterns [it] ... noun ... that_CL
and [it] ... noun ... to_INF were queried and examples found in the corpus were
submitted to native speaker informants. The results of the interviews are listed
in Appendix 23. As with the phenomena discussed in the chapters before, there
are some items that seem to allow the structure in question but are not listed
with it in the VDE/Patternbank, such as blessing, blow, habit or responsibility:
(28) a. But it seems that it is a mixed blessing having the most successful
racing driver of all time as a boss. (newsmerge)
b. It was a big blow having to send on a substitute after about ten
minutes. (newsmerge)
c. It’s a great British television habit, reading people in exactly the way
they ask themselves to be read, flattening British society into some-
thing whimsical and apolitical and untrue. (newsmerge)
d. It is a colossal responsibility being the midwife. (newsmerge)
There are also cases where there was no agreement among informants, such as
mistake or fault, and acceptability varied across the actual instances:
(29) a. ?I should have realized it was a mistake getting involved with

Compeyson. (FPU 1655)249
||
248 The query translates as follows: It or it followed by up to six ‘words’ that must not be
punctuation marks, followed by the relevant noun, followed by an optional comma or dash,
followed by an optional not, followed by an -ing verb form, all within the same sentence.
b. ?*Oh it’s my fault leaving it there. (FMF 353)250
Then there is role, which occurs only once but was accepted by all informants,
or illusion, which does not occur at all but was still accepted by both informants
interviewed on it:
(30) a. It’s a very demanding role being Prince of Wales, but it’s an equally
more demanding role being King. (newsmerge)
b. It’s an illusion believing that you can fly. (invented)
The case of idea is interesting in that we can illustrate the full acceptability
scale here:
(31) a. *It was my idea asking you. (AT4 2237)

b. ?It was a good idea taking your own dressing gown though wasn’t it?
(KE3 271)
c. It seemed a good idea - making a film of Muhammad Ali’s comeback
fight in the heart of Africa. And so it was. (newsmerge)
All native speakers rejected (31a), no agreement could be reached on (31b) and
everyone liked (31c), which would, however, have to be classified as dislocated
rather than extraposed if we were to make that distinction (see Section 7.1.1 for
why the present study does not make the distinction).
Much of the judgement data collected shows that testing actual data of ex-
traposed or dislocated [V-ing] clauses is problematic (see Section 7.1.1 for de-
tails). The most interesting cases for our purposes are again the ones that do not
usually allow the structure. The following quite heterogeneous group of nouns
seems to show a restriction of that kind: duty, goal, instinct, judg(e)ment, need,
opinion, tendency and will.
Thus we can say that some nouns show restrictions on extraposed (in a
broad sense, including dislocated) [V-ing] subjects. This is interesting also for
the item-specific restrictions on extraposition discussed in more detail in Chap-
||
249 Even though there are enough hits in the corpora to suggest that mistake does occur in the
[it]...noun...V-ing pattern, there was no example among those submitted for judgement that all
native speakers agreed to accept. A general preference for a [to_INF] in the position could be
observed among the native speaker informants.
250 Three out of four native speaker informants rejected this sentence and corrected it to read
my fault for leaving, whereas three out of three accepted It was my own fault, getting pregnant
again, a personal matter, not something you should take to the union. (academic)
Data Analysis | 149
ter 7, since, for instance, duty can occur with a [V-ing] in canonical subject posi-
tion:
(32) Attracting the sympathy of erstwhile opponents is the proper duty of a

political party. (newsmerge)
6.3.3 Case study: adjectives and non-extraposed clausal subjects
As mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, there is a lack of pre-analysed

data for non-extraposed clausal subjects with adjectives, so in order not to miss
relevant cases by relying on the analyses of extraposed subjects available, the
first case study looks at all adjectives beginning with the letter h that are listed
in the Erlangen Valency Patternbank (Herbst/Uhrig 2009). This rather harsh
restriction had to be made due to the sheer number of adjectives in the VDE
(544). Also the native speaker checks in this section were done with the help of
only two informants.
The parsed corpora were searched for the three principal clausal subjects in
English, [that_CL], [to_INF] and [V-ing], using the following queries:251
– [to_INF]: [adjective] ---csubj-----> [not specified] ---aux-----> to
– [that_CL]: [adjective] ---csubj-----> [not specified] ---complm-----> that
– [V-ing]: [adjective] ---csubj-----> %ing
All results were manually checked and only actual examples of the construction
in question were added to a database. Where the number of results was suffi-
cient to suggest that the construction is acceptable, no further checks took
place. Combinations which occurred only once were checked by the native
speaker informants to verify their acceptability. In the same interviews, judge-
ments on invented examples exemplifying structures not found in the corpus
were also elicited. Table 23 presents the results. Due to the small scale data
available, all results presented in this section have to be interpreted as prelimi-
nary and in need of verification by a larger scale study.252
||
251 csubj = clausal subject; aux = auxiliary; complm = complementizer; %ing: anything that
ends in -ing; see de Marneffe/Manning (2008) for a full description of the grammatical model.
252 Appendix 24 lists all native speaker judgements.
canonical position of copular clauses with adjectives starting with h as predicative element
[to_INF] [V-ing] [that_CL] Comment
half-hearted – – –
handy + + +
happy – – – only example of [to_INF] rejected
hard + + + [that_CL] only with “hard to [verb]”, see
discussion on tough movement
hard-pressed – – –
harmful + + –
harsh + + +
hateful – – –
hazy – – –
healthy – + o
heartbroken – – –
heartless + + o
heavy – o – problematic examples of [V-ing] (no
agreement on one; not the same lexical
unit, highly colloquial for the other)
helpful + + o
heroic + + +
hesitant – – –
hilarious + + +
honest o + +
honourable + + –
hopeful o o –
hopeless + + –
horrendous + + +
horrible + + + [that_CL] only one example “too horrible
to”, but NS accepted alternatives without
“too”
horrific + + o
hospitable – – –
hostile + – – only one example of [to_INF] and [V-ing],
the latter rejected
hot – + o
human + + o
Data Analysis | 151
humane + + o
hungry – – –
hurtful + + +
hypocritical + + o
It is not surprising that some adjectives – such as hesitant or heartbroken – ob-

ligatorily require an animate (usually human) subject and thus allow no clausal
subjects at all. Various others – for instance hilarious or horrendous – allow all
three realizations of clausal subjects.253 However, we also find adjectives that
permit some but not all clausal subjects.
The adjective healthy, for instance, is only attested with a [V-ing] subject as
in (33a), and the [to_INF] in (33b) was rejected and corrected to [V-ing] in (33c)
in the native speaker interviews. The [that_CL] in (33d) was accepted, however.
(33) a. Many non-veggies think giving up red meat is healthy but by going
vegetarian you risk losing out on valuable nutrients like iron. (news-
papers)
b. ?To eat lots of junk food does not seem healthy. (invented)
c. Eating lots of junk food does not seem healthy. (invented)
d. That he ate lots of junk food was not healthy. (invented)
While these examples make it appear as if the [to_INF] were dubious with
healthy, we find ample evidence in the corpora that healthy does allow a to-
infinitive complement in extraposed position:
(33) e. It is not healthy to have such a consensus on Europe across the three
main parties. (AHN 2098)
f. So all those of us who have been taught it is healthy to eat potato
skins had better think again. (BN4 1663)
Thus, healthy is not incompatible with [to_INF]s as such. In addition, if we test

the non-extraposed counterparts of (33e) and (33f) we obtain the perfectly ac-
ceptable (33g) and (33h).
||
253 Many adjectives in the list are not attested with [that_CL]s in the corpus but were accepted
by native speaker informants, which may be related to the strong propensity of [that_CL]s to
occur in extraposed position.
(33) g. To have such a consensus on Europe across the three main parties is
not healthy.
h. So all those of us who have been taught that to eat potato skins is
healthy had better think again.
We cannot even argue that the oddness of (33b) is due to the verb eat in the
[to_INF] given that it is eat in (33h), too. The fact that the [to_INF] is the subject
of a subordinate clause in (33h) cannot account for the difference in acceptabil-
ity, either, given that the structure of the acceptable (33g) is parallel to the prob-
lematic (33b) with the exception of the copula and the resulting do-supported
negation. This result is puzzling in that it shows that there are other restrictions
at work than just a simple selection of subject category (in this case [to_INF]).
Furthermore, the adjective honourable does not allow a [that_CL] subject,
but is perfectly acceptable with a [to_INF] (34a) or a [V-ing] (34b).
(34) a. To redouble humanitarian efforts during Ramadan would also be both

honourable and politically effective. (newspapers)
b. Although it is a short stride from national pride to xenophobia, cele-
brating a sporting victory can be honourable enough when the per-
formance is as stylish as it was now. (newsmerge)
Although this looks like an arbitrary restriction, there might be a possible se-
mantic explanation: As mentioned above,254 it is sometimes claimed that
[that_CL] complements usually express facts, whereas non-finite forms such as
[V-ing] or [to_INF] can also be used to express (actual and potential) activities
without factual character. However, Faulhaber (2011: 170–189) shows convinc-
ingly how many such semantic accounts contradict each other and fail to pre-
dict the actual realisations of complement clauses in postverbal position.255
Since quite often such explanations can only be applied in a post-hoc manner it
is questionable to what extent they can predict the choice of complement here.
Let us thus examine harmful, which shows the same pattern:
(35) a. Using fitness equipment incorrectly can be harmful to your body.

(HJB 203)
b. To awaken a child for food is very unnecessary and harmful. (aca-
demic)
||
254 See also 4.2 for a discussion of potentiality with [to_INF] complements.
255 See also Klotz (2007) for a smaller scale study of postverbal clausal complements on the
basis of the VDE.
Data Analysis | 153
c. *That he created a sterile environment through excessive cleanliness

was harmful to his immune system. (invented)
(36) That he only left her 3,000 pounds was not particularly helpful, ei-
ther. (invented)
Interestingly, although not all native speaker informants agreed on it, (36) ap-
pears to be less awkward than (35c), but it would be difficult to decide what in
the semantics of helpful makes it allow factual subjects and what in the seman-
tics of harmful makes it disallow them, so it looks as if there are at least some
arbitrary restrictions in the selection of [that_CL] subjects. The same pattern was
also found for hopeful and hopeless.
To sum up, we can say that we were able to identify some likely candidates
for restrictions on clausal subjects of adjectives in canonical position even with
the limited data available and that we can treat this as a further pointer to the
existence of item-specific restrictions on English subjects.
6.3.4 Case study: nouns and non-extraposed clausal subjects
For the second case study, all nouns starting with the letter i were selected from
the Erlangen Valency Patternbank (Herbst/Uhrig 2009) and the parsed corpora
were searched in a similar way to the first case study. The modified queries can
be represented as follows:
– [to_INF]: [noun] ---csubj-----> [not specified] ---aux-----> to
– [that_CL]: [noun] ---csubj-----> [not specified] ---complm-----> that
– [V-ing]: [noun] ---csubj-----> %ing
Again, corpus examples of patterns that occurred only once or were otherwise
dubious were verified with the help of two native speaker informants who were
also asked to judge invented examples of patterns that did not occur in the cor-
pus. Since some of the items in question are of very low frequency, since a con-
siderable portion of sentences had to be invented and since only two native
speakers were involved in this rather small scale case study, the results gath-
ered in this subsection must be treated with great caution. The following table
presents the results of the combined corpus and native speaker evidence:256
||
256 All native speaker verdicts can be found in Appendix 25.
canonical position of copular clauses with nouns starting with i as predicative element
idea + + + [that_CL] only once

ignorance + + + [V-ing] only once
illusion + + + [that_CL] only once
image – o – But lots of [V-ing] with inversion; see sepa-
rate discussion in Section 6.3.4.2
immunity – – –
impact – o – one example of [V-ing] by Belgian painter;
rejected
importance – – – see separate discussion in Section 6.3.4.1
of im- + + + [that_CL] only once; almost always “of [adjec-
portance tive] importance”; see separate discussion in
Section 6.3.4.1
impression o + o
impulse o + o
incentive + + o
inclination + + o [to_INF] only once
increase + + + plus lots of [V-ing] with inversion
influence o + + [to_INF] only once in a very specific construc-
tion
insight – + + [that_CL] only once
insistence – – – [V-ing] only with inversion
inspiration + + +
instinct + + +
instrument + + –
insurance o + +
interest o + + [to_INF] 'borderline', 'marginal'; lots of [V-ing]
with inversion
interval – – –
interview – – –
introduction + + + plus some [V-ing] with inversion
invitation + + o
Again, it is not surprising that some nouns do not allow clausal subjects at all. It
appears that immunity, insistence, interval and interview are such cases, proba-
Data Analysis | 155
bly also impact since the following corpus example was not only rejected by
both native speaker informants but is also from a non-native context:
(37) ?Seeing his work was a lasting impact. (newspapers)
A variety of nouns seem to allow the full range of possible clausal subjects, at
least under the relatively lax criteria applied in this section. These include idea,
ignorance, illusion, influence, inspiration, instinct and possibly introduction.
For instance example (38a) of instinct with a [that_CL] was crafted on the basis
of a corpus example with a [V-ing] given as (38b):
(38) a. But that he immediately went after them was pure instinct. (invented)
b. What Harry didn’t realize was that going after Snape was instinct,
too. (fiction)
It would take a larger study with more native speaker informants to reliably
determine if the [that_CL] that was accepted on the basis of an invented exam-
ple here is actually fully acceptable, in particular in the light of the corpus evi-
dence discussed in Section 6.3.2.1 which led us to claim that there is a restriction
with instinct that forbids extraposed [that_CL] subjects.
Again, we also find nouns that do not allow all realisations alike. Thus, for
instance, instrument is attested with several examples of [V-ing] subjects in the
corpora (usually as blunt instrument) but with no [that_CL] and no [to_INF].
While it was possible to craft borderline-acceptable examples with a [to_INF],
the [that_CL] in (39b) was rejected by both native speakers.
(39) a. It will point to one of the conclusions of the government-

commissioned Deloitte and Touche report which suggests that giving
a set budget to a newly opened hospital is a “blunt instrument”.
(newsmerge)
b. *That they gave a set budget to a newly opened hospital was a “blunt
instrument”. (invented)
For insight, we also may have identified a restriction on the availability on the
[to_INF], but again there is not enough data for us to make a claim other than
that there is a need for further investigation. There were one [that_CL] and one
[V-ing] example found in the corpus, and the [V-ing] example given in (40b) had
to be modified (reproduced as (40c)) in order to be accepted by the native
speaker informants.
(40) a. That “the country” in whose interests policy is designed is to be un-

derstood in class terms is, of course, no recent insight. (academic)
b. ?Seeing him in action at his GEC HQ off London’s Park Lane was a rare
insight. (newspapers)
c. Seeing him in action at his GEC HQ off London’s Park Lane was a rare
insight into his everyday working life. (modified version of previous
example)
The invented [to_INF] example was rejected:
d. *To realize her own issues with him was an interesting insight. (in-
vented)
Since it is often difficult to tell why exactly an example is rejected by native

speaker informants, this again is of course not enough to rule out the accepta-
bility of a [to_INF] subject with insight altogether.
Finally, the case of influence shows very nicely that the syntactic environ-
ment has an influence on the acceptability that is hard to describe. The corpora
provide sufficient evidence for the acceptability of [V-ing] as a subject of influ-
ence (as in (41a)), no evidence for [that_CL] subjects (but (41b) was just about
accepted) and one example of a [to_INF] given as (41c) below, which was ac-
cepted, too:
(41) a. Selling The Big Issue is a stabilising influence in Goddard’s life.

(newspapers)
b. That he sold The Big Issue was a stabilising influence in Goddard’s
life. (invented)
c. T S Eliot once remarked of Henry James, “There will always be a few
intelligent people to understand James, and to be understood by a few
intelligent people is all the influence a man requires. (newsmerge)
It appears as if in all the example sentences it would be much less likely to have
influence on its own or just with a premodifier – the postmodifier in the first two
and the complementation around influence in the last appear to play a decisive
role in the acceptability of the sentences, which would be difficult to model in
valency theory since they do not appear to fill a valency slot of influence in the
traditional sense.
We thus managed to identify ‘suspicious’ cases for restrictions on subjects
of some nouns discussed in the present section, but as for the first case study,
we have to admit that the limited availability of data does not allow us to make
any strong claims, even though the general tendency towards item-specificity
observed in this study so far seems to be confirmed further.
Data Analysis | 157
6.3.4.1 Special case 1: of importance

During the data analysis for the present case study, it turned out that while
importance on its own does not allow any form of clausal subject, the phrase of
importance allows all of them:257
(42) a. *To encourage succinct writing about science is a great importance -

and these winners will make a real contribution to science communi-
cation. (invented)
b. To encourage succinct writing about science is of great importance -
cation. (newspapers)
c. Yet finding out what happens in higher education is of utmost im-
portance in understanding the patterns of gender inequality that ex-
ist. (FA6 114)
d. That the eggs should be fresh, free-range and from a well-fed chook is
of paramount importance. (newsmerge)
One could argue that of importance functions in a similar way to the adjective
important in these sentences and that the construction should not be treated as
a case of noun valency at all. Syntactically, of course, as most instances of the
construction contain an adjective modifying importance,258 and as adverbial
modifiers of the whole structure are not acceptable, we still have to treat the
structure as a prepositional/particle phrase with a noun phrase complement:
(43) *To encourage succinct writing about science is very of importance.
At the semantic level, however, the premodifying adjectives fulfil the function
of expressing degree in a similar way to degree adverbs (see CamG 720–725),
often, as in the examples above, – but not always (see (44) below) – expressing
a high degree of importance.
||
257 The possible complements shown here make a good case for a large corpus, given that
Kaltenböck in his study based on the 1-million-word ICE-GB did not find any instance of non-
extraposed [to_INF] subjects with a PP predicate (Kaltenböck 2004: 153).
258 In the BNC, the sequence of importance occurs 410 times, the sequence of [adjective]
importance 1753 times. In the data analysed for the present chapter, the numbers were skewed
towards the latter construction even further. This is probably due to the fact that heavier post-
verbal elements boost the acceptability of sentences with non-extraposed clausal subjects.
(44) Thus the premium need not necessarily be connected with the product
that carried the premium; the idea is to stimulate purchases of the
product — selling the premium is of secondary importance. (K94 1117)
While it is of course possible to follow Kaltenböck (2004), who treats such items
as PP predicates, their peculiarities make any treatment in a traditional gram-
matical approach quite problematic and are a further indicator that linguists
should regard meaningful units of whatever size as basic in the description of
language very much in the way Sinclair (2004: 24ff) or construction grammar259
suggest. In Section 9.3.2 a model to deal with such cases in a valency framework
will be discussed.
6.3.4.2 Special case 2: image

Of all nouns examined for this chapter, image is the only one to frequently show
the particular pattern exemplified in (45a).
(45) a. Hovering in front of her was the image of a large eagle. (fiction)
While the structure looks like a copular clause with a [V-ing] subject and a pre-
dicative element headed by image superficially, there is an alternative interpre-
tation. For instance, the subject-related question seems to indicate that the
postverbal element might be the subject since the alternative is infelicitous:
b. ?What was the image of a large eagle? – Hovering in front of her.

c. What was hovering in front of her? – The image of a large eagle.
That in fact the postverbal element should be treated as subject in such struc-
tures can be observed in (46), where the verb is in the plural and thus shows
concord with images and not with the [V-ing] clause preceding it. (As pointed
out in Section 7.1.3.2, clausal subjects are usually treated as singular by con-
cord.)
(46) Running through McClaren’s mind were images of England’s recent

rugby prowess, as well as the determination paraded by his own play-
||
259 While Croft/Cruse (2004: 265ff) are right to point out that construction grammar (they use
lower case to refer to the whole set of construction grammars) is far from uniform, this state-
ment is in line with any such approach, in particular with Goldberg (1995, 2006) and Fill-
more/Kay/O’Connor (1988).
Conclusion | 159
ers since the first-half nadir against Andorra in Barcelona last season.
(newspapers)
We thus can safely assume that the given structure is an instance of some kind
of inversion. Some sentences might be treated as instances of locative inversion,
but this is clearly not true of the following one:
(47) Adding to the doubts is M Chirac's long-standing image as a political

weathervane and an impulsive leader. (newsmerge)
CamG suggests the neutral term subject-dependent inversion, thus also acknowl-
edging that “the subject occurs in postposed position” (CamG 1385). If we com-
pare the inverted structures with their canonical counterparts, an interesting
question arises as to what the verb in the sentence is:
(48) The image of a large eagle was hovering in front of her.
In (48), was hovering would be treated as verb by CGEL, or as VHCact by

Herbst/Schüller (2008), which could be taken to mean in turn that the original
sentence (45) contains a discontinuous verb in the progressive aspect. CamG
calls the preposed element a VP (1386) even though the copula is located out-
side this ‘VP’.260
To sum up we can state that image attracts inverted structures in a way no
other item in our test set does, which is a further indicator of the highly idiosyn-
cratic behaviour of words that can be modelled best in theories which feature a
substantial storage component.
6.4 Conclusion
Overall, the analysis of subjects in copular clauses has yielded convincing evi-
dence that highly item-specific restrictions are at work there, too. The present
section will first give an overview of the results collected in the data analysis
and then discuss theoretical implications and issues of modelling.
||
260 CamG (1385f) shows that even though the inverted structures show progressive aspect
morphology, they do not necessarily have a progressive meaning and thus not all such inverted
sentences correspond to canonical progressive sentences.
6.4.1 Summary of results
For extraposed subjects of adjectives, it was shown that there are the item-
specific restrictions summed up in the following table:
Tab. 25: Summary of restrictions on extraposed subjects in copular clauses with adjectives as
predicative elements
[to_INF] [that_CL]
apparent – +
bold + –
careless + –
certain – +
civil + –
clumsy + –
complacent + –
conspicuous – +
early + –
easy + –
economic + –
exact + –
expensive + –
extreme + –
fruitful + –
fruitless + –
hopeless + –
indisputable – +
inept + –
manifest – +
notable – +
radical + –
safe + –
sentimental + –
smart + –
ungrateful + –
Conclusion | 161
It was also shown that similar restrictions exist for nouns, which are summed
up here:
Tab. 26: Summary of restrictions on extraposed subjects in copular clauses with nouns as
predicative elements; for lexemes with multiple lexical units, the lexical unit in the
VDE/Patternbank is given in parentheses
disgrace (A) + – + distinction of lexical units difficult for

[V-ing]
disgrace (B) – + + distinction of lexical units difficult for
[V-ing]
duty + o –
goal + + –
habit + – +
instinct + o – invented [that_CL] example was ac-
cepted in canonical position
job + – + whether [V-ing] examples are same
lexical unit is questionable
job (special use 1) – + –
joke (special use 1) – – +
judg(e)ment + + –
need + + –
opinion + + –
role + – + only one example of [V-ing]
task + – +
tendency + – –
will + + –
Even though the restrictions on the [to_INF] only hold if the distinction between
different lexical units is kept,261 the columns for [that_CL] and [V-ing] indicate
that there is item-specific variation.
Thus both systematic studies on extraposed subjects in copular clauses
come to similar conclusions based on a substantial test-bed of data. Even
though the limited data available for the two case studies does not allow to
||
261 See Section 6.3.2.1 above for the discussion of job and disgrace.
make strong claims about subjects in canonical position, the results do point in
the same direction as the systematic studies.
For adjectives starting with h and for nouns starting with i the most interest-
ing cases are repeated here:
Tab. 27: Summary of restrictions on clausal subjects in canonical position in copular clauses
with adjectives as predicative element
[to_INF] [V-ing] [that_CL]
harmful + + –
healthy – + o
heartless + + o
helpful + + o
honest o + +
honourable + + –
hopeful o o –
hopeless + + –
horrific + + o
hostile + – –
hot – + o
hungry – – –
hypocritical + + o
Tab. 28: Summary of possible restrictions on clausal subjects in canonical position in copular
clauses with nouns as predicative element
[to_INF] [V-ing] [that_CL]
influence o + +
insight – + +
instrument + + –
The fact that Table 27 contains more o-cells than the tables before is an indicator
of the problems that arose in the case studies due to the limited availability of
data. It is nonetheless likely that many of the restrictions identified in Table 27
hold, since the interpretation of data was done very carefully. For the nouns
listed in Table 28, there are only two possible restrictions, so based on the pre-
Conclusion | 163
sent data we can neither confirm nor reject any hypotheses solely based on the
case study of nouns.
Overall, the results obtained in the present chapter can only be interpreted
as strong evidence for a treatment that regards subjects of copular clauses as
syntactically governed by the predicative element.
6.4.2 Theoretical implications
The results of the data analysis are particularly relevant for the modelling of
copular clauses in valency theory. While in the two previous chapters, we basi-
cally found the position of valency theory in general confirmed, the situation is
more complex for copular clauses. If we recall the discussion of theoretical posi-
tions in Section 6.2, there is no general agreement as to the exact syntactic
structure of such clauses.
The model we propose here is in principle a modified version of
Herbst/Schüller’s (2008) model. Their model, which makes use of valency and
constituent structure (see Section 2.2.2), assigns copular and non-copular claus-
es identical syntactic analyses:
(49) a. She killed a teacher.

b. She is a teacher.
Both examples can thus be described as follows in their notation (see Herbst/
Schüller 2008: 173–178):
sentence: declarative-‘statement’
(49a) She killed a teacher.
SCU: NP PHU: VHCact:2 PCU: NPÆFFECTED
Fig. 17: Analysis of a non-copular clause in Herbst/Schüller’s (2008) model
sentence: declarative-‘statement’
(49b) She is a teacher.
SCU: NP PHU: VHCact:2 PCU: NPPREDICATIVE
Fig. 18: Analysis of a copular clause in Herbst/Schüller’s (2008) model

Thus the only difference between (49a) and (49b) is at the semantic level, where
the postverbal complement takes different semantic roles depending on the
verb. This analysis is similar to Helbig’s position discussed in Section 6.2, but
the evidence collected in the present chapter challenges such a view since we
found that predicative elements impose valency restrictions on the subject.262
For extraposed subjects, the relationship is less controversial, so Herbst
(1983) or Herbst et al. (2004) would regard the underlined [that_CL] in the fol-
lowing structure as governed by the adjective clear:
(50) a. It is clear that the views of the unions were ignored. (ACH 400)
Whether and in what way this analysis could be combined with the view that it
and the [that_CL] form one constituent together as proposed in Herbst/Schüller
(2008)263 remains unclear.
Here we shall instead propose a uniform treatment that analyses both ex-
traposed and non-extraposed subjects as governed by the predicative element
as a valency carrier. This does not imply any change in the constituent structure
part of the clause. A first approximation may look as follows:
(50) b. That it represented a threat was clear enough. (ANU 1264)
clause
subject predicate
constituent structure
predicator predicative element
That it represented a threat was clear enough.

valency structure
Fig. 19: Possible structure for non-extraposed copular clauses
The valency structure in this particular example only consists of a link from
clear to the [that_CL];264 the copula verb does not even figure in the valency
structure. The reason for such an analysis is – as already mentioned the theoret-
||
262 For adjectives we have reasonable evidence, for nouns the same behaviour is to be ex-
pected.
263 See the discussion in Chapter 7.
264 One may also posit a valency relationship to enough, but an analysis as adjunct to clear is
preferred here.
Conclusion | 165
ical introduction – that no formal valency restrictions whatsoever are imposed

by the copula be. Similar to the argument that in sentences with meteorological
verbs the preverbal it is not a complement of the verb and just supplied because
of the necessity for English clauses to have a subject, we can claim that the
copula is not a complement of the valency carrier (the predicative element) in
such clauses and that it is simply supplied because of the necessity for English
clauses to have a verb.265
There are three disadvantages to such an analysis. The first and minor one
is that the parallel treatment of copular and non-copular clauses with the verb
as the highest-ranking element is lost.
The second and possibly more serious problem is that there are sentences of
the type given in (51a), which are only reasonable in a context where further
information is known, for instance as an answer to (51b).
(51) a. Yes, I am.

b. Are you sure you want to talk about it? (A7J 1679)
If we regard sure as the valency carrier in (51b), what is the valency carrier in
(51a)? One may of course argue for an elliptical treatment in which the valency
carrier is omitted because it is known, but assuming an underlying structure to
be able to explain an actual structure is not very appealing for a surface-
oriented model with a strong focus on usage. Furthermore, there are similar
structures discussed by Herbst (VDE xxxi):
(52) a. Does Hannah know? (VDE xxxi)

b. Where is he now? Does Hannah know? (VDE xxxii)
Again, (52a) is only possible in a context such as the one given in (52b) and this
is reflected in the model:266
Hence complements such as the wh- and that-clauses in

(17) c. But you know how folks are here in Zennor.
d. Did you know they were here?
can be described as contextually optional complements to indicate that they are only
optional if their referent can be identified from the context. (VDE xxxii; their emphasis)
One may thus argue that it is desirable to treat cases such as (51a) and (52a) in
the same way in a syntactic model and, since the complement status of the
||
265 Word grammar (Hudson 2010: 293f) also regards the subject as the subject of the predica-
tive element.
266 See also the discussion of optionality in Section 2.2.2.
‘missing’ element in (52a) is hard to deny, the ‘missing’ element in (51a) should
be treated as a complement as well.
Furthermore, different copula verbs show different behaviour in this re-
spect, so the item-specific (i.e. valency) character can hardly be doubted:267
(53) a. She is very nice.

b. She really is.
(54) a. She seems very nice.

b. *She really seems.
The third and most convincing argument against the simple structure presented
in Figure 19 is the quantitative valency of be. One can argue that the copula
must be the primary valency carrier in the clause since it is divalent268 and thus
blocks the occurrence of additional complements such as John in the following
example.
(55) a. *That it represented a threat was John clear enough.
Semantically, there is absolutely no reason to reject (55a), and a parallel struc-

ture is in fact possible in German in which the underlined element corresponds
semantically to the [to_NP] in (55b), which is usually analysed as a complement
of clear (VDE 138).
(55) b. That it represented a threat was clear enough to John.
(56) „Nur dass es ziemlich zur Sache geht“, war Gao klar, der zuvor für
eine Universitätsmannschaft im Fußballtor stand. (taz, 24 March 2007)
One may of course argue that the valency of clear simply does not allow such an
[NP] complement in English. However, the fact that no English adjective has
this valency slot while verbs often allow a postverbal [NP] after the verb (even
with an adjective following as in the case of so-called ‘complex transitive’ struc-
tures) speaks for a model in which the copula exerts the restriction, even though
we have seen at the beginning of the chapter that no formal restrictions whatso-
||
267 Since the regular form of (54b) is She really does., one may argue that is in (53b) is a pro-
form for is in (53a), but since the pro-form is only takes up instances of the verb is, such a
treatment seems unnecessarily complicated and could only be justified with the help of meta-
theoretical considerations such as symmetry.
268 For exceptional cases of trivalent use see the entry of be in the VDE.
Conclusion | 167
ever are enforced by be, i.e. that qualitative valency does not seem to restrict the
occurrence of complements.
We can thus modify our model to account for these valency restrictions and
add the additional valency relations:269
clause
subject predicate
constituent structure
predicator predicative element
That it represented a threat was clear enough.

valency structure
Fig. 20: Modified structure for non-extraposed copular clauses
Such a treatment with multiple incoming edges also allows for an elegant
treatment of ‘complex transitive’ structures (an issue raised in Chapter 5, in
particular in Section 5.2.2.2) and of so-called tough movement structures to be
discussed in Chapter 7. Section 9.3.2.2 will show how these structures can be
modelled according to the same principles in a valency model and thus present
more evidence for the solution suggested here.
||
269 Theoretically, a structure in which the subject is only the child of one element might be
possible, too, but in that case one would either have to posit an inheritance relation where be
inherits the restrictions from clear and imposes them onto the subject (which requires a more
complex model and thus has to be rejected, other things being the same) or one could have a
complex head of the clause, consisting of the verb and the predicative element, within which
we would have to posit valency relations as well.
7 Extraposition
Extraposition is a term used for structures such as that in (1a), where an element
(usually a subordinate clause) is found towards the end of its superordinate
clause and it occurs in the position the extraposed element occupies in canoni-
cal structures such as (1b).270
(1) a. It was stupid to barge in here like this. (JYC 4090)

b. And to treat him like the prodigal son was stupid. (CBN 2328)
The hypothesis presented in Section 1.3, i.e. that subject extraposition might be
lexically determined, may appear surprising at first sight, given its traditional
treatment in terms of a (“usually optional”) rule, as also proposed for the gener-
ative framework by Rosenbaum (1967: 6). However, the table found in Appendix
26, the top of which is reproduced here, seems to suggest otherwise. It gives the
distribution of extraposed and non-extraposed [to_INF] subjects in the VDE for
all verbs that allow this form of subject in the active voice:
Tab. 29: Extraposition and non-extraposition of [to_INF] subjects with active verbs according to
the VDE; for lexemes with multiple lexical units, the lexical unit in the VDE/Patternbank is
given in parentheses
extraposed non-extraposed
amuse(A) + +
annoy() + +
appear(B) + +
attract(A) + +
become() + –
begin() + –
bring(B) + –
buy() + –
call(F) + –
cause() + –
||
270 Extraposition is not limited to subjects and there are further uses of the term in generative
grammar, but only subject extraposition is covered in the present study. Again, the study is
limited to English. For a recent cross-linguistic survey of such structures see Schmidtke-Bode
(2014, Section 5.5.).
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110589801-189
170 | Extraposition
extraposed non-extraposed
come(F) + +
commit(A) + –
compare(B) + –
concentrate(A) + –
confirm() + –
cost(A) + +
cost(B) + –
count(B) + –
decide(alpha) + –
delay(B) + –
demand(A) + –
discourage() + –
do(alpha) – +
ensure() + –
excite() + –
fall(E) – +
feel(C) + –
fill() + –
form() + –
free() + –
Even if only some of these restrictions hold, we will have to treat extraposition
as an item-specific phenomenon and list its occurrence in the lexicon of a va-
lency model.
There is a second purpose to the present chapter: The last of the hypotheses
presented at the beginning of this book (see Section 1.3) claims that the term
subject covers an array of properties that happen to coincide in one constituent
in canonical clauses but less so in non-canonical clauses. We would thus expect
the subject properties discussed in Section 2.3.2 to perhaps cause problems
when applied to sentences showing subject extraposition and will discuss this
issue in detail in Section 7.1.3.
7.1 Theoretical treatment

This section is devoted to the treatment of extraposition in various approaches
to syntax. Such a discussion is necessary because the models differ greatly from
Theoretical treatment | 171
one another in their analysis, in what counts as extraposition and what does
not, and because the theoretical implications drawn from the analysis of course
depend on our theoretical treatment of the phenomenon.
In most recent grammars of English, the term extraposition is used for a
“[p]ostponement which involves the replacement of the postponed element by a
substitute form” (CGEL: 1391), as in the following example:
(2) a. It was clear that she had been worrying. (HP7.535)
The use of the word replacement in the above citation seems to suggest that
Quirk et al. see sentence (2a) above as derived from sentence (2b) below, which
is backed by their use of the formulation “is moved to the end of the sentence”
(CGEL 1391).271
(2) b. That she had been worrying was clear.
As pointed out by Kaltenböck (2004) from a functional perspective treating the

non-extraposed form as basic may be misleading, since it is much less frequent
than the extraposed form “and therefore has to be taken as the statistically
marked construction of the two” (Kaltenböck 2004: 2).
Even though the definition given by Quirk et al. is relatively general, only it
is mentioned as the substitute form in the subsequent paragraphs. We shall
follow this practice in the present study even though there are other researchers
who have argued for a wider range of possible anticipatory elements.
For instance, Mindt (2007: 105), who carried out an extensive study of ad-
jectives followed by a [that_CL], prefers the term non-intentional subject in order
to cover a range of problematic cases.272 But as the pronoun it accounts for
96.9 % of her non-intentional subjects and as the other examples are not
straightforward cases of extraposition, the distinction is of limited use here.
Similarly, for Jespersen the term extraposition has a wider scope than for
most grammarians nowadays, as it includes instances of dislocation (see post-
||
271 Aarts uses a similar terminology in that he identifies two stages in the process of extrapo-
sition: “In the first stage the content clause is displaced to the end of the matrix clause, after
which anticipatory it [...] is slotted into the matrix clause Subject position” (Aarts 2011: 183). He
goes on to state, however: “I present extraposition in this way only for expository purposes.
There is no suggestion that the two stages are processes which take place in the mind” (Aarts
2011: 183).
272 Non-intentional subjects cover cases such as “The Bible is quite clear that these evil spirits
(and the things that they do) are dangerous.” (Mindt 2007: 105) which do not contribute rele-
vant insights to the present chapter.
172 | Extraposition
poned and anticipated identification in CGEL 1310 and the discussion in Section
7.1.1 below) as well as cases where the extraposed element is represented by a
pronoun other than it in the “sentence proper” (Jespersen 1933: 95). Extraposi-
tion in the narrower sense in which it is most often used today is treated under
the heading of preparatory it:
But it has also another very important function, namely as “preparatory it” to represent a
whole group of words which it would not be convenient to put in the place required by the
ordinary rules of word-order without causing ambiguity or obscurity. The group itself (an
infinitive with its complements, a clause, etc.) then comes afterwards in “extraposition.”
(Jespersen 1933: 154)
Jespersen’s reason for extraposition, i.e. to avoid “ambiguity or obscurity”, is

noteworthy and at least partially compatible with processing accounts present-
ed in Section 7.3.1 below.
In the context of noun phrase extraposition illustrated in (3), no indication
as to what the actual cause of a preference of this structure over the canonical
structure might be is given.273
(3) It is strange the number of mistakes he always makes. (Jespersen 1933:

155)
Jespersen treats [to_INF] subjects as subjects irrespective of whether they are

extraposed or not. No indication as to the factors influencing the choice of either
construction is given. The same applies to the case of [for_NP_to_INF] (Jesper-
sen 1933: 343f). Thus Jespersen’s preparatory it corresponds more closely to
extraposition as we understand it in the present study than his broader concept
of the term extraposition, which is, however, relevant for the interpretation of
Erdmann’s results cited below.
||
273 Besides the length and structural complexity, concord may play a role in this particular
example as the canonical structure would require a singular verb near a phrase that expresses
plurality while being in the singular. This can indeed lead to confusion. (See, for instance, The
number of inquiries are higher than in any other month since the branch opened in November
1991. [K55 4087] as opposed to the much more frequent structure with singular verb The num-
ber of injuries is actually going down in proportion to the increased number of skiers. [AHC 1117].)
7.1.1 Extraposition vs. dislocation
7.1.1.1 The problem

Some grammatical models, such as CamG, make a distinction between extrapo-
sition as in (4a) and (right)-dislocation as in (4b):
(4) a. It is no joke coming home at night to an empty house. (newsmerge)

b. It is no joke, trying to build a new National Theatre. (newsmerge)274
Superficially, both sentences look very similar with it as subject, no joke as pre-
dicative element and a [V-ing] clause following. The only reason for which these
are treated as instances of different constructions is the comma between joke
and the [V-ing] clause in (4b). According to CamG the comma275 in writing repre-
sents an audible prosodic boundary:
In speech the two constructions are strikingly distinct prosodically. Unlike the extraposed
constituent, the dislocated constituent almost invariably constitutes a distinct intonation-
al phrase and is separated from the nucleus of the clause by an intonational boundary.
(CamG 1414)
The spoken character is important since dislocation “is often found in oral per-
sonal narratives” (CamG 1408). CGEL claims that the [V-ing] is “resistant to
bearing the main information focus” so that the main focus is “on the first ele-
ment of the predicate” (CGEL 1393):
(5) It’s |FÙN being a HÓSTess| (CGEL 1393)
However, Mair, whose corpus contains roughly 50 % spoken material, notes

that “neither of these two prosodic criteria proves very helpful”276 (Mair 1988:
56) for the distinction between extraposed and dislocated [V-ing] clauses since
“right-dislocation structures are not always separated from the rest of the clause
by a distinct intonational break” (Mair 1988: 56).
||
274 (4b) is difficult to assess without context. It is the first sentence of a commentary in the
Irish Independent and it becomes clear that it has to be analysed as an instance of right-
dislocation if we look at the entire paragraph:
It is no joke, trying to build a new National Theatre. Apart from the brutal logistics, one is
at the mercy of events, dear boy, events, in this case the unexpected offer of a waterfront
site owned by the Dublin Docklands Development Authority. (newsmerge)
275 CamG (1414) points out that a dash also commonly fulfils the same function.
276 Mair does of course not refer to CamG in his discussion but CamG’s position appears to be
basically that of Postal’s (1974) study.
174 | Extraposition
CamG (1413f) identifies two further properties in which the two construc-
tions differ. The first is the status of it, which they claim is a non-referential
dummy in (4a) and an ordinary referential pronoun in (4b). If we accept this line
of argument, then it should be possible to replace it in (4b) with another pro-
noun such as this – similar to the full range of personal pronouns that is possi-
ble with right-dislocated [NP]s:
(4) c. ?This is no joke, trying to build a new National Theatre.
However, (4c) is only of limited acceptability, even in spoken language, so the

referential character of the pronoun in dislocated structures is at least doubtful,
as long as we treat (4b) as a clear case of dislocation, which CamG would have
to do due to the intonational boundary represented by the comma after joke.
The second difference between the two constructions according to CamG is
“in the information status of the right-dislocated and extraposed constituents.
[... T]he right-dislocated phrase is required to be discourse-old, whereas the
extraposed constituent may be discourse-new” (CamG 1414). The property is
illustrated with the help of the limited acceptability of a dislocated noun phrase
in which the indefinite article is an indicator of the discourse-new status:
(6) #
It’s really interesting, a book I’m reading. (CamG 1414)
In the case of [V-ing] clauses, the discourse-new status is not available as readi-
ly from their form and it may be argued that often a clause by its very nature
contains both old and new information, although possibly less so for typical
subjectless [V-ing] clauses. Kaltenböck (2004) also distinguishes the two con-
structions based on their communicative function.
CGEL, on the other hand, does not draw the distinction between extraposi-
tion and dislocation (CGEL 1392f) for [V-ing] clauses. Instead, Quirk et al. classi-
fy both variants as instances of extraposition and state that “[e]xtraposition
of -ing clauses is in fact uncommon outside informal speech” (CGEL 1393),277
“that the participial clause has just as much affinity with a noun-phrase tag278
(cf 18.59; eg: He’s a friend of mine, that man) as with a genuine extraposed sub-
ject” (CGEL 1393), and that the structure could be punctuated with or without a
comma.
||
277 Since CamG (1188f) does not mention any correlation to register or medium for extraposi-
tion, this might only apply to the structures CamG would analyse as instances of dislocation.
278 Right-dislocated [NP]s are called noun-phrase tag by CGEL.
Furthermore, Mair notes that – contrary to what CGEL (1393) claims – ex-
traposed [V-ing] clauses are not rare or marginal (Mair 1988: 54) and that, while
they show a general affinity towards spoken informal language, their accepta-
bility in non-informal language is highly item-specific (Mair 1988: 59). The most
important claim made by Mair is that he discards the distinction between extra-
position and right-dislocation (and in many cases non-finite adverbial clauses)
altogether and opts for a solution that treats them as instances of an indetermi-
nate construction in the sense of Matthews (1981: 17–21).
7.1.1.2 Evidence
Mair’s position is supported by CamG’s observation that “with [extraposed]
gerund-participials speaker judgements vary” (CamG 1189). It is also confirmed
by the corpus research and native speaker interviews carried out for the analysis
presented in Section 6.3.2.2, in which the distinction between extraposed and
dislocated [V-ing] clauses proved impossible to maintain: The native speaker
informants not only disagreed as to the acceptability of corpus examples, they
also disagreed strikingly about the necessity of an intonational boundary before
the [V-ing] clause, i.e. in their classification of the element as dislocated or ex-
traposed in CamG’s terms. For instance, the three native speakers of British
English interviewed on the issue of (7) below all accepted it, but one only on the
condition that the intonational boundary between fun and playing be present,
one only on the condition that it be absent, and one accepted both variants.
(7) They think it is just harmless fun, playing on the ice-covered reservoir.
(newsmerge)
On the other hand, there are clear-cut instances of dislocation such as (8a), for
which all native speakers agree on the necessity of an intonational boundary
between bet and producing, and there are cases of extraposition, where all in-
formants accepted the sentence without the intonational boundary, such as
(8b).
(8) a. You know, I can’t blame John Travolta. It would have seemed a safe
bet, producing and starring in a major science fiction epic with all the
high-tech hullabaloo that was afforded to The Phantom Menace, The
176 | Extraposition
Matrix, and all those other major science fiction epics. (academic;
slightly modified)279
b. Rugby Football League spokesman Dave Callaghan said: ‘It is a blow
losing a sponsor of the quality of Stones Bitter but work has already
started on finding somebody who will have a long-term commitment
to the exciting principle of Super League.’ (newsmerge)
Not having to distinguish between the two structures is probably the only viable
alternative if one does not want to introduce artefacts into the analysis.
So far, we have only looked at [V-ing] clauses, simply because they occur in
both extraposition and in right-dislocation, if one distinguishes the two. One
may argue, however, that [NP]s also show both variants, though extraposition
to a lesser extent: “NPs generally cannot be extraposed, but there is a very lim-
ited range of types that can: [...] The NPs concerned all have the form ‘the ... N +
relative clause’” (CamG 1407f). The following example is an instance of the rele-
vant structure:
(9) It’s extraordinary the amount of beer he puts away. (CamG 1407)
Accordingly, example (10a), in which the [NP] takes a different form, would not
count as an instance of extraposition, whereas (10b) clearly shows extraposi-
tion:
(10) a. It’s stressful this managing lark, you know, I’m starting to think I was
a bit hard on Wood sometimes. (HP5.248)
b. It’s stressful to manage the team, you know, I’m starting to think I was
a bit hard on Wood sometimes.280
Again, CamG would probably make a distinction here and classify (10a) as a
case of dislocation and not of extraposition, since the underlined element in
(10a) is analysed as “a sort of ‘afterthought’” CamG (1411). In both examples, the
underlined element corresponds to the sentence-initial it and can replace it to
form the canonical sentence. An analysis of (10a) as an instance of extraposition
||
279 The original reads “would seem” instead of “would have seemed”. One native speaker
informant objected to the aspect and as it makes no difference to the argument, the example
was modified accordingly.
280 Example (10b) is slightly infelicitous and might be rephrased either using would as a
modality marker (It would be stressful to manage the team) or with a [V-ing] in ex-
traposed/dislocated position (It’s stressful(,) managing the team). The argument is still valid,
though.
is thus not excluded. By analogy, and following Jespersen, whose extraposition

has a wider scope, one could also treat (11) in the same way.
(11) He’s a funny man, Dumbledore. (HP1.219)
The reason why this approach is not advocated in the present study is that the
pronoun he in (11) is not as semantically neutral as it is in (10b) with the ex-
traposed [to_INF]. For postposed [NP] complements, the status of it is more
difficult to decide. Thus if we extend (12a) below with an afterthought to form
(12b), the term extraposition as defined above might be less suitable due to the
referring character of it, which could be said to refer to the real world object just
as well as to the postponed [NP]:
(12) a. It shows us nothing more or less than the deepest, most desperate
desire of our hearts. (HP1.157)
b. It shows us nothing more or less than the deepest, most desperate
desire of our hearts, this mirror.
We thus can conclude that for [NP]s, much speaks for dislocation in the majority
of cases and that extraposition is rare. But again, the distinction is difficult to
draw.281
Finally, [that_CL] and [to_INF] clauses “are rarely right-dislocated, though
not wholly excluded from the construction” (CamG 1414). Due to their very low
frequency (especially in the mostly written corpora used for the data analysis in
this study), dislocated [that_CL] and [to_INF] clauses will not be discussed in
the present chapter, even if it were possible to distinguish them from extraposed
ones at all.
7.1.1.3 Conclusion for the present study

As one of our hypotheses in this study is that subject extraposition is item-
specific, we would expect not to find it with all lexical items alike. No hypothe-
sis can be made at this point as to whether dislocation, as treated by CamG, is a
generally applicable mechanism or might be regarded as item-specific, so treat-
ing both right-dislocation and ‘genuine’ extraposition as instances of extraposi-
tion – as CGEL does – may result in additional noise in the data. It is for this
||
281 CGEL also used the term extraposition for clausal elements and states that dislocation
(“postponed and anticipated identification” in their terminology [CGEL 1310]) is “restricted to
informal spoken English, where it is very common” (CGEL 1310).
178 | Extraposition
reason that it would of course be desirable to follow CamG in keeping extraposi-

tion and dislocation distinct in the present study where possible, but, as noted
above, the distinction cannot be made for [V-ing] clauses and is basically irrele-
vant for [that_CL] and [to_INF] clauses. Thus we are faced with the same dilem-
ma as Mair and have to come to the same conclusions:
The distinction between right dislocation of constituents and extraposition of clausal sub-
jects is real enough in many areas of English syntax. Operating with this distinction in the
present case, however, is both facile and misleading – facile because, in disregarding the
potential for overlap with adverbial -ing-clauses, it obscures the true complexity of the
empirical data, and misleading because in some instances the analyst will be forced to
make a distinction where none exists in the data. (Mair 1988: 59)
7.1.2 Obligatory extraposition
There are clauses which show the same structure as the extraposed sentences
illustrated above but which do not have a non-extraposed counterpart:
(13) a. It appears that he is now employing Occlumency against you. (HP6.61)

b. *That he is now employing Occlumency against you appears.
Typical verbs that occur in such structures are seem, appear, chance, happen
and turn out (CamG 960). It is obvious that a definition that relies on the re-
placement of an element by it cannot be used to describe (13a) unless one wants
to argue that there is some sort of underlying representation in the form of (13b)
which is altered by a replacement rule. Since the phenomenon is clearly item-
specific, one could take this behaviour as evidence for treating extraposition as
a valency phenomenon. CGEL (1392) takes a similar approach and treats such
cases as instances of obligatory extraposition.
However, Huddleston/Pullum (CamG 67, 241f, 960ff) exclude sentences
such as (13a) from their treatment of extraposition due to the unacceptability of
(13b). Similarly, Halliday states that if there is extraposition, “there will be a
marked variant with the clause Subject at the beginning” (Halliday 1994: 98),
which would imply that (13a) does not show extraposition.
In terms of valency theory, the case of (13) represents an interesting prob-
lem that will be discussed in detail in the remainder of this section. We can
hypothesize that appear needs two further elements to occur in a clause in order
for the sentence to be grammatical. These could be it and the extraposed ele-
ment, but we could also add another element (e.g. a predicative adjective) to
(13b) in order to form the relatively straightforward282 (13c):
(13) c. That he is now employing Occlumency against you appears obvious.
Our hypothesis is, however, contradicted by the fact that we cannot rephrase
(13d) below in terms of (13e) even though another element is present.
(13) d. It appears to me that he is now employing Occlumency against you.

e. *That he is now employing Occlumency against you appears to me.
So since there are two complements in (13e) quantitative valency cannot be the
reason for its unacceptability and consequently we cannot claim that quantita-
tive valency must be the reason for the unacceptability of (13b) above. Thus we
have to find other ways of modelling such behaviour.
Matthews283 gives the following description of the structure of extraposed
sentences such as (2a):
(2) a. It was clear that she had been worrying. (HP7.533)
[T]he predicator clear takes a single complement, the clause [that she had been worrying].
This could, in principle, supply the subject [...]. But the more usual pattern is with the
clause removed outside the subject-predicate relation [...]; this leaves no subject and it is
supplied. (Matthews 1981: 276)
He makes an important point that is less pronounced in the approaches men-

tioned so far: the anticipatory it does not fill a valency slot of the predicator in
any traditional model.284 If we adopt a more usage-based, surface-oriented per-
spective, Matthews’ argument would be more difficult to sustain.
If we accept that it does not fill a valency slot, appear still only has one
complement in (13a), which seems to be enough to satisfy its valency require-
ments. Thus, if only one complement is required by the valency carrier and if
this complement is in canonical subject position as in (13b), we would expect
||
282 (13c) is slightly infelicitous due to the long subject in canonical position, but this effect
could be reduced significantly by adding a conjoined clause such as and we have to think very
carefully what we should do about it.
283 Although Matthews does not identify himself as a valency grammarian, much of his model
is compatible with valency theory; see Section 2.2.2.3.
284 Herbst et al. (2004) seem to adopt the same line of argument as they indicate obligatory
and optional extraposition as a property of the complement in the complement block of verb
entries in the VDE; in adjective entries they use square brackets around it in order to indicate
its non-complement status.
180 | Extraposition
the sentence to be grammatical. As it is not, there are two alternative ways of

modelling this fact. First, one could reject the position that it does not fill a va-
lency slot and maintain the opposite. While this is certainly possible, it leads to
additional problems in that it does not have an identifiable referent and likely
does not fill an argument slot of the verb. The second option is to posit obligato-
ry extraposition in the case of appear in (13a). If we treat extraposition as a
property of the complement itself, as in the VDE,285 we would have to argue that
the obligatorily extraposed [that_CL] in (13a) is not the same complement as the
optionally extraposed [that_CL] in (13c), since the latter does not show such a
restriction. Such a treatment can be observed in the relevant entry for appear in
the VDE:
Fig. 21: Complement block of appear (VDE 40)
According to the VDE model, the [that_CL] in (13c) is not governed by the verb
appear but by the predicative adjective obvious. Given that extraposition is more
natural for such sentences, the VDE only lists an extraposed variant as [it +
pattern of II], which means that an element can occur as extraposed subject of
the sentence if the [ADJ] complement listed in valency slot II has a valency slot
for this element (see also the discussion in the previous chapter). There is ample
corpus evidence to show that the non-extraposed variant exists as well, as in
(14) below, so the form of the complement as [it + pattern of II] may be mislead-
ing and one could rephrase it as [pattern of II]A(it) in the VDE style.
||
285 Such an interpretation is suggested by the notation used but may of course be no more
than a descriptive device.
(14) That the arbitrageur can lend money at the riskless rate of interest
appears sensible [...]. (FSA 246)
For the obligatorily extraposed variant shown in (13), the VDE’s analysis is par-
ticularly interesting since it treats the [that_CL] as one complement that is ob-
ligatorily extraposed and represents two arguments of the verb.286 The reason
behind this is the parallel we can observe between the following two sentences:
(15) a. He appears to fancy me. (adapted from the VDE 40)

b. It appears that he fancies me.
The verb appear in (15a) takes two complements (he and the [to_INF] clause),
which are analysed as representing one argument each in the VDE.287 We can
then state that the semantic relationship between he, appear and fancy is the
same in both sentences in (15). In (15b), appear adds a meaning component of
epistemic modality to what is expressed in the [that_CL] and one could indeed
argue that it does exactly that in (15a), which corresponds roughly to (15c):
(15) c. He apparently fancies me.
In that respect the case of appear is similar to certain adjectives288 in that one
could see the same relationships between (15a–c) as between (16a–c).289
||
286 For seem, no such analysis is offered.
287 In this respect, the VDE differs from Jespersen’s and the generative analysis mentioned in
the following footnote in that the two complements would have to be analysed as representing
only one argument in these approaches.
288 Jespersen offers a similar analysis and proposes a split (notional) subject in the following
examples:
He seems to be all right. (1933: 343)
They would be certain to miss him. (1933: 343)
She is not likely to be up so early. (1933: 343)
Erdmann (1987: 57ff), for instance, follows Jespersen in this respect (and indeed even seems to
transfer Jespersen’s notional concept to the syntactic level).
In the generative framework, such structures are treated as examples of so-called raising, since
the subjects in (15a) and (16a) are analysed as being ‘raised’ from an inferior position in the
subordinate clause to the subject position in the main clause. Accordingly, appear is called a
raising verb and certain a raising adjective. See for instance Haegeman (1994: 319f).
289 The situation becomes slightly more complicated in the case of the adjectives through the
introduction of will in (16b) and (16c) to express the futurity inherent in (16a). For another
similar phenomenon see the discussion of examples (23a–c) in Section 5.2.2.2.
182 | Extraposition
(16) a. He is certain to turn up.

b. It is certain that he will turn up.
c. He will certainly turn up.
If we regard appear purely as a marker of epistemic modality which happens to

be in the form of a verb, we might have to regard he in (15a) as a complement of
fancy and not necessarily of appear; appear would instead have everything else
in the clause as one (discontinuous) complement, similarly to the situation in
(15b). The analysis of appear as a modality marker can also be backed up by
looking at the copula be, which cannot occur in this construction on its own as
in (17a) but can as soon as we add a modal verb to express the epistemic modali-
ty as in (17b). (17c) illustrates that the same obligatory extraposition takes place
here as in the case of appear and seem.
(17) a. *It is that she no longer trusts you.

b. It may be that she no longer trusts you. (CGEL 1392)
c. *That she no longer trusts you may be.
Thus one might be inclined to regard seem and appear as copular verbs with a
‘built-in’ modal verb. While the fact that modal verbs can still occur with the
two (illustrated in (18)) argues against an analysis of the two as actual modal
verbs, given that as a rule modal verbs cannot be combined (see (19)), we main-
tain the analysis since some of the verbs classified as semi-auxiliaries by CGEL
(143–146) do in fact also combine with modal verbs and we would of course not
want to claim that appear or seem are prototypical modals syntactically.
(18) At first sight it may appear that all the children are doing the same
thing but within each group allowance is made for ability and the
children follow their own carefully planned programme at their own
pace — this is updated regularly. (APJ 174)
(19) *I tell you what we might should do. (Kortmann 2006: 609)290
There is another reason given by CamG to show that instances of it followed by

appear or seem should not be treated as cases of extraposition:
||
290 As the present study tries to model Standard English (see Section 3.1 for the problems
associated with the term), (19) is asterisked even though it is acceptable in certain dialects of
the southern United States (see Nagle 2003) and Scottish and Tyneside English (Kortmann
2006: 609).
(20) a. It seemed that he was trying to hide his true identity. (CamG 961)
b. It was later confirmed that he was trying to hide his true identity.
(CamG 961)
c. *It seemed and was later confirmed that he was trying to hide his true
identity. (CamG 961)
Example [(20b)] is a clear case of the extraposition construction: if [(20a)] also belonged to
this construction it should be possible to coordinate the contrasting parts seemed and was
later confirmed. However, [(20c)] shows that this can’t be done, suggesting that the con-
tent clause does not have the same function in the two cases. (CamG 961)
There are two flaws in the argument presented here. First, the sentence is much
more acceptable if we use the [that_CL] in a coordinated structure with a repeat-
ed it as in
(20) d. It seemed and it was later confirmed that he was trying to hide his true
identity.
There is no reason to arbitrarily claim that only the contrasting elements should
be coordinated and we can see in (21b) that we should still expect unacceptabil-
ity in (20d) if the that-clause really had different functions in (20a) and (20b),
regardless of the presence of the repeated pronoun:291
(21) a. *She is and loves a teacher.

b. ??She is and she loves a teacher.
The second problem is the assertion that one should be able to coordinate the
contrasting elements if both sentences were instances of the same construction,
i.e. extraposition. The examples in (22) definitely show extraposition:
(22) a. It is shocking that such a thing could happen.

b. It is disgraceful that such a thing could happen.
c. It shocked me that such a thing could happen.
If we want to combine (22a) and (22b) by means of coordination, there are three
theoretically possible ways, given in (23a–c):
||
291 One could argue that the repeated it might be necessary due to it having two different
functions in (20a–b), but the fact that both partial structures can share the same [that_CL] in
(20c) should be sufficient to refute CamG’s argument because the [that_CL] still seems to have
the same function given that the coordination is acceptable.
184 | Extraposition
(23) a. It is shocking and disgraceful that such a thing could happen.

b. *?It is shocking and is disgraceful that such a thing could happen.292
c. It is shocking and it is disgraceful that such a thing could happen.
The coordinated adjectives in (23a) and the coordinated matrix clauses in (23c)
lead to acceptable sentences whereas the coordinated predicates in (23b) are at
least clumsy. But as (23a) is the one that coordinates the contrasting parts, the
findings could still be seen in line with CamG’s analysis. If we look at (23d),
however, we can observe that the coordination of the contrasting elements does
not lead to an acceptable sentence, even though both original sentences show
extraposition:
(23) d. *It shocked me and is disgraceful that such a thing could happen.
Again, the version with repeated it is much more acceptable:
(23) e. It shocked me and it is disgraceful that such a thing could happen.
So it appears as if the restriction CamG observed is not due to extraposition but

follows a more general principle that forbids coordination of verb phrases – or
at least of differently structured verb phrases with an extraposed subject. How-
ever, there are (rare but acceptable) examples of such coordination, so the exact
nature of the restriction remains mysterious:
(24) It is pretty straightforward and follows Johnny’s philosophy that a

race driver is “a simple animal, and doesn’t have to be a rocket scien-
tist.” (www.ericjacobsen.org)293
The last argument presented by CamG against the obligatory extraposition

analysis is the case of as if-clauses. CamG (962) points out that all [that_CL]
complements in what they call the impersonal construction with appear or seem
allow an as if-clause as an alternative. Thus (13a) can be modified to yield (13f)
without loss of acceptability.
||
292 In the non-extraposed variant such coordination of VPs is also problematic: *?That such a
thing could happen is shocking and is disgraceful.
293 This example may also be used to argue that the extraposed subject is not VP-internal. Or
it may not be accepted as a valid example because – if we insist on the VP-internal status of the
extraposed subject – it is not an instance of basic coordination in the sense of CamG (238).
(13) a. It appears that he is now employing Occlumency against you.

(HP6.61)
f. It appears as if he is now employing Occlumency against you.
This is not true of optionally extraposed sentences such as (25a):
(25) a. It surprised some that he did not retire to Cambridge. (A68 30)
b. *It surprised some as if he did not retire to Cambridge.
Thus, given that as if-clauses never occur as subjects in canonical position, an

extraposed subject analysis may appear infelicitous, but the VDE opts in favour
of this solution. As it would generally be desirable to treat (13a–b) as parallel,
(13a) should not be treated as an instance of extraposition, CamG claims,294 but
of course the VDE also treats them in parallel as instances of obligatory extrapo-
sition. However, the question in the VDE approach is where to stop: CGEL, while
it does not agree with CamG on appear or seem, seems to be in line with its
analysis when it comes to further superficially similar constructions:
If- and when-clauses behave very much like extraposed subjects in sentences like:
It would be a pity if we missed the show.
[cf It is a pity that we missed the show]
It’ll be a great day when you win the sweepstake.
It is doubtful in each case, however, whether the clause could act as subject, although it
could act as initial adverbial clause: If we missed the show, it would be a pity (cf 10.9ff). On
balance, therefore, these appear to be adverbials rather than extraposed subjects. (CGEL
1392; their italics)295
In the VDE, the [if_CL] is analysed as an extraposed subject, albeit it is only

listed for the verb surprise as in the following example:296
(26) It wouldn’t surprise me if she quit. (VDE 834)
||
294 CamG backs up the analysis with what they treat as another instance of the same imper-
sonal construction as in It looked as if he was trying to hide his true identity. (CamG 962), which
does not allow that instead of as if and is thus even more clearly not an instance of extraposi-
tion.
295 For German, Oppenrieder comes to a similar conclusion and states that such expressions
have a ‘taste’ of subject or object respectively when extraposed. When they are found at the
beginning of the sentence, they require the addition of a ‘real’ subject or object (Oppenrieder
2006: 907).
296 The same construction is, however, generally subsumed under the heading of [wh_CL] in
the VDE as with matter:
It doesn’t really matter if you are wrong. (VDE 526; see also VDE xvii)
186 | Extraposition
The when-clause is subsumed under the [wh_CL] category and as such is also
listed as extraposed subject. The extraposed subject analysis in the VDE even
extends to items such as [about_NP] as for matter:
(27) It doesn’t matter about the bed. (VDE 526)
In such cases it becomes clear that from a semantic point of view an analysis in
terms of an impersonal construction with [about_NP] as an additional comple-
ment may be preferable over the extraposed subject analysis.
There is another class of sentences which look as if they are instances of ob-
ligatory extraposition due to the fact that no canonical variant is readily availa-
ble:
(28) a. It emerged that across the very varied fleets the cost of asbestos re-
moval would be £25,000 per vehicle, an investment producing no fi-
nancial return. (A11 974)
b. It emerged that not only was there no reliable evidence of guilt, but,
on the contrary, there was considerable proof of innocence. (A1G 104)
However, the reason behind their apparent inability to be ‘transformed’ into a

canonical variant is the complex structure of the [that_CL] complement, which
is related to weight and processing constraints (see Section 7.3.1 below). That
emerge does allow a [that_CL] in canonical subject position is illustrated in
(28c):297
(28) c. That this is the correct interpretation of the role of words in trusts
emerges more clearly in the next section. (B2P 210)
We shall thus limit the use of the term obligatory extraposition to those cases in
which the valency carrier generally disallows the type of element (e.g. [that_CL])
in canonical subject position in a given pattern (e.g. appear without predicative
element). Given that there is no one simple solution, the remainder of this chap-
ter will follow CGEL in using the term obligatory extraposition despite the at
least partially valid arguments against such a treatment brought forward by
CamG.
||
297 One could also argue that the fact that additional elements are present postverbally may
influence the ability of a non-extraposed [that_CL] subject to occur, similarly to the case of
(13c) discussed above. However, the complement status of the elements here is debatable as
opposed to (13c), where obvious is definitely a complement of appear.
To sum up, in the comparatively static models used for the analysis in this
chapter, there is no convincing and consistent model to capture all generaliza-
tions one would want to make. So the reference grammars only capture either
the parallel between (29a) and (29b) (CGEL) or the one between (29b) and (29c)
(CamG).
(29) a. It is perfectly clear that Charles and Diana are less and less comforta-
ble in each other’s company. (CEN 3385)
b. It appears that Charles and Diana are less and less comfortable in
each other’s company.
c. It appears as if Charles and Diana are less and less comfortable in
The valency analysis offered by the VDE captures both parallels but this comes
with the negative effect that complements that can never occur in canonical
subject position, such as [as if_CL] complements, are labelled as subjects only
due to an analogy to other complements that can occur in subject position, so
the generalization over extraposed and non-extraposed subjects is weaker in
this model.
A model that could capture all these parallels would be more attractive than
CGEL, CamG or the valency approach. Currently, construction grammar (see for
instance Goldberg 1995, 2006) is the most likely candidate for such a model as
the strong focus on storage that most flavours of construction grammar advo-
cate would probably lead to a model which stores all variants seen above and
which allows emergent generalizations that are not mutually exclusive. The
organization of the stored language data could be imagined in the form of a
network model as presented by Bybee (2007: 323–326). Such a model will be
discussed in Section 9.3. However, it is still a problem to model the scope and
limitations of generalizations (see Herbst 2011 for a critique).
7.1.3 What is the subject?
As we have seen above, most researchers do not treat the anticipatory it as a

dependent of the valency carrier. However, in the grammatical structure, items
that are not required by the verb can still be subjects — as suggested for meteor-
188 | Extraposition
ological verbs (“It’s raining.”)298 in most approaches. The present section re-
views the different positions taken and the arguments for and against the re-
spective analyses.
7.1.3.1 Survey of different positions

Quirk et al. (CGEL 1391) state explicitly that there are two subjects in a sentence
that shows extraposition: the postponed subject (which is the notional subject)
and the anticipatory subject (it).299 This view is challenged by Huddle-
ston/Pullum (CamG 239ff), who introduce a uniqueness constraint on subjects,
i.e. there cannot be more than one subject in a clause.300 They check both ele-
ments, it and the extraposed subject,301 against the list of subject properties they
established and conclude that it is the sole subject. We shall discuss the criteria
in detail below. In Halliday’s (1994: 97) analysis, it and the extraposed subject
together form the subject of the clause; in the accompanying text, the embed-
ded clause at the end of the clause is “functioning as Subject [...] with an antici-
patory it occurring in the normal Subject position” (Halliday 1994: 98). The
precise nature of the relationship between the two elements remains unclear.
Similarly, Herbst/Schüller (2008: 124) treat it and the postponed subject as one
single discontinuous element. Thus we can see that almost every conceivable
position on this matter has been argued for in the analysis of English.
In German linguistics, there is no consensus of any sort, either. Engel (2004:
137) uses the term Korrelat (‘correlate’) for es (‘it’), as it correlates with an em-
bedded clause. He makes use of obligatory extraposition and seems to regard
||
298 Such meteorological verbs will not be discussed in detail here, but see for instance the
discussion in Emons (1974: 118–124) and the references there, or Fischer (1997: 97), who anal-
yses It in It rains. as part of the verb (!) and can thus claim that the verb is zero-valent.
299 The VDE seems to follow that position, which can be inferred from their explanation of the
notational convention to indicate obligatory extraposition of a complement: “when occurring
as subject, extraposition with a dummy subject it is obligatory” (VDE xii).
300 See Section 2.3.2 for details.
301 The use of the term extraposed subject for an element that is explicitly not treated as sub-
ject may appear illogical, but the authors defend their terminology as follows:
These terms are intended to capture the fact that they are semantically like the subject of
their basic counterpart, but they are not to be interpreted as kinds of subject. The subject
is a syntactic function, and these elements are no more subjects than a former president is
a president or than an imitation diamond is a diamond. (CamG 243)
the extraposed subject as the subject of the clause.302 Eisenberg (2006: 178)
treats the correlate es and the extraposed element together as subject of the
clause. The internal structure of the subject is similar to an attributive construc-
tion, where es is head (Eisenberg 2006: 330).
7.1.3.2 Criteria for subjecthood revisited

The criteria for subjecthood were discussed in Section 2.3.2 above. In this sec-
tion, we will see to what extent they apply to anticipatory it and extraposed
subjects. A substantial portion of the discussion is based on the extensive
treatment by Huddleston/Pullum (CamG 241–243), who are in favour of an ap-
proach that treats only it as the subject in extraposed sentences. A critical eval-
uation of their arguments is given where necessary.
1. Category
Prototypically, subjects are noun phrases. Although both it and the extraposed
subject can usually occur as only subject, it would be better suited as it is a
noun phrase and thus conforms to the prototype:
(30) That riots and local socialism were both found in the most acutely
stressed parts of the country is no accident. (AS6 878)
(31) It is a tool or aid to a banker making a lending decision. (B1W 1648)
As discussed in Section 7.1.2, matters become more complicated if we treat

when-clauses as in (32a) as extraposed subjects since they cannot be subjects in
the canonical subject position (see (32b)). An analysis in terms of two subjects
(see above) may thus be less appropriate.
(32) a. It was a relief when six o’clock arrived [...]. (HP7.421)

b. *When six o’clock arrived was a relief.
If we treat it and the extraposed subject as one constituent, it is not obvious

what category this constituent should belong to. If we want to follow Eisenberg
(2006; see above) in calling it the head of the construction, our complex element
could be treated as an NP and would thus conform to the prototype.303
||
302 A similar position seems to be taken by Marx-Moyse (1983), who speaks of “vorauswei-
sendes es” (‘cataphoric it’) and calls the extraposed subject “Subjektsatz” (‘subject clause’).
303 It has to be made clear that such considerations are more relevant to rather traditional
approaches to grammar; the fact that we can identify chunks or discontinuous elements that
190 | Extraposition
2. Position
It occupies the default subject position whereas the extraposed subject (hence
the name) does not. If our analysis involves a discontinuous constituent, there
is no single position that could be determined.304
3. Case
As neither clausal subjects nor it are marked for nominative/accusative case,
this criterion is not applicable.
4. Agreement
The relevant paragraph in CamG reads as follows:
In extraposition the verb agrees with it. Clauses generally have the default 3rd person sin-
gular feature, but a clause-coordination can have a plural interpretation, as reflected in
the are of To promise you’ll do something and to actually do it are two quite different things.
There can be no extraposition counterpart precisely because are does not agree with it.
(CamG 242)
On the other hand, many coordinated clauses occur with a verb in the singu-
lar:305
(33) a. That he bought a new car and that he has a shiny yacht annoys me
like hell.
b. *That he bought a new car and that he has a shiny yacht annoy me
like hell.
||
do not readily lend themselves to a simple categorization is common and accepted in usage-
based approaches such as Construction Grammar.
304 Note that the term position is often used differently in the generative model, where it refers
to a place in the underlying deep structure which can but need not correspond to the position
the element occupies on the surface (see Section 2.2.1 for more details).
305 Even variations of CamG’s example can be shown to allow both singular and plural
agreement:
(1) To promise you’ll do something and to actually do it is not the same.
(2) To promise you’ll do something and to actually do it are not the same.
(3) To promise you’ll do something and to actually do it is not the same thing.
(4) To promise you’ll do something and to actually do it are not the same thing.
(5) To promise you’ll do something and to actually do it are not the same things.
By comparing the last two examples we can exclude that agreement is determined by the post-
verbal [NP] complement. Thus coordinated clausal subjects can receive singular or plural
interpretation basically depending on whether the speaker chooses to treat them as one unit or
separately.
If we compare (33a) to its counterpart that shows extraposition (34c), there is no

way to tell what the verb agrees with, so the criterion is difficult to apply.306
(35) c. It annoys me like hell that he bought a new car and that he has a
shiny yacht.
CGEL’s test for agreement between subject and subject complement (if the latter
is a noun phrase) cannot be applied satisfyingly either. However, since CamG is
right in that no coordinated clauses with a plural interpretation can occur as an
extraposed subject, we can still count agreement in favour of it as the subject.
5. Inversion
The post-operator position is taken by it in sentences that show subject extrapo-
sition:
(36) a. It was obvious that he had only just got home [...]. (HP5.373)
b. Was it obvious that he had only just got home?
However, one may want to question the applicability of the criterion to clausal
subjects if we follow CamG’s test:
This property provides an indirect way of identifying the subject in structures not illustrat-
ing inversion: you can be confirmed as subject of You know the candidates because it is
you that comes to occupy the post-auxiliary position when we convert this declarative to
the corresponding closed interrogative Do you know the candidates? (CamG 237)
Thus if we take sentence (37a) and transform it into the corresponding closed
interrogative in (37b), we find that again it takes the post-operator position and
that the [that_CL] is impossible in the same position, as illustrated by (37c), i.e.
that extraposition is obligatory in inverted structures:307
(37) a. That such traditions continued in the early 17th century not only in
Italy but also in France should hardly surprise us[.] (J1A 473)
||
306 Eisenberg (2006: 289f) only gives German examples comparable to (33a) although plural
agreement with dass-clauses should be possible in German as well. Thus he concludes that
contrary to nominal (“nominative”) elements, clauses are not marked for number, even when
coordinated, which is at least questionable.
307 Newmeyer shows “that if we lengthen the constituents following the sentential subject,
acceptability improves considerably” (Newmeyer 2003: 157) and cites the following example in
support: “Why did [that Mary liked old records] lead Bill into a three-hour discursus on how
wonderful the 1960s were?” (Newmeyer 2003: 157)
192 | Extraposition
b. Should it surprise us that such traditions continued in the early 17th

century not only in Italy but also in France?
c. *Should that such traditions continued in the early 17th century not
only in Italy but also in France surprise us?
However, we would of course not want to claim that it is the subject of (37a),
thus the indirect test is of rather limited usefulness with clausal subjects. None-
theless, since most researchers would agree that (37b) is an extraposed structure
and since it takes the post-operator position, we can count this criterion in fa-
vour the subject status of it instead of the extraposed element.
According to CamG (243) “[i]n extraposition neither it nor the extraposed clause
can be questioned, so this test is not applicable.” This can be doubted since the
native speakers interviewed on this issue do not agree with this statement as
they would accept such questions both for copular and for non-copular claus-
es:308
(38) a. It is likely that the school will be closed unless the culprit behind
these attacks is caught. (HP2.191)
b. What is likely?
c. #It.
d. That the school will be closed until the culprit behind these attacks is
caught.
(39) a. [I]t follows logically that somebody at the Ministry might have or-
dered the attacks [...]. (HP5.134f)
b. What follows logically?
c. #It.
d. That somebody at the Ministry might have ordered the attacks.
The form of questions (38b) and (39b) suggests that the element which is the
focus of the question is a subject. The acceptable answers to these questions,
(38d) and (39d), tell us that the questioned subject is the [that_CL].
||
308 CamG claims later that the question for the extraposed subject needs to contain the dum-
my pronoun it (“*What does it invariably annoy him?” [CamG 962]), but no reason is given why
the question should have this form. If we accept their premise, questioning the extraposed
subject is indeed impossible.
In some cases the answer has a slightly different form than the element in
the original sentence:
(40) a. It is a pity it broke [...]. (HP5.749)

b. What is a pity?
c. #It.
d. #It broke.
e. That it broke.
This is hardly surprising since the extraposed clause without that cannot occur
in the canonical subject position either:
(41) a. *It broke is a pity.

b. That it broke is a pity.
The fact that the answer to (40b) is (40e) with that and not the bare clause
(40d), which is present in the original sentence (40a), seems to imply that there
is some kind of relationship between that-clauses and subordinate clauses
without that. This issue and the obligatoriness/optionality of that in [that_CL]
complements are discussed in Section 7.2.2 below.
7. Tags
Huddleston/Pullum (CamG 243) observe that it is repeated in interrogative tags
and take this as another argument in favour of the subject status of it:
(42) a. It annoyed you that he left early and that he took all the booze with
him, didn’t it?
Their point is not precise, though, as the criterion is not the repetition of the
subject in the tag, but the occurrence of an element that agrees with the subject.
As we have seen above in the section on agreement, all clauses with extraposi-
tion show singular agreement, so it is in fact impossible to decide whether the it
in the tag represents the anticipatory it or the extraposed subject. Even in the
case of the coordinated [that_CL]s in (42a) we cannot tell as they also take it as
pronoun in the tag if they occur in canonical position, since – as we have seen
above – coordinated clauses with a plural interpretation cannot occur in extra-
position.
(42) b. That he left early and that he took all the booze with him annoyed you
a lot, didn’t it?
c. *That he left early and that he took all the booze with him annoyed
you a lot, didn’t they?
194 | Extraposition
8. Coordination
With regard to the occurrence with a coordinated VP, Huddleston/Pullum
(CamG 243) take a rather one-sided view by just testing it with a relatively un-
common structure which is rather difficult to process (reproduced as (43)) in
order to claim that it must be subject:
(43) It was obvious to everyone that he loved her and had been from the
very beginning. (CamG 243)309
They ignore the fact that it is also possible (and probably more natural) to have
an extraposed subject with coordinated VPs as in (24) (repeated below), where
the extraposed subject appears not to be part of the VP:310
(24) It is pretty straightforward and follows Johnny’s philosophy that a

race driver is “a simple animal, and doesn’t have to be a rocket scien-
tist.” (www.ericjacobsen.org)311
Thus, the criterion of coordination is not as clearly in favour of the “it is subject”
analysis as Huddleston/Pullum make it appear. Coordination probably offers
the best argument to back up the “discontinuous subject” option, as can be seen
in (24), where the VPs is pretty straightforward and follows Johnny’s philosophy
are coordinated and there is only one discontinuous subject present.312
9. Obligatoriness
As we have seen above, Huddleston/Pullum (GamG 238f/243) check for obliga-
toriness by comparing a sentence to its “maximal finite reduction” if the neces-
sary information is recoverable from the context. So if we want to know what
the subject in (44a) is, we can rephrase it in the form of a question as (44b) and
take a look at the corresponding answer (44d).
(44) a. It is probable that this will have much to offer. (A04 723)
b. Is it probable that this will have much to offer?
||
309 Some native speaker informants rejected this example.
310 We also commonly find extraposed subjects with coordinated matrix clauses: It is compel-
ling and it is noteworthy that he was still a staff analyst at the Pentagon when he gave this speech.
(rosecoveredglasses.blogspot.com)
311 See however Note 293 for a short discussion of the status of the VP in this example.
312 The example of coordinated matrix clauses given in Note 310 above is however problemat-
ic for a discontinuous subject analysis since there are two instances of it and only one ex-
traposed subject.
c. #That this will have much to offer is.313

d. It is.
The problem with this criterion is that it does not require the subject (of the
original sentence in question) in the maximal finite reduction, it requires a sub-
ject that is usually a pronoun replacing the original subject. So although Hud-
dleston/Pullum claim that only it and not the [that_CL] fulfils the criterion of
obligatoriness, it is impossible to argue in favour of their analysis on the evi-
dence of the incongruity of (44c) and the acceptability of (44d) as the same situ-
ation arises with non-extraposed sentences, too:
(45) a. That he was the most inspiring and best loved of all Hogwarts head-
masters cannot be in question. (HP7.24)
b. That he was the most inspiring and best loved of all Hogwarts head-
masters cannot be in question, right?314
c. #That he was the most inspiring and best loved of all Hogwarts head-
masters cannot.315
d. It cannot.
As it would not make sense to argue that it is the subject of (45a) just because it
is the subject of (45d), the whole line of argument collapses. Thus the obligato-
riness criterion as Huddleston/Pullum test it does not yield conclusive evidence.
If we understand obligatoriness in the sense that, leaving position aside, an
element has to occur in a sentence, we find that the extraposed subject is at
least as obligatory as it in most canonical sentences:
(46) a. It is therefore advisable that you complete your shopping well before
nightfall. (HP3.148)
b. That you complete your shopping well before nightfall is therefore
advisable.
c. #It is therefore advisable.
While (46b) is marked due to the heavy initial subject, it is still acceptable. (46c)
is only acceptable if we treat it as a personal pronoun (referring to an ele-
ment/entity that is recoverable from the context) and not as anticipatory it.
||
313 The hash symbol indicates that this sentence is unacceptable as minimal response to
(44b). It may be perfectly acceptable in other contexts.
314 This form of question has been chosen due to the fact that no non-extraposed clausal
subject is possible in closed interrogatives.
315 The statement of fn. 313 applies here, too.
196 | Extraposition
The situation is different if we have obligatory extraposition, as in sentences

with subject-auxiliary inversion:316
(47) a. Sir ... is it important to know all this about Voldemort’s past?
(HP6.203)
b. ?Sir ... is to know all this about Voldemort’s past important?
c. #Sir ... is it important?317
For (47c), the same restriction on the interpretation of it applies as for (46c).
With regard to the restricted acceptability of (47b), we have to conclude that
both it (in the sense it is used in (47a)) and the extraposed subject are obligatory
in (47a).
10. Uniqueness
In their discussion of the subject in extraposition constructions, Huddle-
ston/Pullum (CamG 241) take the uniqueness property as their starting point:
There can only be one subject in a clause, so we have to decide between it and
the extraposed subject. The solution proposed by Quirk et al. (see Section 7.1.3.1
above), who treat both elements as subjects, is not even considered and neither
is a discontinuous subject analysis, which would definitely meet the criterion.
The evidence to back up their view is provided by agreement and tags in coordi-
nation (CamG 239) for nominal subjects, but as we have seen both are not relia-
ble for clausal subjects. Thus, in the light of the evidence presented in this chap-
ter, it would be premature to argue that there can only be one subject in a
clause, particularly as it is so difficult to decide which element it is.
The fact that the form of the reflexive pronoun is determined by the subject will
not help us to decide whether it or the extraposed [that_CL] in (48a) is subject
because we can observe in (48b) that a [that_CL] also triggers the form itself.
(48) a. But it revealed itself that there was a natural progression.

(www.variety.com)
b. That she was destined to march to a different drummer revealed itself
early. (www.apsu.edu)
||
316 Sentences of the It seems that... type behave in the same way but since not all scholars
would analyse these as instances of extraposition, an interrogative example with inversion was
chosen here because there is less disagreement (see Section 7.1.2 above for discussion).
317 This is of course acceptable as a sentence with referential it, but not as a rephrasing of
(47a).
12. Passivization
According to CGEL’s passivization property, the direct or indirect object of an
active clause becomes the subject of a corresponding passive clause. If this
condition is accepted to hold for clausal subjects, it follows that the [that_CL]
that is object in (49a) is subject in (49b).
(49) a. They had agreed that it was far too dangerous to try and communicate
with Mr. Weasley while he walked in and out of the Ministry, because
he was always surrounded by other Ministry workers. (HP7.188)
b. It had been agreed that it was far too dangerous to try and communi-
cate with Mr. Weasley while he walked in and out of the Ministry, be-
cause he was always surrounded by other Ministry workers.
It has to be stressed, though, that this property only applies to the model of
Quirk et al., who regard both elements as subjects anyway. Huddleston/Pullum
are careful to emphasize that (a) they do not regard the [that_CL] in (49a) as
object (CamG 1017f), (b) they do not regard passivization as necessary or suffi-
cient criterion for objecthood (CamG 1018) and (c) they accept two types of pas-
sives (extraposed and non-extraposed) related to sentences with what they call
content clauses as internal complements318 (CamG 1434).
The second half of the passivization property is only applicable to clausal
subjects to a limited extent, as there is a need for reformulation of [that_CL] and
[to_INF] clauses if they are to become by-phrases.319 If we tolerate that reformu-
lation for our test, we see that in (50b) not the it from (50a) but the extraposed
subject has been expressed in the by-phrase.
(50) a. […] it struck Harry that Dumbledore might not have been quite truth-
ful. (HP1.157)
b. […] Harry was struck by the fact/idea that Dumbledore might not have
been quite truthful.
c. #[…] Harry was struck by it.
This is particularly interesting as Huddleston/Pullum (CamG 68) also mention

the relationship between subjects in active clauses and by-phrases in passive
||
318 “Content clause as internal complement” is prototypically a clausal object in CGEL’s ter-
minology.
319 The term by-agent phrase as chosen by CGEL (725) is not particularly felicitous for our
purposes as it is problematic to attribute agentivity to clausal subjects. Following Herbst/
Schüller (2008: 118), the neutral term by-phrase will be used instead.
198 | Extraposition
clauses, so there is an inconsistency between this correspondence and their

claim that it is the (only) subject in sentences such as (50a). This test is also an
argument against a discontinuous subject analysis since the two parts cannot
occur together in a by-phrase:
(50) d. *[…] Harry was struck by it the idea that Dumbledore might not have
been quite truthful.
13. Theme/topic
“The subject is typically the theme (or topic) of the clause” (CGEL 726). The
adverb typically suggests that there are exceptions, and indeed the extraposed
subject cannot be said to be the theme of the clause if we follow the definition
cited in Section 2.3.2; only non-extraposed clausal subjects act as theme. Quirk
et al. acknowledge this in a note to their paragraph on extraposition:
The it used in extraposition is called ‘anticipatory it’ because of its pronominal corre-
spondence to a later item. But informationally, this it is similar in effect to prop it (cf 6.17),
as in ‘It started to rain’ which likewise enables us to end the clause at a focal point. (CGEL
1392)
The question arises, however, whether in such sentences it alone can satisfacto-
rily be treated as the theme despite its apparent lack of semantic content.320
Here, Kaltenböck’s analysis, in which he treats the anticipatory it as sitting on a
gradient between prop it and referring it is interesting in that for him, all three
types have reference, the type of which he labels as follows:
– “’ambience’ (+ possible adverbial restriction)” for prop it,
– “state-of-affairs (clause)” for anticipatory it, and
– “’single’ entity/referent (NP)” for referring it (Kaltenböck 2004: 47)
So for some sentences, we can definitely see that it fulfils the theme/topic crite-
rion better than the extraposed subject does.
In the case of extraposition, the anticipatory it, as it is semantically practically
empty, could be regarded as an element that is given by default, similarly to
existential there to be discussed in Section 8.3. As for the extraposed subjects,
||
320 CGEL (349) states “that the pronoun is not quite void of meaning, since it arguably has
cataphoric reference (forward coreference) to a clause [...] in the later part of the same sen-
tence.”
the general tendency of focus and new information to coincide (CGEL 1361)
comes into play, but since it is a clause it is likely to contain both given and new
information. As we can see from the following short excerpt, the [that_CL] pre-
sents information that is more new than given.321
(51) Harry kept to his room, with his new owl for company. He had decided
to call her Hedwig, a name he had found in A History of Magic. His
school books were very interesting. He lay on his bed reading late into
the night, Hedwig swooping in and out of the open window as she
pleased. It was lucky that Aunt Petunia didn’t come in to vacuum an-
ymore, because Hedwig kept bringing back dead mice. (HP1.67)
Information structure will be discussed in more detail in Section 7.3.2.

15. Agentivity
As we have seen above, prototypical agentivity cannot apply to clauses, but if
we apply Dowty’s (1991) proto-roles (see Section 2.3.2 for a brief discussion), we
can say that the extraposed [that_CL] in (52) is more proto-agent-like than proto-
patient-like and the anticipatory it – since it fills no argument slot and is thus
assigned no semantic role – is not relevant to agentivity.
(52) It struck Harry as ominous that Hagrid thought a biting book would
come in useful, but he put Hagrid’s card up next to Ron’s and Hermi-
one’s, grinning more broadly than ever. (HP3.16)
7.1.3.3 Summary
The following table presents the findings from Section 7.1.3.2. It conveys a much
messier picture than the equivalent table in CamG (241) and thus needs further
discussion.
||
321 Huddleston/Pullum (CamG 68) distinguish between discourse-old and addressee-old
information, but in the quoted example there is no difference between the two as the addressee
(=the reader) will usually have read the book (=the discourse) so far and as the author does not
know what is known to the reader other than what was in the discourse (or what is shared
knowledge of the world in general, of course).
200 | Extraposition
Tab. 30: Summary of the criteria for subjecthood with extraposition
Criterion anticipatory it postponed discontinuous Notes

subject subject
category + – ?
position + – (+)
case N/A N/A N/A
agreement ? ? (+) conflicting evidence
inversion + – (+)
open interroga- – + –
tives
tags + + (+)
coordination (+) (+) + rare cases for it;
question whether
extraposed subject
is VP-internal
obligatoriness (+) + ?
uniqueness ? ? + depends on interpre-
tation of the other
criteria
reflexive pronouns + + +
passivization – + –
theme/topic ? – –
given information ? – ?
agentivity – (+) ? only in some mod-
els; not prototypical-
ly
In the light of such evidence it must be clear that any decision as to which ele-
ment(s) should be treated as subject has to remain arbitrary to some extent. It is
a matter of the researcher’s focus to which criterion he or she attributes most
weight. A purely numerical approach (counting the pluses and minuses in the
respective columns) is not feasible because some criteria may be subdivided or
merged. Therefore the list of criteria is not definite and needs discussion in or-
der to allow for a decision in favour of one of the approaches presented in Sec-
tion 7.1.3.1:
1. Both elements are subjects.

The main problem with an analysis that allows for two subjects in a clause is
that the syntactic model would have to be adapted accordingly, with a subject
slot behind the verb. However, the uniqueness constraint seems to be accepted
(sometimes only implicitly) by many researchers.322
2. Both elements form a discontinuous subject.
The major drawback of the analysis of the two elements as one discontinuous
subject is that the formal status of such an element is unclear. An interpretation
in which it is the head of the construction, as proposed by Eisenberg for German
(see Section 7.1.3.1 above), is semantically counter-intuitive. Criteria such as
position or inversion are difficult to apply due to the discontinuity. The main
advantages of a discontinuous subject approach are its uniqueness and the
possible coordination of VPs. But as long as the internal relations between the
different elements are not satisfyingly described and the disappearance of it in
non-extraposed constructions and answers to open interrogatives has not been
modelled, this proposal remains tentative. Even if we were to acknowledge a
discontinuous subject as in the model of Herbst/Schüller (2008), it is not clear
what form such an element should take as complement of a verb (particularly if
we want to generalize over the extraposed and the non-extraposed variants of
the complement).
3. The postponed subject is the only subject.
The main arguments for treating the postponed subject as the subject of the
whole sentence are of a semantic nature. It is relatively uncontroversial that it
realizes an argument of the verb in question, that it is the element of which
something is predicated, etc. In addition, the fact that the same element does
without doubt occupy the subject position in the non-extraposed variant makes
a strong case for its subject status. The strictly syntactic criteria, the most obvi-
ous of which is position, can, however, be regarded as arguments against such
an analysis.
||
322 This of course does not take coordination into account, which has to be considered inde-
pendently. One may, however, follow Huddleston/Pullum (CamG 239), who only allow coordi-
nation at the formal level and thus evade the problem. See, however, the discussion of prob-
lematic cases starting on page 51 above.
202 | Extraposition
4. Anticipatory it is the only subject.

As we have seen above, the case CamG makes for anticipatory it as the subject of
sentences which show extraposition is not as straightforward as claimed there.
Open interrogatives, passivization and agentivity are criteria against its subject
status, and some of the other arguments brought forward by CamG cannot stand
up to closer scrutiny. Nevertheless, at the level of syntax, anticipatory it makes
the most convincing subject out of all candidates. If we separate the levels of
syntactic structure and of verb valency as rigorously as suggested by Herbst/Roe
(1996),323 at least some of the criteria we have in our list above become question-
able: Agentivity, for instance, describes a semantic role that is dependent on a
particular verb, first of all at the semantic level. Only in a second step can this
term be used for the description of the corresponding verb complement at the
syntactic level.324 In a third step, which is a considerable abstraction, it is ob-
served that the verb complement assigned the agent(ive) role often occupies the
subject position in active declarative clauses.325 Thus while the criterion of agen-
tivity may help in the identification of the subject element in a clause, we have
to bear in mind that agentivity is essentially verb-related and is thus better suit-
ed to identifying an element in relation to the verb than at the level of syntactic
structure.326
Passivization does not provide a viable syntactic argument, either. If it were
a property of a syntactic category such as subject, there would be no need to
indicate it in a valency dictionary such as Herbst et al. (2004). The reason why
we need this information in a valency description of a verb is that it is verb-
specific, or, to be more precise, complement-specific. Thus we can only say that
a certain complement of a certain verb can occupy a postverbal position in ac-
tive sentences and a preverbal (=subject) position in passive sentences and that
some other complement may or may not occur as subject in active or as by-
phrase in passive sentences.
||
323 See Section 2.2.2 for a brief summary of their position.
324 This is of course a simplified account as the match between semantics and syntax is im-
perfect. See Helbig (1992), Herbst/Klotz (2002), Faulhaber (2011) for detailed accounts of the
problems that arise in this context.
325 It is often claimed that, as a general tendency, the most agent-like element in the active
clause becomes its subject (see for instance Goldberg 2006: 184ff or Herbst 2007: 27). See also
the discussion in Section 2.3.2.
326 It is also possible to assume semantic roles on both levels, as Herbst/Schüller do, whose
model distinguishes between verb-specific participant roles and more general clausal roles,
“which arise from sentence structure” (Herbst/Schüller 2008: 160).
A similar line of argument can be followed in the discussion of open inter-

rogatives: What is questioned is an element at the level of verb valency, because
the question contains the valency carrier and asks for a dependent element. It is
thus not surprising that anticipatory it, which has no complement status, can-
not be questioned. In fact, the situation is the same as for prop it in (53):
(53) It’s still raining in there. (HP7.200)

(54) It is essential that you understand this! (HP6.477)
Both its cannot sensibly be questioned precisely because they are not comple-
ments of the verb. In both cases, the it is just there for structural reasons, in
order to occupy the subject position of the clause. The main difference between
the two semantically empty forms is that in (53) the it is needed as a subject
because the verb does not license a complement whereas in (54), the comple-
ment licensed by the valency carrier is actually present in the sentence, only in
a different position. But still, the subject position is not taken, so we need some
sort of element there, which is it.327 This requirement for subjects in English
declarative clauses is a purely syntactic constraint, and if we accept this expla-
nation it automatically follows that we have to treat it as subject and thus posi-
tion (in canonical and in inverted clauses) as the most important criterion for
the distinction of the different subject candidates. This is in line with the posi-
tion of Matthews (1981) presented in Section 7.1.3.1.
If we treat it as subject, the question arises as to what the status of the post-
poned subject is. Here, a treatment comparable to that of other postverbal com-
plements will be proposed. If we were to describe the relationship between it
and the postponed subject, we would probably argue for an appositive relation
more than for a head-dependent relation as the one proposed by Eisenberg (see
Section 7.1.3.1). At the semantic/communicative level, anticipatory it works as a
cataphoric pronoun which indicates that the element that would be expected in
subject position actually will occur later in the sentence. It is, however, ques-
tionable whether it makes any sense at all to posit a syntactic relationship be-
tween the two, other than that one is subject because the other is not.
||
327 The reasons why the complement does not take the subject position are discussed in detail
in Section 7.3 below.
204 | Extraposition
7.2 Syntactic properties

7.2.1 Extraposed to which position?
While we have discussed the position of anticipatory it in detail above, we have

largely neglected the position of the postponed subject. While Quirk et al. (as
cited in Section 7.1.3.1) only vaguely state that it is moved to the end of the sen-
tence, Huddleston/Pullum are more precise in locating it “at the end of the ma-
trix clause, in what we are calling extraposed subject position” (CamG 1403) and
in stating in a footnote that adjuncts may follow it, “provided they too are rela-
tively heavy” (CamG 1403). In order to verify and refine this analysis, 1,000
sentences from a partially parsed version of the BNC (Schneider 2009) were
extracted that had it as subject and that later in the same sentence. This method
of looking for that as a word form was necessary because [that_CL]s were not
part of the parsing scheme used. Accordingly, more than half of the sentences
(557) did not show extraposition with a [that_CL]328 and 13 sentences were un-
clear, erroneous or contained more than one extraposed [that_CL] which would
have resulted in multiple classification. Of the remaining 430 sentences, the
vast majority (312) contained a [that_CL] as the only post-verbal element. 65
contained another element between the valency carrier (verb/noun/adjective)
and the [that_CL].329 The most important result is that no non-clausal elements
came after the [that_CL] in any of the sentences and that no complements (not
even clausal complements) of the valency carrier occurred in that position ei-
ther. There were 42 instances where the [that_CL] was not the last element in the
sentence, though, as it was followed either by a subordinate clause or by a co-
ordinated main clause. In 11 cases, it was impossible to decide whether the fol-
lowing clause was part of the [that_CL] or the superordinate clause. The key
facts are summarised in the following table:
||
328 The largest group within the “scrap” were 92 cleft sentences.
329 In 24 of the 65 sentences the intervening elements(s) were complements of the valency
carrier, in 32 cases there were adjuncts (most of them relatively short such as however, there-
fore, also, too, moreover), 9 are indeterminate between complement and adjunct (for a thor-
ough discussion of complement status see Somers 1984).
Syntactic properties | 205
Tab. 31: Position of extraposed [that_CL] subject
that-clause is percentage330
only element 73 %
final element preceded by sth. else 15 %
followed by another clause 10 %
(ambiguous cases) 3%
Our sample of extraposed [that_CL] subjects thus seems to confirm CamG’s posi-
tion as to where the extraposed subject occurs. We can add two more observa-
tions, which seem to apply to [that_CL] complements only:
1. No non-clausal adjuncts were found to follow the extraposed [that_CL],
whereas both clausal and non-clausal adjuncts preceded it.
2. No sentences were found in which the extraposed subject [that_CL] was
both preceded and followed by another element.331
Due to the nature of our sample we cannot say whether these are tendencies for
postverbal [that_CL]s in general, or whether this behaviour is specific to ex-
traposed subject [that_CL]s. [to_INF]s seem to be all right with a combination of
both elements, though. Compare:
(55) a. It was so great of him to let me sleep because I know he was tired too.
(mindaandsam.blogspot.com)
b. ?It was so great of him that he let me sleep because I know he was
tired too.332
||
330 Due to rounding, figures do not add up to 100 %.
331 Further research in the BNC yielded one example where the extraposition occurred in an
adverbial subordinate clause at the beginning of a sentence so that the extraposed [that_CL],
which is preceded by a [to_NP], is followed by the matrix clause:
Under Section 36 of the Criminal Justice Act 1988, where it appears to the Attorney General that
the sentencing of a person in the Crown Court has been unduly lenient he may refer the case to the
Court of Appeal, with leave, for the sentence to be reviewed. (EEC 319)
332 Even if we accept (55b) as a spoken/borderline case, it is less acceptable than (55a).
206 | Extraposition
7.2.2 [that_CL] with and without that
As we have seen above, content clauses333 in extraposed subject position can

occur with or without introductory that. While CGEL speaks of “deletable that”
(CGEL 1183), Erdmann (1987: 55) follows Jespersen in rejecting such a deletion
since both variants have always existed independently of one another and nei-
ther is based on the other. The present study will not rely on the concept of dele-
tion but will treat that as optional in such complements. The major reference
grammars treat the optionality of that as the default case, i.e. both variants are
usually allowed. Nonetheless, according to Greenbaum (1988: 95) the bare vari-
ant is marked compared to the variant with that. Kaltenböck (2004: 76–88) gives
a very detailed account according to the text types in the ICE-GB corpus and
according to matrix clause predicates. While the latter do not seem to cause
large differences in proportion between the two (see 2004: 81), the text type
seems to play a role with the highest proportion of that in instructional and
academic writing and the lowest proportion in private dialogue and reportage
(Kaltenböck 2004: 78).
CGEL (1049f) and CamG (951ff) present grammatical restrictions on the use
of the bare variant which are summarised below, insofar as they are relevant to
subjects.
1. ‘Gap’ is subject
The only construction in which that is obligatorily omitted is described by CGEL
as sentences with a “pushdown wh-element” (CGEL 1050) and by CamG as “un-
bounded dependency construction” (CamG 953) in which the “subject is real-
ised by a gap” (CamG 953). Both grammars do not specifically mention ex-
traposed subjects in this context, but the unacceptability of (56b) as opposed to
(56a) indicates that the rule applies to them as well.
(56) a. And who does it appear ___ will go home Thursday night? (reali-
tynewsonline.com)
b. *And who does it appear that ___ will go home Thursday night?
2. Pre-verbal position
All content clauses in pre-verbal position require the presence of that, and both
reference grammars agree that this is in order to avoid an interpretation of the
||
333 In this section we shall borrow CamG’s term content clause in order to avoid the clumsy
wording ‘[that_CL] with and without that’.
Syntactic properties | 207
subordinate clause as the main clause. Thus for non-extraposed subjects, that
can never be optional.
(57) a. That he was the most inspiring and best loved of all Hogwarts head-
masters cannot be in question. (HP7.24)
b. *He was the most inspiring and best loved of all Hogwarts headmas-
ters cannot be in question.
3. Clarification of adjunct position

If there is an adjunct right before the content clause as in (58b) or if the content
clause starts with an adjunct as in (58a), that cannot be omitted, as illustrated in
(58c):
(58) a. It worries me that, at the moment, the public feel let down by the court
system. (news.bbc.co.uk)
b. It worries me at the moment that the public feel let down by the court
system.
c. *It worries me at the moment the public feel let down by the court
system.
According to CGEL (1050), this is because without that it would be impossible to

determine whether the adjunct belongs to the matrix clause or the subordinate
clause. However, the restriction seems to hold even for cases in which an alter-
native interpretation is not possible. If we move the adjunct last time in (59a) to
the final position in the matrix clause, we get (59b), which is problematic. So
(59c) should only allow for one sensible interpretation, but it still remains dubi-
ous, although (59d) is perfectly all right.334
(59) a. It’s a pity that last time I missed it because I got up a little late. (li-
brary.thinkquest.org)
b. ?It’s a pity last time that I missed it because I got up a little late.
c. ?It’s a pity last time I missed it because I got up a little late.
d. It’s a pity I missed it because I got up a little late.
Thus, though CGEL correctly describes the facts, we have to disagree with their
argument.
||
334 Not all native speakers seem to have that restriction as one informant accepted (59b–c) as
well.
208 | Extraposition
4. Coordination
CGEL also mentions that that must be retained “to prevent a coordinated that-
clause from being misinterpreted as a coordinated main clause” (CGEL 1050).
This is not obligatory, though, as pointed out in CGEL (1043) and illustrated in
(60), which is ambiguous but acceptable in both readings.
(60) I must admit that I didn’t even know he was on trial, but it appears
that he was and he just got away with it. (healthcareblog.com)
5. Clause or long phrase intervening

CGEL also shows that “a clause or a long phrase” (CGEL 1050) intervening be-
tween the verb and the content clause leads to the retention of that. There is a
certain overlap between this factor and the clarification of the adjunct position
as outlined above, since said long phrase may well be an adjunct, as in the fol-
lowing example:
(61) It appeared to me in the Town Hall meeting last night that some
neighbors are concerned the plan is a way to provide additional park-
ing for the Nationals and encourage fans to park in the neighbor-
hoods. (tommywells.org)
But we find that the phenomenon has indeed to be treated as a separate factor
since non-adjunct elements may just as well trigger the obligatory presence of
that if they are heavy enough:
(62) a. So it seems pretty obvious to me he doesn’t want someone like his

mother. (associatedcontent.com)
b. So it seems pretty obvious to me that he doesn’t want someone like
his mother.
(63) a. So it seems pretty obvious to anybody who has followed his misfor-
tune that he doesn’t want someone like his mother.335
b. ?So it seems pretty obvious to anybody who has followed his misfor-
tune he doesn’t want someone like his mother.
||
335 This example was constructed in order exclude other possible factors of influence when
compared to (62a–b), and to make the point more obvious. It was formed on the example of the
following original sentence: It must be obvious to anybody who has followed his misfortune that
his guilty plea was a desperate attempt to obtain some prospect of an end to his nightmare.
(larvatusprodeo.wordpress.com)
Factors influencing extraposition | 209
The content clause may be preferred in canonical subject position, though, if

the element following the verb becomes too heavy compared to the content
clause itself (cf. Section 7.3.1 below).
7.3 Factors influencing extraposition

So far we have only dealt with questions of analysis, but we have ignored why
extraposition occurs in the first place. As there is, at least theoretically, a canon-
ical alternative to most sentences which show extraposition, we need to account
for this deviation from the default pattern. Various scholars have suggested a
wide range of factors that influence whether extraposition occurs or not, which
will be discussed in turn in the following subsections.
7.3.1 Weight/Processing336
The tendency of longer constituents to follow shorter ones is a well-established

fact in linguistics, and Behaghel (1909) is usually quoted as the first to observe
it (see also Wasow 1997: 348; Wasow 2002). Thus, for instance, it is not possible
to transform the following sentence into a non-extraposed version:
(64) a. It was plain that whatever ‘everyone’ was saying, she was not going to
believe it until Dumbledore told her it was true. (HP1.14)
b. *That whatever “everyone” was saying, she was not going to believe it
until Dumbledore told her it was true was plain.
However, less ‘heavy’ [that_CL] subjects can occur in canonical position with
plain:
(64) c. Mr Jafferjee said: “That this was a significant failure within the Mental
Health Care regime is plain. (newspapers)
Most authors refer to such elements using the concept of weight. Wasow (2002:
16ff) gives a brief overview of the different definitions of weight that have been
proposed, some of which can only sensibly be applied to an analysis within the
||
336 CamG (1405) treats weight and processing issues under the heading of pragmatics, which
is at least debatable since measurements of weight are usually some sort of syntactic meas-
urement; processing as a cognitive phenomenon also would require a very broad definition of
pragmatics in order to be subsumed under it.
210 | Extraposition
grammatical framework for which they were developed. The simplest measure
(and the one that is easiest to apply) is the number of words an element consists
of. Hawkins (1994: 74f) claims that counting words is sufficient for the practical
analysis of data, although his exact (theoretical) model uses a more elaborate
but highly theory-dependent measure of counting nodes in a constituent struc-
ture. Wasow (2002: 32ff) challenges Hawkins’ simplification and concludes
“that a single measure of weight may subsume what appear to be effects of both
length and grammatical complexity” (Wasow 2002: 40), which is probably re-
lated to the fact that early research on the matter337 focused exclusively on
grammatical complexity, thus treating subordinate clauses as heavier than
noun phrases of the same length. The reason behind this analysis was the ob-
servation that in some cases shorter complex elements (e.g. a noun phrase with
a short relative clause) lead to unacceptability if not in end-position whereas
longer not-so-complex elements (e.g. a noun phrase with a long prepositional
phrase as postmodifier) in the same position do not (Chomsky [1955] 1975: 477).
In generative transformational grammar, ease of processing was proposed as an
explanation of the observation that complexity seems to take precedence over
length, which is still in line with today’s positions (cf. for instance CamG
1405f).338 We can see from examples with multiple embedding that complexity
indeed seems to play a role:
(65) a. *That that he was angry was so obvious embarrassed her. (CamG
1406)
b. It embarrassed her that it was so obvious that he was angry. (CamG
1406)
In such an example, processing constraints will lead to restrictions on the ca-

nonical form. The reason is not, however, the complexity in the sense of the
number of nodes as such, which is much higher in the non-extraposed subject
of (66):339
||
337 Ross (1967: 56) for instance treats an NP as heavy if it dominates S, i.e. if there is an em-
bedded clause.
338 Szmrecsányi on the other hand presents evidence from experiments which suggests that
“researchers can feel safe in using the measure that is most economically to conduct, word
counts” (Szmrecsányi 2004: 1031).
339 The number of nodes is of course highly dependent on the syntactic model used, but it is
very unlikely that any model would lead to a higher number of nodes in (65a).
(66) That the other tobacco diseases which of late years have begun to
trouble the farmers in Rhodesia are due to an impoverished soil is
suggested by the appearance of eelworm in this crop. (popmerge)
CamG proposes that “[t]he sequence of two identical subordinators in [(65a)]

makes this basic version unacceptably difficult to process” (CamG 1406). This is
correct insofar as multiple embedding with a double that is not usually possible,
no matter where the element is placed:340
(67) a. ?When Johnson quit on Wednesday, the McCain headquarters issued a

statement saying that that he had been selected in the first place
raised “serious questions about Barack Obama’s judgment.”
The sentence becomes fully acceptable when there is the fact that instead of the
second that as in (67b), though:
(67) b. When Johnson quit on Wednesday, the McCain headquarters issued a

statement saying that the fact that he had been selected in the first
place raised “serious questions about Barack Obama’s judgment.”
(nytimes.com)
However, the same alteration does not lead to an acceptable sentence in the
case of (65a):
(65) c. *?That the fact that he was angry was so obvious embarrassed her.
Although (65c) is more acceptable than (65a) it is still far from being perfectly
acceptable. Thus the double subordinator that, which was proposed as the rea-
son for the unacceptability of (65a) cannot be the sole factor at work. The differ-
ence in acceptability between (67b) and (65c) confirms the position that subjects
in canonical position have to be less complex than extraposed subjects and
postverbal complements can be. It is not possible, though, to give a hard and
fast limit on the complexity of the subject. Karlsson’s (2007a) model of “con-
straints on multiple initial embedding of clauses” correctly predicts that (65a) is
not acceptable, but neither this paper nor his paper on multiple center-
embedding of clauses (Karlsson 2007b) can account for the unacceptability of
(65c), which contains a combination of initial and central embedding.341 One
||
340 See also, for instance, Rohdenburg (2003) for a discussion of horror aequi.
341 Initial embedding means that the subordinate clause occurs before any other element of
the superordinate clause; central embedding applies if some material of the superordinate
212 | Extraposition
possible reason might be that too many “pending” clauses, i.e. clauses the pred-
icate of which have not been read yet, lead to difficulties in processing and thus
to unacceptability. In the case of (65a) and (65c), we have three pending clauses
– the main clause, the first that-clause and the second that-clause – and all
three predicates immediately follow one another. So unclear boundaries at the
end of the subordinate clauses may also be responsible for the unacceptability.
Generally, multiple embedding seems to be much less problematic if non-
finite clauses are involved:
(68) a. The deep trouble for Mr Gantt is that many black Democrats agree,
however reluctantly, that the voters of North Carolina are simply not
ready to vote for a black man, and that to nominate one would merely
allow Mr Helms to extend his 24-year lease on the state’s Senate seat.
(newsmerge)
b. To try to outlaw something that’s widely seen as acceptable behaviour
brings the law itself into disrepute. (britnews)
The second example also shows that length and complexity do not necessarily
trigger extraposition if other factors, such as information packaging, favour the
non-extraposed variant.342
7.3.2 Information packaging
In English (and many other languages) the focus is usually at or towards the
end of the sentence. So one function of extraposition with anticipatory it is that
it “enables us to end the clause at a focal point” (CGEL 1392). Usually, focal
information is also the new piece of information in a sentence. And, since often
new information needs more words than given information, which can be repre-
sented through pronouns and other pro-forms, the locus of new and focal in-
formation often coincides with the syntactically heavier constituents discussed
in the section before.343
||
clause is to the left and to the right of the subordinate clause; accordingly final embedding
refers to subordinate clauses in final position within the superordinate.
342 CamG also notes that while “[i]n cases where both orderings are permissible, the weight
factor may well result in the extraposed version being preferred” the “acceptability of the basic
version certainly does not require that the content clause be fairly short” (CamG 1405).
343 See also the discussion of criteria 13 and 14 in Section 7.1.3.2
For CamG, extraposition of subjects is the unmarked case when the subject
is a [that_CL], a [wh_CL] or a [to_INF].344 Thus, two “pragmatic constraints relat-
ing to familiarity status” (CamG 1404) of the non-extraposed variant apply.
The first is that non-extraposed subjects are always treated as background
knowledge (CamG 1404f). This does not mean that it has to be discourse-old,
“all that is necessary is that the speaker be able to treat the information as fa-
miliar to the addressee” (CamG 1404), which is in line with Miller’s (2001) anal-
ysis. The following example, which is from the article on St. Basil the Great in
the Catholic Encyclopedia of 1907, is an extreme case of a long non-extraposed
subject:
(69) That he was in communion with the Western bishops and that he
wrote repeatedly to Rome asking that steps be taken to assist the East-
ern Church in her struggle with schismatics and heretics is undoubt-
ed; but the disappointing result of his appeals drew from him certain
words which require explanation. (popmerge)
It is hard to tell whether the writer would really believe the initial coordinated
[that_CL] complements to be shared background knowledge, although the use
of undoubted points in that direction, but according to CamG (1405), discourse-
new information that “is not being asserted, but rather is being treated as back-
ground knowledge” can occur in this position, too. No clear criteria as to what
counts as an assertion are given. For Miller it is not necessary for the infor-
mation to be discourse old as long as it is “directly inferrable” (2001: 683),
which is of course also questionable in example (69).
The second constraint is that “[v]ery often a non-extraposed content clause
represents presupposed information” (CamG 1405) as in the following example:
(70) That the skin survives these daily torments is a remarkable tribute to
its toughness. (CamG 1404)
The problem is that presupposition is neither a necessary nor a sufficient crite-

rion345 for non-extraposition, so CamG’s ‘constraint’ is more of a tendency.
||
344 Similarly CGEL: “But it is worth emphasizing that for clausal subjects (though cf 18.34
[which restricts V-ing extraposition]) the postponed position is more usual than the canonical
position before the verb (cf 10.26)” (CGEL 1392).
345 The optional extraposition noted for factive predicates (Kiparsky/Kiparsky 1970: 145;
CamG 1405) shows that presupposition cannot be tied to non-extraposed clausal subjects, for
instance.
214 | Extraposition
Finally, there is a further information-structural tendency discussed else-

where in CamG: Given that [V-ing] clauses usually occur in canonical subject
position whereas [to_INF] clauses usually occur in extraposed position, CamG
claims that “[t]o a significant extent, then, the difference between infinitival
and gerund-participial is a matter of information packaging” (CamG 1254). Mair
argues that such a difference between the two can even be maintained if both
are extraposed:
The gerundial construction, because of its affinity to noun-phrase tags and free -ing-
clauses, makes it easier to “split” the focus of emphasis in an utterance. By extraposing
the infinitival subject clause the sentence
(37a)To stay in an American hotel can be extremely expensive.
can be reordered to yield:
(37b) It can be extremely expensive to stay in an American hotel.
Separating an extraposed infinitival subject clause from its matrix by a distinct intona-
tional break is unusual, so that sentences such as (37b) often have one informational fo-
cus only (“hotel” in the unmarked case). An extraposed gerundial subject, by contrast, is
very easy to separate from its matrix. A pause between the matrix and the extraposed sub-
ject, and heavy stress on both “expensive” and “hotel” would not be unusual at all in:
(37c) It can be extremely expensive – staying in an American hotel.
(Mair 1988: 61)
However, Mair also acknowledges that such cases are comparatively rare in his
data.
The most comprehensive study on the information structure of extraposi-
tion is Kaltenböck’s (2004) functional account in which he distinguishes “two
basic types of it-extraposition: Given Complement Extraposition and New-
Complement Extraposition” (2004: 203). While the latter is more frequent
(71.5 % in Kaltenböck’s collection), the proportion varies considerably with text
type. See Kaltenböck (2004: ch. 5.1) for the exact details.
To sum up, we can state that there are no hard and fast rules as to how in-
formation structure influences the choice of the canonical or extraposed vari-
ants, but information structure is one of several factors playing a role in the
selection of one option over the other.
7.3.3 Factivity
A further factor relevant to extraposition is described by Kiparsky/Kiparsky

(1970) in their article “Fact”, where they argue that predicates can be divided
into two groups, so-called factive and non-factive ones. For our purposes, this
distinction is relevant since “[f]or the verbs in the factive group, extraposition is
optional, whereas it is obligatory for the verbs in the non-factive group”

(Kiparsky/Kiparsky 1970: 145).346 For sentential subjects they list the following
verbal predicates as non-factive: seems, appears, happens, chances, turns out.
We can confirm that chances and happens never occur with a clausal subject in
canonical position in the parsed corpora, but the situation is more difficult for
the other three. The case of appears (and the largely parallel seems) has been
discussed in detail in Section 7.1.2 where it became obvious that non-extraposed
variants are possible with these verbs if certain other elements are present in the
clause (and possibly determine the range of permissible subjects). For turns out,
a similar example could be found:
(71) As G K Chesterton said of Gnosticism, ‘That Jones shall worship the

god within him turns out ultimately to mean that Jones shall worship
Jones.’ (newsmerge)
Nonetheless the observation that sentences of the following type do not have a
non-extraposed variant is correct:
(72) It turns out that there are generally not enough dislocations originally
present in most crystals to account for the very extensive slip which
can take place in a ductile material. (CEG 456)
However, the matter becomes more complicated if modality and [to_INF] com-
plements come into play.347 Whether the canonical form is allowed seems to also
depend on the interpretation of the subject as a fact, as can be seen in the fol-
lowing examples. In (73a) the extraposed subject does not receive a factive in-
terpretation due to the modal verb would:
(73) a. It would be so great of him to let me sleep because I know he is really

tired, too.
If we change the sentence to past tense, however, the extraposed subject does
receive a factive interpretation:
||
346 Kiparsky/Kiparsky also list adjectives as non-factive predicates, but since the obligatory
extraposition explicitly applies only to verbal non-factive predicates, they can be largely ig-
nored here. See Herbst (1983: 221ff) for a discussion of adjective valency and factivity.
347 It was noted by Kiparsky/Kiparsky that for some speakers “many of the syntactic and
semantic distinctions we bring up do not exist at all” (Kiparsky/Kiparsky 1970: 147), so general-
izations over multiple users of the language may prove difficult.
216 | Extraposition
(73) b. It was so great of him to let me sleep because I know he was really
tired, too. (mindaandsam.blogspot.com)
If we look at the same pair in the (less likely) non-extraposed variant, the first
one works and the subject does not receive a factive interpretation:
(73) c. To let me sleep would be so great of him because I know he is really

tired, too.
In the second version, however, there seems to be a clash between the subject
and the past tense verb, at least for some native speakers:348
(73) d. ?To let me sleep was so great of him because I know he was really
tired, too.
Our hypothesis here is that the [to_INF] receives a non-factual interpretation if it

is at the beginning of the clause, which then results in the clash that renders
(73d) less acceptable if a predicate that requires a factual subject follows. The
hypothesis is backed by the fact that we can replace the [to_INF] with a [V-ing]
to form the perfectly acceptable (73e):
(73) e. Letting me sleep was so great of him because I know he was really
tired, too.
This is in line with the results of the case study on non-extraposed [to_INF]
subjects and modality in Section 4.2, where we were able to observe a tendency
of such subjects to be associated with epistemic modality. However, to state that
the semantics of a (non-extraposed) [to_INF] is non-factive and of a [V-ing] is
factive is not right, as noted by Berndt, who rejects a general factive interpreta-
tion of [V-ing] elements since he gives examples which “illustrate the possibility
of putting one and the same gerundial construction to various uses and demon-
strate, in our opinion, the complete untenableness of attempts to ascribe some
kind of ‘typical’ meaning to a particular construction type of gerundive nomi-
nals” (Berndt 1991: 49).349 Thus the observation made here must again be re-
garded as a tendency but not a hard and fast rule.
||
348 One native speaker informant rejected both (73c) and (73d).
349 Mair argues, in a similar vein, that “the alleged ‘factivity’ of the gerund construction may
be nothing more than an incidental result of the fact that the gerund is more noun-like than
both infinitives and that-clauses and hence less likely to be extraposed. And, as is well known,
a subject in topic position tends to be presupposed as given in the unmarked case” (Mair 1988:
60). However, it was argued here that the [to_INF] in canonical position is not treated as factive
We thus have to regard factivity as one of several factors involved in the de-
cision as to which complement can be extraposed or not – only the obligatory
extraposition with the five factive predicates listed above seems to hold general-
ly.
7.3.4 Register
It has been suggested that there is a register distinction guiding the uses of ex-
traposition and non-extraposition. For instance, Collins, on the basis of a lim-
ited dataset of Australian English, finds that “[t]he pressure to extrapose would
seem to be at its strongest at the speech end of the speech - writing continuum
and at the informality end of the formality - informality continuum” (1994: 14f).
However, given that – as Kaltenböck (2004: 23) points out – only 7 instances of
non-extraposition were found in the spoken data, all of which were in the Han-
sard transcripts, the predictive power of Collins’ figures is limited. Kaltenböck
himself used a larger sample, i.e. the entire British component of the Interna-
tional Corpus of English (ICE-GB), to obtain more reliable but less clear-cut re-
sults as summarized by the following table:
Tab. 32: Frequency of canonical and extraposed variants in spoken and written texts (250 each)
from Kaltenböck (2004: 132)
canonical extraposed
n % n %
Spoken 79 9.8 % 730 90.2 %

Written 138 12.4 % 971 87.6 %
Total 217 11.3 % 1701 88.7 %
In fact, it could be argued that Collins made his statement on a wrong assump-
tion. He observes: “65 % of non-extraposed sentences occurred in the written
data, and 35 % in the spoken” (1994: 14). This is in line with Kaltenböck’s fig-
ures, where roughly 64 % of non-extraposed sentences occurred in the written
texts. However, as the data by Kaltenböck shows, the number of clausal sub-
||
and thus has to be extraposed if it should be interpreted as factive, which is not in line with
Mair’s statement.
218 | Extraposition
jects in total is much lower in the spoken data than in the written data, so hav-
ing a higher proportion from the written mode almost follows automatically and
does not necessarily mean that the spoken data favours extraposition. Still, as
Kaltenböck’s data suggest, there seems to be a stronger preference for extraposi-
tion in the spoken data, a fact that he explains by “the increased processing
effort associated with clausal subjects” (Kaltenböck 2004: 133).
It is important to note, however, that both Collins and Kaltenböck include
obligatory extraposition (see discussion in Section 7.1.2), so that for a substan-
tial portion of their extraposed sentences there is no non-extraposed variant
available, so the numbers cannot necessarily be read as proportions in which
the speaker opted for one or the other of two alternatives. Also, if the proportion
of obligatory extraposition differs between the two subcorpora, this may skew
the results even further.
One more mode-related feature addressed by Kaltenböck is the overall pro-
portion of extraposed [that_CL] and [to_INF] subjects. While in Erdmann’s
(1987) study, which was based on a written corpus, [to_INF] extraposed subjects
were the most frequent ones, they only come second after the [that_CL] subjects
in Kaltenböck’s (2004) study, which is based on 50 % spoken material. Kal-
tenböck gives the following reason:
A closer look at the to-infinitives in our corpus reveals a striking imbalance of distribution
between the spoken and the written mode: unlike extraposed that-clauses, which are fair-
ly evenly distributed over both modes with only a slight preference for written texts [cross-
reference omitted], to-infinitives occur much more frequently in writing (405 vs. 260 in-
stances; = 60.9% vs. 39.1%); hence Erdmann’s unusually high number of to-infinitives.
(Kaltenböck 2004: 92)
As for the formal vs. informal divide, Kaltenböck (2004: 133–135) also gives very
detailed numbers from ICE-GB that confirm Collins’ tendencies cited above as
he observes “a gradual increase of non-extraposition from the spoken or more
informal categories to the more formal written ones” (Kaltenböck 2004: 133).
Zhang (2015) claims that academic writing is particular likely to contain ex-
traposed subjects, but the differences she presents are not all statistically signif-
icant and the more detailed account given by Kaltenböck does not support her
claim.
7.3.5 Type of complement
The type of the complement itself is another factor responsible for the choice of
an extraposed over a non-extraposed variant. Erdmann (1987) shows how the
different realisations of subjects have different probabilities of occurring in

extraposed position; the overall results of his corpus study are summarised in
the following table:350
Tab. 33: Proportion of extraposition by complement type, based on Erdmann (1987: 41); figures
not exact
clause type canonical extraposed
[that_CL] 10 % 90 %
[to_INF] 12.5 % 87.5 %
[for_ N_to_INF] 9.5 % 90.5 %
[V-ing] 50 % 50 %
It looks as if only [V-ing] shows a significantly different pattern from the other
three types distinguished by Erdmann. His proportion for extraposed [V-ing]
clauses is probably too high, though: Mair (1988), who worked on 445,000
words of spoken and 430,000 words of written English from the Survey of Eng-
lish Usage, found that in spoken language 45 % of [V-ing] clauses were ex-
traposed and in written language 30 %. The reason for the discrepancy may be
that Erdmann follows Jespersen’s broad definition of extraposition and thus
includes instances of dislocation without anticipatory it as well (see Erdmann
1987: 34).
A larger corpus-based study, viz. that of Kaltenböck (2004), gives a detailed
account based on ICE-GB, summarized in the following table:
Tab. 34: Frequency of non-extraposition compared with subject it-extraposition; figures from
Kaltenböck (2004: 152), who also includes other types of complements
non-extraposition it-extraposition
n % n %
[that_CL] 12 1.6 % 731 98.4 %

[to_INF] 34 4.9 % 665 95.1 %
||
350 For better readability Erdmann’s factors (“...9 times more frequent than...”) were convert-
ed into percentages and rounded to the nearest 0.5 %, which leads to the undesired effect of
apparently higher precision than actually backed by the data.
220 | Extraposition
non-extraposition it-extraposition
n % n %
[for_NP_to_INF] 2 1.8 % 107 98.2 %

[V-ing] 128 72.7 % 48 27.3 %
Total 176 10.2 % 1551 89.8 %
Furthermore, as shown above, there are complements that never occur as sub-
jects in canonical position but do occur in a structure that looks like obligatory
extraposition. These include when-clauses as well as [if_CL], [as_if_CL],
[as_though_CL] and [like_CL] complements. It is likely that there is a cline be-
tween extraposition and impersonal constructions and that all these are some-
where on that cline between the extreme positions.
7.3.6 Type of valency carrier
If we include the type of valency carrier in our table of clausal subjects, the
picture becomes more complex:351
Tab. 35: Proportion of extraposition by complement type and valency carrier, based on Erd-
mann (1987: 41, 92, 94, 101–103); figures not exact
clause type type of valency carrier canonical extraposed
[to_INF] verb 28.5 % 71.5 %

adjective 6% 94 %
noun 18 % 82 %
[for_NP_to_INF] verb 50 % 50 %
adjective 4% 96 %
noun 18 % 82 %
[V-ing] verb 91 % 9%
adjective 29 % 71 %
noun 44 % 56 %
||
351 Erdmann makes no statement about [that_CL] complements.
Erdmann’s figures are sufficient to show that the form of the complement and
the type of valency carrier both play a role in determining whether extraposition
takes place or not. The findings are generally in line with the reference gram-
mars’ statements as to the preference of [to_INF] subjects to be extraposed. The
picture for [V-ing] is in line with Mair’s statement that “[o]ne of the factors most
likely to prevent extraposition is the presence of a verbal (rather than a nominal
or adjectival) matrix predicate” (Mair 1988: 55). The more detailed analysis by
Kaltenböck presented below relies on a larger corpus basis. By and large it
seems to confirm Erdmann’s figures. The data on [for_NP_to_INF] is too sparse
to base any claim on it. However, it does not seem to confirm Mair’s position on
[V-ing] with a nominal predicate, which seems to be quite rare, too.
Tab. 36: Proportion of extraposition by complement type and valency carrier, based on Kal-
tenböck (2004: 152f)
clause type type of valency carrier canonical extraposed

n % n %
[(that)_CL] verb 3 0,9 % 343 99,1 %

adjective 6 2,0 % 293 98,0 %
noun 2 2,4 % 81 97,6 %
[to_INF] verb 16 21,1 % 60 78,9 %
adjective 11 2,1 % 512 97,9 %
noun 7 8,5 % 75 91,5 %
[for_NP_to_INF] verb 0 0,0 % 5 100,0 %
adjective 0 0,0 % 86 100,0 %
noun 1 6,3 % 15 93,8 %
[V-ing] verb 55 93,2 % 4 6,8 %
adjective 31 43,7 % 40 56,3 %
noun 35 89,7 % 4 10,3 %
7.3.7 Valency carrier
Since the VDE lists extraposition properties as optional or obligatory, it was

possible to compile a list of all complements that are listed as obligatorily ex-
traposed in the active clause with their respective valency carrier:
222 | Extraposition
Tab. 37: Obligatory extraposition in active clauses in the VDE; for lexemes with multiple lexical
units, the lexical unit in the VDE/Patternbank is given in parentheses
valency complement comment

carrier
amuse(A) [wh-CL]A:it see discussion below

appear(B) [(that)-CL]A:it sort of copula; discussed in Section 7.1.2
concern(A) [that-CL]A:it counter-example
do(alpha) [to-INF]A:it counter-example
fall(E) [to-INF]A:it
follow(B) [that-CL]A:it obligatoriness of extraposition depends on pattern (in
VDE)
grieve(α) [to-INF]A:it counter-example
grieve(α) [that-CL]A:it
happen(B) [that-CL]A:it
hit(E) [that-CL]A:it only dubious counter-examples
look(C) [as if-CL]A:it complement can never be in canonical subject position
look(C) [as though-CL]A:it complement can never be in canonical subject position
look(C) [like-CL]A:it complement can never be in canonical subject position
matter() [about N]A:it
occur(A) [that-CL]A:it
occur(B) [that-CL]A:it obligatoriness of extraposition depends on pattern
owe(B) [to-INF]A:it possibly not a subject; counter-example
pay(α) [to-INF]A:it entry messy -> influence of pattern/other complements
remain() [it + pattern of II]A:it problematic counter-examples (only in coordination)
remain() [to-INF]A:it non-extraposed sentence only with tough movement
seem() [Q/S]A:it complement can never be in canonical subject position
seem() [that-CL]A:it sort of copula; discussed in Section 7.1.2
seem() [as if-CL]A:it complement can never be in canonical subject position
seem() [as though-CL]A:it complement can never be in canonical subject position
seem() [like-CL]A:it complement can never be in canonical subject position
seem() [so/not/otherwise]A:it complement can never be in canonical subject position
sound(B) [to-INF]A:it problem with pattern of X
sound(B) [as if-CL]A:it complement can never be in canonical subject position
sound(B) [as though-CL]A:it complement can never be in canonical subject position
sound(B) [like-CL]A:it complement can never be in canonical subject position
surprise(B) [if-CL]A:it complement can never be in canonical subject position
valency complement comment

carrier
take(γ) [to-INF]A:it counter-example

tend(B) [that-CL]A:it counter-example
touch(B) [to-INF]A:it only one highly dubious counter-example
wash(C) [to-INF]A:it counter-example
The table was then verified with the help of the parsed corpora presented in
Section 3.2.2 in order to find possible counter-examples. So, for instance, the
[that_CL] with concern or the [to_INF] with wash can occur in the canonical
position, even if they do so relatively rarely:
(74) That United were denied the chance to take the title in front of their
supporters tonight will not have concerned Ferguson after Villa’s 1-0
defeat. (newsmerge)
(75) A former chief risk officer at one of Britain’s biggest banks says that
Northern Rock’s operating model was very risky: “To say that nobody
could have envisaged what happened doesn’t wash at all.” (newspa-
pers)
Some counter-examples are dubious, others are problematic in that the verb
only occurs in coordination so that the structure may be influenced by the other
valency carrier in the coordinated structure:
(76) a. To champion the sovereignty of weakness was - and remains - a pro-

found challenge to the human agenda. (newsmerge)
b. To take the country into not one but two recessions in which millions
lost their jobs was unforgivable and remains so. (newspapers)
So for remain with a [to_INF] subject, it would be impossible to argue either for
or against obligatory extraposition on the basis of the data.
The complements that can never be in canonical subject position were al-
ready discussed above and need not be discussed here. For amuse, the [wh_CL]
class has to be divided up into when-clauses, which fall into the aforementioned
category, and others which – while they are not attested in the corpus – may
still be acceptable:
224 | Extraposition
(77) Where the King lost his crown amused me.352
There are, however, a few good examples for which no counter-examples were
found. Compare for instance:
(78) a. It fell upon defeated Germany to take full responsibility for the incom-
ing Germans. (VDE 299)
b. ?To take full responsibility for the incoming Germans fell upon de-
feated Germany.
(79) a. It grieved me that I had added to the sorrows she already had to bear.
(VDE 361)
b. ?That I had added to the sorrows she already had to bear grieved me.
As mentioned above, matter is the only verb in the VDE that seems to allow an
extraposed [about_NP] subject which cannot occur in non-extraposed position:
(80) It doesn’t matter about the bed. (VDE 526)
This is, however, a borderline case in that the extraposed subject status is more
than questionable (i.e. one may rather want to analyse the structure as an im-
personal construction) and thus our discussion should not rely on such exam-
ples, even though there is the occasional prepositional subject as mentioned in
Section 2.3.2.
There are also verbs that seem to resists extraposition of their clausal sub-
ject altogether. The VDE gives for instance convince and persuade and the tests
carried out with native speakers and reported in Appendices 3 and 4 confirm
this finding.353 One can only speculate as to the reason for this restriction, but it
may be due to a danger of confusion with postverbal clausal elements in the
case of a divalent pattern and due to too complex intervening elements in the
case of a trivalent pattern. Looking at the VDE, we can observe that the majority
of verbs actually only allows for non-extraposed clausal subjects in the active
clause: Less than 30 % of all [that_CL] active clause subjects are listed with
||
352 This example was made up and accepted by two out of three native speaker informants.
See Appendix 8.
353 There is, however, one example of an interrogative (which leads to obligatory extraposi-
tion) with convince in the parsed corpora where the extraposed element is an [if_CL]: But would
it convince Tube users that we were fully paid-up members of the decadent west if we wore our
work passes on our jackets, or carried a copy of Pride and Prejudice, or played the new Foo Fight-
ers album very loudly on our iPods? (britnews)
optional or obligatory extraposition; this does of course not say anything about
token frequency, which may just as well be the opposite, given that frequent
verbs such as seem show obligatory extraposition.
If we return to the table presented at the beginning of this chapter, we can
observe that many of the restrictions on extraposition identified there are per-
fectly valid. So, to pick out two random verbs, commit seems to resist extraposi-
tion of the [to_INF]:
(81) a. To blame the lexicographers for recording common usage commits

the irrational and primitive error of shooting the messenger. (news-
merge)
b. ?It commits a terrible error to blame the lexicographers for recording
common usage.
Similarly concentrate:
(82) a. The problem is that there are 75 ridings a year and to give a wider
berth would concentrate our low flying over other parts of the coun-
tryside to the detriment of the inhabitants there. (HHV 16197)
b. ?It would concentrate our low flying over other parts of the country-
side to give a wider berth.
Given the abundant evidence from the VDE on this issue, further systematic
studies are not necessary to claim that extraposition in the active clause is high-
ly dependent on the valency carrier.354
In the passive voice the situation is different. For [that_CL] subjects, Erd-
mann remarks that passive verb forms are substantially more frequent than
active ones in the it-matrix clause and can be regarded as the default for ex-
traposed structures (Erdmann 1987: 70). For [to_INF] subjects, on the other
hand, he finds that passive verb forms are not frequent in the matrix clause
(Erdmann 1987: 89). We need not carry out a systematic here study to show that
item-specific restrictions on extraposition are at work in the passive, too, since
the data presented in Section 5 indicates that permit allows a non-extraposed
[to_INF] in the passive whereas for other verbs, we can confirm CamG’s findings
that “infinitivals are restricted to a few catenative verbs (e.g. decide, desire,
hope, prefer), and then only in extraposed position” (CamG 1435).
||
354 Although we have only looked at verbs here, data presented in Section 6.3 such as the
difference between extraposed and non-extraposed [V-ing] with duty seems to suggest that the
situation might be similar for other valency carriers.
226 | Extraposition
7.3.8 Other complements/valency pattern
Some of the restrictions listed in the table in the previous section are not re-
strictions imposed by the valency carrier as such but restrictions that exist only
when the valency carrier is used in a certain pattern.355 Thus for instance occur
needs extraposition of the [that_CL] in the monovalent pattern but not in the
divalent pattern:
(83) a. It frequently occurs that goods have to be returned to suppliers for

various reasons, e.g. damaged or defective goods. (EA9 1728)
b. ?That goods have to be returned to suppliers for various reasons, e.g.
damaged or defective goods occurs frequently.
c. It did not occur to him that he might also have been frightened. (CEC
1375)
d. That it could help the client to better manage future projects did not
occur to them. (newsmerge)
According to the VDE, pay and follow show the same behaviour, thus sentences
(84a–c) are acceptable whereas (84d) is not.356
(84) a. It follows from this interpretation that the difference between religion
and morality is reduced. (VDE 322)
b. That the difference between religion and morality is reduced follows
from this interpretation.
c. […] it follows that the BBC must be for the government in this crisis.
(VDE 322)
d. *That the BBC must be for the government in this crisis follows.
There are more cases in the VDE which are not listed in the table above357 but
which can be found with similar restrictions, such as harm with a [to_INF] sub-
ject:
(85) a. It shouldn’t harm to point this out. (VDE 375)

b. ?To point this out shouldn’t harm.
||
355 In some such cases one could also argue for different lexical units of the verbs in the
different patterns and accordingly for different valency carriers.
356 This is in line with Erdmann (1987: 40).
357 The reason for these items not being listed in the table is that the VDE only differentiates
between them at the pattern level but not at the complement level in the complement block
and that the table was created on the basis of the complement block.
c. Yet to let him off would harm the rule of law. (newspapers)
d. Yet it would harm the rule of law to let him off.
Furthermore, there are cases where extraposition is not possible if certain other
complements are present. According to the VDE, attract allows extraposition of
[that_CL] and [to_INF] subjects in the divalent pattern but not in the trivalent
ones:
Fig. 22: Complement block for attract from the VDE (58)
Corpus research seems to confirm this treatment since for instance the non-
extraposed [to_INF] occurs in both divalent and trivalent patterns as in (86a–b),
but the extraposed variant was only found in the divalent pattern as in (86c).
(86) a. But to do so could attract severe penalties such as deduction of points

and, more seriously, a ban from European competitions. (newspapers)
b. Labour sources dismissed the claim, pointing out that to take such
drastic action would only create martyrs and might even attract more
MPs to the rebel cause. (newspapers)
c. As I thought it might attract suspicion to walk the same way again, I
looked at the shops in Tottenham Lane instead. (fiction)
Similar but even more complex is the case of frighten, where extraposition is
possible in one trivalent pattern but not so much in others:
228 | Extraposition
Fig. 23: Complement block for frighten from the VDE (334)
The native speakers interviewed on the topic confirmed the VDE’s analysis:
(87) a. That he had escaped from prison frightened me to death.

b. It frightened me to death that he had escaped from prison.
c. That he had escaped from prison frightened me into staying in our
flat.
d. ?It frightened me into staying in our flat that he had escaped from
prison.
7.4 Case study: tough movement

In some sentences with extraposition, it is not unproblematic to identify the
extraposed subject, as there are two elements which could replace it in canoni-
cal subject position. Thus based on (88a) both to follow this route (as in (88b))
and this route (as in the corpus example (88c)) can occur in canonical subject
position:
(88) a. It is tough to follow this route.

b. To follow this route is tough.
c. In bad weather even this route is tough to follow. (CMD 254)
The [NP] this route in (88c) can be analysed as a complement of follow since it
fills a valency slot of that verb as in (88a) and (88b). Such an analysis was pro-
posed for instance by Lees (1960: 216–218), who showed that the verb’s selec-
tion restrictions apply to the subject of sentences such as (88c). It was taken up
in the generative transformational literature (e.g. Rosenbaum 1967, Postal 1971),
where the phenomenon received its name ‘tough movement’ because it was
analysed to involve a movement transformation and occurs chiefly with adjec-
Case study: tough movement | 229
tives such as tough as in the example given above.358 As Oehrle noted, “[o]n the
classic analysis, all three sentences share a common underlying structure”
(Oehrle 1979: 583) with different rules that operate on the structure underlying
(88b) in order to yield the structures presented in (88a) and (88c). However, the
classic analysis is not accepted by all researchers in the generative tradition.
Oehrle (1979: 585f), for instance, claims that tough to follow in (88c) above must
be a constituent but tough to follow this route in (88a) is not a constituent, so he
goes on to propose two distinct lexical structures for adjectives such as tough,
one responsible for (88a–b) and the other for (88c) (Oehrle 1979: 591).
CGEL discusses examples such as (88c) without recourse to derivative
mechanisms simply by positing that “[t]here is an analogous construction in
which the adjective is complement359 to an infinitive clause acting as (ex-
traposed) subject” (CGEL 1229). The authors do, however, state that “the subject
of the sentence is identified with the unexpressed object of the infinitive clause”
(CGEL 1229), so the subject’s relationship to the verb is expressed. They also
note that generally “there is no semantic implication between” (CGEL 1229)
sentences (89a–b) below although with some adjectives, such an entailment
relation exists, as in (90a) which implies (90b).
(89) a. The bread was hard to bake. (CGEL 1229)

b. The bread was hard. (CGEL 1229)
(90) a. Jenny is nice to know. (CGEL 1229)

b. Jenny is nice. (CGEL 1229)
CamG treats the phenomenon in the larger context of what they call hollow
clauses, i.e. non-finite clauses “in which a non-subject NP is missing” (CamG
65). This category includes, besides the [to_INF] type we have seen so far and
some others that are of no relevance here, [V-ing] clauses as in the following
example:
(91) This idea is worth giving some thought to. (CamG 65)
||
358 Tough movement is a shorthand term for what in the generative theory is a process of
object-to-subject raising. The term raising basically covers all cases in which an argument that
is semantically part of a subordinate clause is realised as a constituent in the superordinate
clause. Depending on the version of the framework, there is a transformational relationship
between the non-raised deep structure and a raised surface structure (standard theory, mini-
malism) or not (GB). Osborne (2007) uses the term rising to model such structures in a depend-
ency framework.
359 CGEL’s term complement corresponds to predicative element in the present study.
230 | Extraposition
However, since these “are licensed as complement to the adjectives worth and
worthwhile, and to the preposition for with a purpose sense” (CamG 1246) only,
they need not be discussed further here and are just another indicator of the
item-specific character of complementation with regard to subjects and related
constructions.
CamG’s analysis is noteworthy insofar as it rejects a raising analysis for sen-
tences such as (88a) above. The authors provide syntactic tests, such as the non-
acceptability of existentials and clefting with such structures, which, they claim
on the basis of their acceptability with other raising structures such as the one
with seem, should be allowed if the subject really is a raised element from the
subordinate [to_INF] clause (CamG 1247f).360 They also present the following
pair of sentences and claim that if raising were at work, the acceptability of
(92a) would (wrongly) predict the acceptability of (92b).
(92) a. It has been a pleasure to listen to someone with so much enthusiasm.

(CamG 1248)
b. ?Someone with so much enthusiasm has been a pleasure to listen to
__. (CamG 1248)
The issue is to some extent theory-internal and there may actually be other fac-
tors at work (see for instance the constraints on information structure discussed
in Section 7.3.2) preventing the non-extraposed variant in this particular exam-
ple, so whether such structures are treated as instances of raising or not is only
of theoretical interest within models that allow such a mechanism at all.
In principle, the phenomenon of tough movement is not limited to noun
phrases, as can be illustrated with the help of the following examples in which a
[that_CL] can be ‘raised’ from the subordinate clause to canonical subject posi-
tion in the matrix clause:
(93) a. It was quite difficult to believe that there could be any animation in
them. (G1L:2500)
b. To believe that there could be any animation in them was quite diffi-
cult.
c. That there could be any animation in them was quite difficult to be-
lieve.361
||
360 CamG also claims that there is a semantic difference between the ‘tough-moved’ structure
in (88c) and the extraposed (88a) in that in the former, tough to follow “denotes a property that
is predicated of” (CamG 1248) this route whereas this is not the case in the latter.
361 One native speaker informant called this use “archaic”.
Given that Kaltenböck (2004: 93) observes that in such examples “it is not en-
tirely clear whether the to-infinitive […] is best to be taken as part of the com-
plement clause or rather as part of the matrix clause”, we shall take a closer
look at clausal subjects in these structures and thus try to determine the valency
relationships in such sentences in the remainder of this section.
The evidence collected for the present study contains both material for and
against an analysis in which the verb of the [to_INF] clause and not the predica-
tive adjective is seen as generally governing the subject in structures of the type
shown in (93c). As pointed out in the literature (CamG 1246, 1250; Mair 1990:
59), tough movement structures also occur with nouns (to a lesser extent) and
verbs (very rarely). The theoretical treatment, however, often ignores verbs, as
Mair confirms:362
Except for the odd speculative footnote (e.g. Chomsky 1981: 319, on take), the verbal ma-
trix predicates illustrated above [take, cost, require, need, be for, be up to] do not figure in
the extensive literature on Tough Movement [...]. (Mair 1990: 60)
For verbs, Mair only found instances of tough movement with take in his data
from the Survey of English Usage (SEU), but predicted the structure to occur with
a few other ones. With the help of our parsed corpus we can show that his ex-
ample of a sentence with require, which is reproduced as (94a), is a strikingly
accurate proxy of actual usage as in the corpus example given as (94b) below.
(94) a. The questionnaire should not require more than ten minutes to com-
plete. (Mair 1990: 60)
b. Between the two phases subjects answered two brief questionnaires
which together required approximately five minutes to complete.
(HPM 1051)
If we look at the case of take presented in Section 4.1.2.2 above, we noted there
that generally take cannot occur with a [that_CL] subject, but it does in the pres-
ence of a postverbal [to_INF] clause whose verb takes a [that_CL] postverbal
complement in finite active clauses. The relevant examples are reproduced
here:
(95) a. That this may not be the case in certain instances does not take much
b. ?That this may not be the case in certain instances does not take
much imagination.
||
362 For a list of valency carriers that typically occur in such structures see CamG (1246, 1250).
232 | Extraposition
c. It does not take much imagination to comprehend that this may not
be the case in certain instances.
This behaviour is strong evidence for relating (95a) and (95c) by some sort of
rule. The case of remain is more difficult to decide. We can still relate the tough
movement construction in (96a) to the extraposed construction in (96b), where
it becomes clear that the whether-clause depends on see, but the non-
extraposed version in (96c) is not possible.
(96) a. Whether such modest dieting is enough remains to be seen. (ABG

2096)
b. It remains to be seen whether such modest dieting is enough.
c. *To be seen whether such modest dieting is enough remains.
Furthermore, there are variants of the construction without a postverbal

[to_INF],363 such as (97a–b):
(97) a. Whether an electric car can succeed in its present form remains as big
a question as ever in my mind after a test drive in central London.
(newsmerge; double after removed)
b. Whether the credentials of Nasa and its staff can be salvaged by the
repair of the Hubble remains in doubt. (newsmerge)
These do not look like tough movement structures due to the missing postverbal
[to_INF], but remain on its own does not seem to have a valency slot for wheth-
er-clauses in subject position. However, since that remain is sometimes treated
as a copula verb,364 the form of the subject found in such sentences may be de-
termined by the postverbal element in such sentences.
The case of hard also provides inconclusive evidence. The [that_CL] in ca-
nonical subject position was only found with postverbal [to_INF] in what looks
like a tough movement structure:365
||
363 The pattern with remain + to be seen is by far the most frequent one; it accounts for rough-
ly 98 % of all occurrences of a whether-clause subject with remain in our parsed corpora; the
others are perfectly acceptable, though.
364 See CGEL (1172).
365 In extraposed position, a [that_CL] seems to be acceptable with hard as in the following
example: It did seem a little hard that, just when things were beginning to go really well, the
even tenor of their lives should be upset by the arrival of someone else — someone who, alt-
hough a friend, was none the less a stranger. (BMU 2572) One native speaker commented that
all examples of this kind constitute a wrong use of hard and should be constructed with harsh
instead.
(98) a. That Leapor is concerned with land use in ‘The Month of August’ is
hard to dispute; her observations, however, are oblique. (AN4 3003)
This counts as evidence in favour of an analysis in which the [that_CL] fills a

valency slot of the verb of the postverbal [to_INF] clause, in this case dispute.
The situation for infinitival subjects with hard is quite complex. Generally,
hard allows a [to_INF]366 complement as a canonical subject, as in the following
example:
(98) b. To write about the events up there was hard, sometimes a real strug-
gle, but it had to be. (ECG 1468)
Then there are (infrequent) cases in the corpus where one could analyse the
subject [to_INF] as a dependent of the postverbal [to_INF], i.e. as instances of
tough movement:
(98) c. To go out on penalties is hard to accept. (newspapers)
The vast majority of these sentences, however, contain a verb in the postverbal
[to_INF] clause that does not usually allow a [to_INF] clause as a postverbal
complement. By far the most frequent verb in this pattern is take as in (98d), so
one might argue that hard to take is an idiomatic expression that should not be
split into smaller parts,367 but (98e–g) cannot be accounted for by such an anal-
ysis:368
(98) d. To lose like that after playing so well is hard to take.

e. To be passed out in 2C would be hard to explain, but fortunately Lau-
ria scraped up a return to 2H. (newspapers)
f. To have lost that much and still have light winds and to have them for
the foreseeable future is pretty hard to deal with. (newspapers)
g. For this to happen within the past 12 months is hard to believe.
(newspapers)
While (98e–g) look like instances of tough movement superficially, we could not
transform any of them into the ‘non-tough-moved’ variant without changing the
||
366 It also allows a [for_NP_to_INF], which can be subsumed under the [to_INF] category
here.
367 Since hard to take commutes with alternatives such as difficult to take and hard to bear,
such a treatment would be questionable, though.
368 See however Chomsky ([1981] 1993: 312), who considers analysing easy-to-please in John is
easy to please as a complex adjective.
234 | Extraposition
clause type of the complement that functions as subject: For explain, we would
have to use a [that_CL] or a [V-ing], for deal with a [V-ing] and for believe a
[that_CL]. As we have seen in (98a) above, a [that_CL] is in fact possible in tough
movement with hard, and the following example shows that [V-ing] clauses can
occur there, too:
(98) h. Earlier the expert admitted that stopping a horse was hard to detect.
(newspapers)
Thus there is no syntactic reason that would require a change of form of the
element that is moved to the subject position from a supposed ‘underlying’ or
‘basic’ sentence such as the extraposed version. Accordingly, we must deduce
that the subject [to_INF] in (98e–g) is not a valency complement of the verb in
the postverbal [to_INF], but it does of course realise a participant role of that
verb.
We thus have to conclude that while a tough movement analysis has its ad-
vantages for the analysis of some sentences (such as the one with take cited
above), it cannot be extended to all sentences of a similar pattern369 and the
open question in this respect is how to determine where the generalization
stops. Thus we can agree with Mair in that a gradient analysis is probably best:
Tough-Movement structures and SVC patterns of the type ‘She was pretty/to look at’ (cf.
‘*It was pretty to look at her’) should be regarded as opposite ends of a gradient rather
than two discrete structural categories. (Part of the reason for the stalemate in generative
grammar between the proponents of a ‘movement analysis’ and those of an ‘object dele-
tion analysis’ is that in their attempts at rigid formalisation researchers fail to allow for
precisely this indeterminacy in much of their data.) (Mair 1990: 63)
However, our ‘gradient’ has at least three poles: the two mentioned by Mair and
a third structure exemplified in (98d–f) above. We can also agree with Mair as to
his analysis of the problems with ‘rigid formalisation’ or simply the failure to
allow for indeterminacy: If we have to decide for every given sentence whether
it is an instance of structure A or structure B, large overlap between structures –
as illustrated above with hard, for instance, – will result in relatively arbitrary
groupings which do not capture all the generalizations one might want to make.
||
369 There is another similar pattern mentioned for instance in CamG in the same context:
“The document is now ready [for you to sign __].” (CamG 1247)
The difference is that the adjectives that occur in this pattern do not allow the basic variant, so
one cannot regard these cases as instances of tough movement:
“*It is now ready [for you to sign the document].” (CamG 1247)
Conclusion | 235
Again, this shows that any model in which every element has to belong to exact-
ly one category is too inflexible to account satisfactorily for all sorts of generali-
sations. A possible treatment of such structures in valency grammar will be
proposed in Section 9.3.2.2; a more flexible model that takes into consideration
cognitive aspects and may also be able to account for the evidence presented
here is briefly discussed in Section 9.3.3.
7.5 Conclusion
We can conclude this chapter with a confirmation of the original hypothesis
presented in Section 1.3: Whether subject extraposition is impossible, optional
or obligatory is indeed a property of the valency carrier.370 In fact, we have to go
even beyond the original hypothesis and state that whether subject extraposi-
tion is impossible, optional or obligatory can also depend on a combination of
the valency carrier with other complements in the clause.
However, as we have seen, valency is not the only factor contributing to the
choice for or against extraposition. Besides some general tendencies as to the
occurrence of extraposition depending on the type of complement and on the
type of valency carrier, there are processing constraints and functional factors
such as information packaging at work. Furthermore, semantic factors (e.g.
factivity) play a role, too.
From a theoretical point of view, these results create interesting problems in
modelling: As outlined in Chapter 2, the term valency is used to describe item-
specific (or subclass-specific – see Engel 2004: 89) information on the number
and form of the complements of a valency carrier. It is thus not immediately
clear whether we would want to describe optional or obligatory extraposition as
a valency property: Depending on the theoretical position taken as to the status
of it and the extraposed subject (see Section 7.1 for discussion), extraposition
may well be beyond the traditional notion of valency. In a purely complement
inventory-based approach to valency, it would in fact be difficult to model the
influence of the other complements in the sentence, since one would have to
posit for instance one [that_CL] complement that can be extraposed and a sec-
ond one that cannot. The choice between these two would still be problematic.
A much simpler and more accurate – though more verbose – way of modelling
such behaviour of lexical items is the use of valency patterns of the type used in
||
370 As mentioned above, there is strong evidence for verbs, some evidence for nouns and less
evidence for adjectives.
236 | Extraposition
the Erlangen Valency Patternbank (Herbst/Uhrig 2009), where both extraposed

and non-extraposed patterns are listed where they occur. Such a model will be
outlined in Section 9.3.2.1.
Whatever the exact theoretical model might be for extraposed sentences
(e.g. whether it allows for obligatory extraposition or not), we can be certain
that there are item-specific restrictions at the level of the valency carrier and at
the level of the pattern, and any model has to be able to account for these.
The present chapter also provided considerable evidence for the hypothesis
that subject properties do not coincide in one constituent in non-canonical
clauses. The discussion in Section 7.1.3 showed how difficult it is to identify one
element as the subject in extraposed structures compared to prototypical canon-
ical instances such as noun phrases in pre-verbal position.
Furthermore, the analysis of so-called tough movement structures and re-
lated problems has shown that there is a very complex interplay of construc-
tions which cannot sensibly be accounted for in a static model of grammar.
Together with the array of factors responsible for the choice of extraposed or
canonical structures, such constructions can only lead us to reject any model
that uses independent syntactic, semantic and pragmatic components (as often
found in early generative literature). Instead, the evidence points in the direc-
tion of a model that allows for storage and generalizations (or ‘rules’?) side by
side for similar phenomena, possibly based on approaches such as Bybee’s
network model (see for instance Bybee 2007, 2010) with emergent structures. A
rough sketch of such a model will be discussed in Section 9.3.
8 Existentials
The present chapter deals with structures such as the following:
(1) This time, however, there was a change. (A0F 9)
(2) There’s a gym installed at my villa. (JYD 1892)
These so-called existential sentences are interesting and relevant for a study of
subjects for at least three reasons: First, it is not self-evident what should be
analysed as the subject in such sentences. Secondly, there are sentences which
look as if there is a predication involving an element one could call subject and
some sort of predicate after the main verb, as in (2), so the role of that predica-
tion and its ‘subject’ needs discussing. Finally, in the light of their departure
from the canonical patterns of declarative sentences, it may also be necessary to
ask to what extent a category such as subject actually makes sense in the de-
scription and theoretical modelling of existential structures.
In order to approach these questions systematically, we shall first discuss
the boundaries of the construction and give a survey of different structures and
their properties before we match them against the properties for subjecthood.
The final section deals with models of the syntactic structure of existentials.
8.1 Phenomena covered

8.1.1 Limitation to there-clauses
Examples (1) and (2) are prototypical instances of a type of clause that is said to
serve to assert the existence of entities or “to bring the existence of an entire
proposition [...] to the attention of the hearer” (CGEL 1403). They represent what
the term existential371 is commonly used for, i.e. “the type introduced by un-
stressed there, accompanied by the simple present or past of be” (CGEL 1403).
There is, however, less agreement as to the boundaries of the construction.
Example (3), which is categorised as an existential sentence in CGEL, is treated
as a presentational clause in CamG due to the fact that it has “some other verb
than be” (CamG 1390).
||
371 The term was originally proposed by Jespersen (1924: 155).
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110589801-257
238 | Existentials
(3) In 1983, there appeared a new study of the issue by Dr Robert Eisen-
man, Chairman of the Department of Religious Studies at the Universi-
ty of California, Long Beach. (EDY 1078)
On the other hand, (4) and (5) are treated as existentials by CGEL (1402f) even
though they do not contain there, but not by CamG.372
(4) I have a car blocking my way. (CGEL 1402)
(5) One finds a similar conflict in other cultures, other mythologies, other
cosmologies. (EDY 1429)
From a functionalist perspective, Gast/Haas (2011) treat there-existentials and

so-called ‘locative inversion’ as in (6) as formal sub-types of presentational/pre-
sentative structures, i.e. structures whose function it is to introduce novel par-
ticipants (marked by subscript NOV below).
(6) Until the end of the war so very few folk had beards, and then only
short ones nicely trimmed, but into the room came [a young man with
a black fuzz of over eight inches]NOV. (Gast/Haas 2011: 129)
Due to their slightly different functions (see Gast/Haas 2011: 130) and their quite
different structures, locative inversion will not be covered in this chapter.
Finally, Kjellmer calls the it in (7) “existential it” (Kjellmer 2001: 328) and re-
lates it to existential there but comes to the conclusion that it appears to be part
of a relatively fixed expression “when it comes/came time” (Kjellmer 2001: 334).
(7) Here in Canada we are badly isolated from regular contact with soccer,
so when it comes time for the World Cup, the cable sports network
dredges up some living bodies to do the commentary. (J1G 415)
In this study, following CGEL, presentational sentences will be treated as a sub-

type of the existential construction and not, as in CamG, as a different, though
related construction.373 However, following CamG, the term existential will be
||
372 While sentences such as (4) and (5) are similar to existentials as defined above in their
information structure and thus may merit to be classified as the same construction on such
grounds, they are relatively straightforward in terms of syntactic structure and valency, with I
and one as SCU, have and find as VHC and the postverbal NPs as PCU. (Terminology follows
Herbst/Schüller 2008.)
373 Despite the proclaimed distinction between the two types of clauses, CamG treats them in
the same section, entitled “Existential and presentational clauses” (CamG 1390ff).
Phenomena covered | 239
restricted to the there-type of clause, not only due to its overwhelming predomi-
nance but also because it is grammatically distinct from the other types pre-
sented by Kjellmer and CGEL. The term existential there will be used to refer to
the preverbal there in such structures.374
8.1.2 Existentials vs locative there-clauses
Furthermore, existentials have to be kept apart from a superficially similar loca-

tive structure presented in (8):
(8) <-|-> Aye, where’s my <-|-> card! I didn’t <-|-> get, oh there’s my card!
(KCU 3104–5)
Although Herbst/Schüller claim that in existentials “in some cases an element

of the locative meaning of the particle use can also be made out” (Herbst/
Schüller 2008: 72), as in (9a–b) below, there are reasons that argue against their
interpretation of these two sentences as existentials.375
(9) a. There, hesitating on the threshold, was the most beautiful girl he had
ever seen in his life. (Herbst/Schüller 2008: 72)
b. “There’s Swallow,” said Dempsey. (Herbst/Schüller 2008: 72)
Both sentences might rather be read as inverted structures with a space adjunct
at the beginning, i.e. not as existentials. That is, the first word is the locative
||
374 Erdmann (1976: 76) lists a range of alternative terms that have been proposed for the
existential there such as “pro-nominal there”, “anticipatory there”, “formal there”, “preparato-
ry there”, “empty there”, “expletive there”.
375 See however Freeze (1992), whose article on “Existentials and other Locatives” claims that
his “unified theory of locative predications, based on an extensive cross-linguistic corpus, will
result in the surprising conclusion (inter alia) that forms like English existential there are loca-
tive” (Freeze 1992: 554). However, this is only possible in his account due to heavy use of struc-
ture-altering mechanisms in the D-structure of generative grammar.
Collins (1992) offers a slightly different perspective: “It should be remembered, however, that
every assertion of existence has a locative dimension, whether explicit or implicit. In the case
of existential sentences the assertion of existence is a function of the entire construction, not
simply the there (and it is of course also a function of certain there-less sentences)” (Collins
1992: 421).
240 | Existentials
particle376 there and not the form there used in existentials. For (9a), such a read-
ing is in fact obligatory if we follow the reference grammars’ analysis that exis-
tential there “is always unstressed” (CamG 1391; similarly CGEL 1405),377 alt-
hough such a distinction is of course less than straightforward in the written
language. Besides the locative reading, example (9b) could theoretically be read
as an existential sentence with unstressed there,378 but it would be difficult to
maintain that the locative meaning of the there is still present in such a use,
given that it is possible to add a space adjunct as in (9c), including the locative
particle there, or even a locative expression with a meaning contradicting the
meaning of the locative particle there as in (9d).
(9) c. “There’s Swallow over there”, said Dempsey.

d. “And there’s Swallow right here next to me”, said Dempsey.379
||
376 While the terminology differs between grammars, the analysis remains constant. The term
particle follows Herbst/Schüller (2008); other terms include adverb (CGEL) and intransitive
preposition (CamG).
377 A slightly different position is taken by the Cambridge English Pronouncing Dictionary (18th
edition): “The weak forms occur only when there is used existentially as in ‘there is’, ‘there
are’, ‘there was’, ‘there won’t be’, etc. The strong form /ðeəʳ/ [US-symbol] /ðer/ is also used in
such expressions, and is the normal pronunciation for there as a place adverbial, e.g. ‘there it
is’” (EPD18: 491; their emphasis). However, in the treatment of weak forms, it is made clear that
strong forms are usually only used “when the word is being quoted […], when it is being con-
trasted […] and when it is at the end of a sentence” (EPD18: 580).
378 If we take a look at the larger context of (9b) in David Lodge’s novel Small World, we can
see that the sentence is definitely locative:
“Which one is Professor Swallow?” Persse enquired, looking round the room.
“He’s here somewhere.” Dempsey rather unwillingly scanned the sherry drinkers in
search of Philip Swallow. […]
Then, to his extreme annoyance, a tall, slim, distinguished-looking man of middle age,
with a rather dashing silver-grey beard, and a good deal of wavy hair of the same hue
around the back and sides of his head, but not much on top, darted forward to greet the
girl, blocking Persse’s view of her.
“There’s Swallow,” said Dempsey.
“What?” said Persse, coming slowly out of his trance.
“Swallow is the man chatting up that rather dishy girl who just came in, the one in the
black dress, or should I say half out of it? (Lodge 1984: 8)
379 A locative reading is not wholly excluded here. If there is pronounced as full form and if
there is an intonational boundary between Swallow and right, one could understand the sen-
tence as containing an instance of dislocation. (See the discussion in Section 7.1.1.)
Survey of structures | 241
Examples (10a–b) show that this type of structure also exists in naturally occur-
ring language and thus support the idea that existential there carries “none of
the locative meaning of the place-adjunct there” (CGEL 1405).380
(10) a. There was no one there but the family. (A0D 1909)
b. There is no prison here. (A03 849)
Breivik/Martínez Insua find that in fact both types of there “were already distin-
guished in Old English” (Breivik/Martínez Insua 2008: 352) and cite evidence
from Scandinavian languages to support their claim that a grammaticalization
process had already begun prior to the Old English period.381 The process of
semantic reanalysis described by them is highly plausible and fully compatible
with later research, e.g. Gast/Haas (2011: 149f) and with other approaches to
similar phenomena (see for instance Dauses 2000, in particular Chapter 2).
8.2 Survey of structures

Both major reference grammars (CGEL and CamG) divide up existential clauses
based on the main verb (be or other verb) and based on the displaced subject382
(only [NP] or [NP] with some extension). Be is by far the most common main
verb in existential clauses and also offers a wider range of possible complemen-
tation patterns than the other verbs that occur in the construction. In the BNC, a
search for “there_EX0 _VB?”383 (existential there followed by a form of the verb
be) yields 199,652 results whereas a search for “there_EX0 _VV?”384 (existential
||
380 Hannay (1985: 23–28) gives an overview of the diverging views on the relationship be-
tween existential there and locative there in the (predominantly generative) literature.
381 To what extent the existential construction has come to dominate over competing con-
structions in the evolution of the English language is illustrated convincingly using evidence
from the Old Bailey Corpus (Breivik/Martínez Insua 2008: 354).
382 For lack of a better term displaced subject (CamG 67) is used for the postverbal constitu-
ent(s) No statement as to the subjecthood of the item(s) is made by this choice.
383 The CLAWS5 tagset distinguishes between the existential and adverbial uses of there.
Even though it has to be borne in mind that this is a particularly error-prone distinction for a
computer program, the frequency difference between be and the other verbs is sufficiently
great for us to assume that the classification errors are negligible for our purposes.
384 This search pattern also finds instances of verbs followed by to be, such as seems to be,
appear to be, proved to be, continues to be, needs to be which might also be counted for the be
category. If we discard these cases, only 2,511 hits for verbs other than be remain.
242 | Existentials
there followed by a verb that is not be, do, or have) only returns 3,915 hits.385
Existential clauses with be and only an [NP] as displaced subject are called bare
existentials (CGEL 1406, CamG 1393); if there is more than an [NP] after the verb
be, they can be called extended existentials (CamG 1393). As pointed out above,
if the main verb is not be, the term presentational is often used. We shall follow
this threefold distinction, which is also used by Aarts (2011), although it would
of course also be possible to distinguish between bare and non-bare presenta-
tional clauses.
8.2.1 Bare existentials
A minimal example of a bare existential is given as (11):
(11) a. There is no cure. (A01 7)
Example (12) below contains a more complex noun phrase with a postmodifica-
tion and two extra elements, thus and inevitably, but is still a bare existential
because there is no further complementation after the verb other than an [NP].
(12) Thus there is inevitably a link between democracy and equality. (EVP
594)
We shall see in the next section, however, that the distinction is not always
straightforward and that ambiguity between the structures can arise due to the
structural identity of postmodifications in the [NP] and extensions.
8.2.2 Extended existentials
Non-bare existentials are treated differently by CGEL and CamG. CamG uses the
term extended existentials and draws a distinction between various types of
||
385 These numbers can only be taken as rough indicators since there are also 21,844 hits for
existential there followed by a modal verb (which is followed by be in the vast majority of
cases), 10,962 instances of a form of have (most of which are followed by been, some by to be)
and 418 instances of do (about 280 of which are followed by seem [and about 220 of these are in
turn followed by to be]). Furthermore, subject-operator inversion is not reflected in the queries,
and semi-auxiliaries (there is to be, there is going to be) may also slightly distort the results.
Nevertheless, with the results being almost two orders of magnitude apart, there can be no
doubt as to the overwhelmingly higher frequency of be in existential clauses.
extensions that is not based on a single criterion; it rather groups together items
on the basis of their meaning (locative and temporal extensions), their function
(predicative extensions) or their form (e.g. infinitival extensions) (all CamG
1394). CGEL classifies according to the canonical clause type corresponding to
the respective existential clause and offers a separate treatment of “[e]xistential
sentences with relative and infinitive clauses” (CGEL 1406). Given that CGEL
wants to “relate basic clauses to existential forms by means of a general rule”
(CGEL 1403) and speaks of an “original clause” (CGEL 1403) (=basic clause), a
derivative interpretation seems to be suggested. The following table presents
the classification and examples in CGEL:
Tab. 38: Basic clauses and their existential counterparts; constructed on the basis of CGEL
(1404)
clause type basic clause existential clause
SVC Something must be wrong. There must be something wrong.

SVA Was anyone in the vicinity? Was there anyone in the vicinity?
SV No one was waiting There was no one waiting.
SVO Plenty of people are getting promo- There are plenty of people getting
tion. promotion.
SVOC Two bulldozers have been knocking There have been two bulldozers knock-
the place flat. ing the place flat.
SVOA A girl is putting the kettle on. There’s a girl putting the kettle on.
SVOC Something is causing my friend There’s something causing my friend
distress. distress.
CGEL posits two restrictions on the basic clause in order to allow a “conversion”
into an existential with be: the subject generally has to be indefinite and the
verb phrase must contain some form of the verb be (CGEL 1403). Breivik (1983),
however, opposes the indefiniteness constraint using counter-examples of the
following type:
(13) There are the facilities here, in the experimental psychology faculty.
(FR3 1676)
Collins takes a similar position in his study of existentials, where he shows that
(in his data) 4.5 % of postverbal [NP]s are definite (Collins 1992: 422) for which
he offers the following convincing explanation:
244 | Existentials
The restrictions on the post-verbal NP are more profitably interpreted from a pragmatic
than a grammatical perspective. What is crucial about the post-verbal NP is the discourse
salience of the entity or entities referred to, the newness of the information it expresses
(and definite NPs may be used to newly identify a referent in certain contexts). (Collins
1992: 422)
8.2.2.1 Relative clause extensions

No restrictions on definiteness apply to existentials with relative clauses. They
are formed on the following pattern:
(14) there + be + noun phrase + relative clause (CGEL 1406)
The pattern is exemplified in (15a) (relative pronoun is subject) and (16a) (rela-
tive pronoun is direct object). CGEL also relates this type of existential to a basic
clause pattern which is illustrated (in a reduced form) in (15b) and (16b) respec-
tively.
(15) a. [H]e’d only known there was something that kept him empty inside,
stopped him from being a proper person. (F99 2301)
b. Something kept him empty inside.
(16) a. All these moves will help, but there is something that we as individu-
als can do — if we want to. (K9H 135)
b. We as individuals can do something.
The pattern cited in (14) is more than surprising, given that in CGEL’s syntactic
model adnominal relative clauses of the type shown above are usually treated
as postmodifications within the [NP] and should thus not be listed separately
from the [NP]. If we thus reduce the pattern to the more standard there + be +
NP, it becomes indistinguishable from the pattern of bare existentials, and in-
deed one may ask whether there are syntactic reasons to separate the two. We
shall discuss this issue in more detail in Section 8.2.2.4 below.
8.2.2.2 Infinitival extensions

The extended existential with infinitive in CGEL “is problematic to the extent
that it cannot be directly related to the basic clause types” (CGEL 1407). CGEL
relates the structure presented in (17a) below to the “stiffly formal” (CGEL 1407)
relative clause construction in (17b) but does not posit a derivative relationship.
(17) a. You think there’s something to talk about? (GV8 1928)

b. (?)You think there’s something about which to talk?386
This relationship is less obvious in cases such as (18a), where the form nowhere
cannot be postmodified by a relative clause (see (18b)).
(18) a. It was hot and sticky and there was nowhere to sit. (FBL 1068)
b. *It was hot and sticky and there was nowhere where to sit.
There are two further issues in (19a) which suggest that there is a problem with
the relationship between the [to_INF] and relatives.
(19) a. There are glorious walks to be found in the Sierra and although there
is no proper beach to speak of in Deya, there is a small cove within
walking distance and the town Puerto Pollensa — with a long sweep-
ing unspoilt beach — is just a short drive away. (BPF 1787)
The first existential clause seems to prevent a [to_INF] relative clause as in

(19b), but even if we transform it into a finite relative clause as in (19c), there
remain considerable semantic differences.
(19) b. *There are glorious walks which to be found in the Sierra.

c. There are glorious walks which are to be / can be found in the Sierra.
In fact, the basic clause in (19e) probably captures the meaning of the original
clause better than the relative construction and better than (19d), which is an
indicator of the modal component inherent in many [to_INF]s (as discussed in
Section 4.2 above).387
(19) d. Glorious walks are to be found in the Sierra.

e. Glorious walks can be found in the Sierra.
However, the active would usually be preferred if there are no further constitu-
ents after Sierra, probably for information structural reasons:
||
386 Not all native speakers seem to accept such a construction. This even holds for CGEL’s
own example “At last there was something about which to write home.” (CGEL 1407), which is
of questionable acceptability for some speakers.
387 Such a view is in line with an analysis within “a functional-semantic framework, where
infinitivals are relatable to general modal concepts ([There are many questions to be asked.]
being interpreted as a communicative variant of Many questions should be asked)” (Collins
1992: 424).
246 | Existentials
(19) f. You can find glorious walks in the Sierra.
The second existential in (19a) also changes substantially in meaning when the
[to_INF] is converted to a relative clause as in (19g).
(19) g. ?There is no proper beach of which to speak in Deya.
The reason here is the status of negative marker + X + to speak of as some sort of
relatively fixed, idiomatic grammatical expression – illustrated in (20) below –
which would probably best be described in terms of construction grammar (see
for instance Fillmore/Kay/O’Connor 1988 and Kay/Fillmore 1999 for a treatment
of similar though more complex constructions).
(20) She was disappointed, even aggrieved, that the remains would not be
brought home for a funeral. Since there were no remains to speak of.
(FRC 8–9)
It is thus problematic to treat infinitival extensions as related to a more basic

version or simply as a variant of a relative clause extension and we should
probably consider the construction as structurally sufficiently different to be
treated in its own right.
CamG also points out that the postverbal [NP] can receive different interpre-
tations in relation to the verb of the [to_INF] so that in “[(21a)], a few replies is
understood as subject of the infinitival, while in [(21b)] one letter is understood
as object of the infinitival” (CamG 1394).
(21) a. There are still a few replies to come. (CamG 1394; their emphasis)
b. There’s one letter (for you) to sign. (CamG 1394; their emphasis)
8.2.2.3 Participial extensions

In CGEL’s taxonomy of existentials, it seems as if [to_INF]s are the only non-
finite clauses that occur. This is due to the claim that most existentials are relat-
ed to corresponding basic clauses as in Table 38 above. Given the correspond-
ence, we would expect the basic sentence form of (22a) below to be (22b) which
is of course not acceptable with stative verbs such as belong.388 The non-
progressive (22c) is a more sensible basic clause counterpart, but it would vio-
||
388 While there are claims that the progressive is on the rise with stative verbs, Leech et al.
(2009: 130) were unable to confirm this trend in a corpus study.
late the restriction that basic clauses need a form of be in their VP in order to
allow conversion into existentials.389
(22) a. There is plenty of furniture belonging to the house. (HH8 962)

b. *Plenty of furniture is belonging to the house.
c. Plenty of furniture belongs to the house.
Similarly, CamG (1394) treats sentences such as (23) as participial extensions:
(23) There was a note put through her letterbox. (ABW 2149)
Law (1999: 184) calls this structure the passive existential construction. It ap-
pears that a debate in generative grammar revolves around the question of how
these should be modelled. The fact that the construction merits a distinct name
of its own seems to stem more from the apparent difficulty to agree on a deriva-
tion in the framework of generative grammar than from interesting linguistic
behaviour of such structures. Again, we can observe a structural ambiguity in
some such sentence that will be discussed in the following section.
8.2.2.4 Extented existentials vs. bare existentials with postmodified or

complemented [NP]
As mentioned above, many extended existentials are superficially indistin-
guishable from a bare existential with a postmodification or a valency comple-
ment.390 We shall review examples for infinitival, participial and relative clause
extensions as discussed in the previous sections here.
For [to_INF] extensions, there is a superficially similar construction where
the [NP] of a bare existential contains a valency complement in the form of a
[to_INF] clause as in (24a). The fact that example (24b) is completely nonsensi-
cal can be seen as an indicator of the different status of the [to_INF] clause,
since the postverbal [NP] plans cannot be interpreted as the subject of the verb
publish (and since it cannot be interpreted as the ‘object’ either, since that posi-
tion is taken by the text of the lecture).
||
389 See CGEL (1403) and the discussion of restrictions on the basic clause at the beginning of
8.2.2 above. One might also argue that in fact (22a) cannot be paraphrased at all in terms of a
basic clause simply because it is a bare existential clause. We shall come back to this question
in the next sub-section.
390 It has to be noted that not all grammars make a distinction between the different struc-
tures, so LGSWE treats all of them uniformly as complex NPs (LGSWE 946–951).
248 | Existentials
(24) a. There are also plans to publish the text of the lecture. (GXE 466)
b. *Plans publish the text of the lecture.
However, there are cases where ambiguity arises. The [to_INF] clause in (25a)
below could be analysed in a similar vein to the relative clause examples men-
tioned above but it could also be regarded as a complement of the noun policy,
given that the VDE lists [to_INF] as a possible complement.
(25) a. There is no planning policy to ensure that they are not concentrated in
one area which may lead to enormous pressures on local support ser-
vices. (FTY 357)
Rough paraphrases of the two interpretations, which are very close to each oth-
er semantically, are given in (25b–c).
(25) b. No planning policy ensures that XYZ.

c. No planning policy to ensure that XYZ exists.
Thus, while the two constructions are syntactically distinct in a large number of
cases, we cannot assign every case to either one or the other category.
For participial structures following the head noun, CamG (1394f), makes a
distinction between bare existentials with an [NP] containing a participial
postmodifier and extended existentials where the displaced subject [NP] is fol-
lowed by a participial extension (as in (26a)).
(26) a. There are some people going to be disadvantaged by the new tax sys-
tem. (CamG 1395)
b. *Those people going to be disadvantaged by the new tax system will
have to be compensated in some way. (CamG 1395)391
In their reasoning, the unacceptability of (26b) indicates that the participial

clause in (26a) is not part of the noun phrase since we would expect such a
noun phrase to be acceptable independently of the existential construction. As
we can see in (22d), this is true of the noun phrase in (22a) above, so (22a) may
alternatively be treated as a bare existential.
(22) d. Plenty of furniture belonging to the house had been stolen the night
before.
||
391 Hannay claims that such elements can in fact occur in what he calls “with absolute con-
structions” (1985: 87): With some people going to be disadvantaged by the new tax system, I
think that the government will have a hard time.
While CamG’s reasoning appears to be valid for the examples given above, indi-
cating that there are two distinct superficially identical constructions, we also
find instances which show conflicting evidence:
(27) a. There was a war raging inside her. (based on H9V 1455)
b. A war was raging inside her.
c. A war raging inside her made it impossible for her to think clearly.
The reformulation of (27a) in terms of a basic variant in (27b) is perfectly ac-

ceptable, which may be counted in favour of an extension analysis, but the
acceptability of (27c) could be seen as an argument in favour of the one-[NP]-
with-postmodifier analysis. No indication is given in CamG of how to analyse a
sentence in case of conflicting evidence, and we will again have to accept the
indeterminacy of sentences as to whether they contain an extension or not.
For the past participials, we can also find relatively clear cases of existen-
tials with a postmodification (and, in this case, an adverbial extension) as in
(28), and of extended existentials with a past participial extension, as in (23)
above (repeated below), as also mentioned by CamG (1395).
(28) There were [some letters written by her grandmother] in the safe.
(CamG 1394)
(23) There was a note put through her letterbox. (ABW 2149)
We can actually show that the two participial clauses do not commute by com-
bining them into one sentence:
(29) There was a note written by her grandmother put through her letter-
box.
Nonetheless, since the extension in (23) can also be used as a postmodification

as in (30), we have the same structural ambiguity as with the other extensions:
(30) A note put through her letterbox informed her of her grandmother’s
death.
When it comes to relative clauses, CamG is much more careful as to whether it is

possible to make a distinction between extension and postmodification at all.
The authors do present evidence in favour of such a distinction, though:
(31) a. There are [people that have an IQ far greater than that]. (CamG 1396)
b. There was [one man] that kept interrupting. (CamG 1396)
250 | Existentials
In (31a) the relative clause is naturally taken as a modifier of people: the sentence asserts
the existence of people with an IQ far greater than ‘that’. Example (31b), however, might
be construed as the existential counterpart of One man kept interrupting. Note that the lat-
ter is a paraphrase of (31b), whereas (31a) cannot be paraphrased as People have an IQ far
greater than that. (CamG 1396; numbers changed)
They also add another argument:
One piece of supporting evidence that can be adduced is the possibility of having a rela-
tive clause after a proper name. Thus in answer to the question Who might be able to help?
one might reply: Well, there’s John you could try. This cannot have an analysis like [(31a)],
for John you could try is not a possible NP. (CamG 1396)
Collins draws the same distinction:
Existential sentences may occur with a relative clause as extension. Some such cases,
where the relative clause serves clearly as a restrictive modifier within NP structure, can
be readily handled as bare existentials. (Collins 1992: 423)
The fact that both can even occur together is a further indicator of their different
status:
(32) I was not unhappy to be sitting opposite an attractive lady from Coll
and there was only one person I knew of who lived on Coll. (GXA 940)
(33) ‘There were youngsters who couldn’t read who had to learn from tapes
and constant repetition,’ says Mr Chance, ‘and they never faltered.
(K4V 2686)
Even though many sentences with a similar structure can be interpreted as two
co-ordinated relative clauses, such a reading is excluded in (33), where the ex-
tension (who...repetition) is predicated of the entire [NP] including the relative
clause postmodification (who...read) and not just of the head youngsters. On the
other hand, there are also [NP]s in non-existential structures that contain two
such relative clauses in the same hierarchical relationship:
(34) A lady I know who saw his mother’s funeral said that Yeats wouldn’t
go into the church. (ADM 1288)
We can thus conclude that there are good reasons to treat existentials with dis-
placed subjects that are postmodified or have a valency complement as struc-
turally different from existentials that contain an extension of the same form.
Syntactically, however, it is often impossible to assign an actual example to one
of the two constructions. The syntactic difference seems to coincide with a se-
mantic difference in that – as mentioned above – bare existentials assert the

existence of an entity and the postmodification is mainly used for the identifica-
tion of the entity (“restrictive modifier” in the citation by Collins above) whereas
extended existentials contain a predication which (usually) asserts new infor-
mation. If one accepts this semantic difference as a criterion for syntactic struc-
ture, one can classify more data as either one or the other, but borderline cases,
such as (25a) above, will still remain.
Furthermore, to sum up the evidence presented in all of Section 8.2.2, we
can say that due to the restrictions found on the ‘basic’ variant CGEL’s deriva-
tive approach for extended existentials is highly problematic and that it may
thus be more appropriate to treat extended existentials independently of some
supposedly underlying structure.
8.2.3 Presentational existentials
As mentioned above, existentials in which the verb is not be are often treated
separately. The use of the terms presentational in CamG (1402) or presentative
(CGEL 1408, Hannay 1985: 9) is an indicator of the fact that they serve “to bring
something to the discoursal stage deserving our attention” (CGEL 1408). CGEL
claims that they are “a rather less common, more literary type of existential
clause” (CGEL 1408) whereas CamG (1402) does not note such a preference.
The most notable difference compared to ‘ordinary’ existentials is that there
are restrictions on the verbs that can occur in such constructions, as can be seen
in (35):
(35) *There killed a man his family.
Most authors agree that generally the verbs have to be intransitive (see for in-
stance CGEL 1408, CamG 1402),392 but example (36) illustrates that intransitivity
is not a sufficient criterion:
(36) *?There sneezed a man at the funeral.
||
392 CGEL states that “exceptions are idiomatic or dubious” (CGEL 1408) whereas CamG notes
that “transitives cannot be wholly excluded, as illustrated in the attested example There seized
him a fear that perhaps after all it was all true” (CamG 1402 fn.17). Hannay (1985) gives two
further examples, one of them biblical: “And there followed him a certain man... (Mark, 14.151)
[...] There entered the hall a procession of dancing girls” (Hannay 1985: 9).
252 | Existentials
This is why usually some kind of semantic groups of verbs are given. CamG
states that a “high proportion have to do with being in a position or coming into
view” (CamG 1402), CGEL requires a “fairly general presentative meaning: verbs
of motion (arrive, enter, pass, come, etc), of inception (emerge, spring up, etc),
and of stance (live, remain, stand, lie, etc)”393 (CGEL 1408). Martínez Insua com-
piled a list consisting of “verbs of being and occurrence -e.g. come, exist, hang,
happen-, temporal verbs -e.g. arise, burst, emerge, loom-, verbs of continuation -
develop, remain, linger, persist-, and verbs of motion -e.g. arrive, enter, come,
pass” (Martínez Insua 2002: 134). The obvious incongruity of the three state-
ments (to which “high proportion”, “etc” or “e.g.” add) suggests that no ex-
haustive list can be given. Corpus research in the BNC confirms that the verbs
given in CamG (1402) and the ones cited above account for the bulk of the rele-
vant sentences in the corpus (one verb cited in none of the accounts is given in
(37) for reference), albeit with huge variation in frequency.394
(37) On either side of this scene there crouches a human watcher and the
air is filled with small birds — thirty-one of them altogether. (BLX
1674)
The choice of verb in such structures is thus relatively difficult to model, since a
purely storage-based model is at a loss if no exhaustive list of items can be given
and a semantic model fails if the verbs that occur are difficult to group in a se-
mantically straightforward fashion. The question will be taken up again in the
discussion of potential models in Section 8.4.4.
8.3 What is the subject?

Generally, there appears to be less controversy in the literature as to what
should be analysed as the subject of an existential clause than there is in the
case of extraposition (see Section 7.1.3). Thus CGEL classifies there as subject
based on the following three criteria:
||
393 CGEL also shows that a wider range of verbs become available when there is an initial
space adjunct in the sentence. Compare:
Into the room (there) had staggered a total stranger.
?There had staggered into the room a total stranger.
?*There had staggered a total stranger into the room. (CGEL 1410)
394 Only one hit for loom was found in this construction in the BNC, for instance.
What is the subject? | 253
(i) It often determines concord [...]

(ii) It can act as subject in yes-no and tag questions [...]
(iii) It can act as subject in infinitive and -ing clauses:
I don’t want there to be any misunderstanding.
He was disappointed at there being so little to do.
There having been trouble over this in the past, I want to treat the matter cautiously.
(CGEL 1405)395
However, one can also find the term “pseudo-subject” (CGEL 756), which sug-
gests that existential there is not a ‘real subject’ – an interpretation that seems
to be backed by the treatment of “the existential subject there (cf 18.44ff), as
distinct from the ‘true subject’ following the verb” (CGEL 897). Such a wording
seems to suggest an underlying level of representation similar to Chomsky’s
deep structure, on which the postverbal element (which is explicitly not the
subject) has its ‘true’ function of subject.396 This may of course be related to the
treatment of many types of existential clauses in terms of basic clauses as dis-
cussed above. The fact that the term “notional subject” (CGEL 1405) is used in
quotation marks may suggest that the level at which that element is the ‘true
subject’ may not be a level of syntactic but rather of semantic representation.
Anderson draws a distinction between the syntactic subject (there – based
on its “syntactic ‘behaviour’” [Anderson 1997: 22]) and the morphosyntactic
subject (the postverbal [NP] – based on agreement). Breivik/Martínez Insua
(2008: 351f) call existential there a subject-position holder and a particle and use
notional subject for the postverbal [NP].
CamG (241ff) also agrees that there has to be the subject on the basis of the
criteria for subjecthood presented in Section 2.3.2 (and discussed for extraposed
sentences in Section 7.1.3.2). The present section will re-examine these criteria
with respect to their applicability to there and the postverbal element(s) in exis-
tential sentences. Again, the discussion closely follows CamG’s (241–243) treat-
ment.
1. Category
As existential there is not the same as the particle there and as it occurs in a
position in which particles do not usually occur, it is likely to belong to a differ-
||
395 The details for criteria (i) and (ii) will be discussed below and have thus been omitted
here.
396 It has to be noted, however, that both quotes are from parts of the grammar that are not
directly related to existentials and may thus not reflect a conscious decision for or against a
certain way of modelling existentials.
254 | Existentials
ent word class.397 The canonical subject position in front of the verb makes a
pronoun analysis (similar to it in extraposed sentences) plausible, and this is
indeed what makes CamG classify existential there as a “dummy pronoun”
(CamG 1390):398
As a pronoun there can be best regarded as a peripheral member of the personal pronoun
category. It has the distinctive personal pronoun property of being able to occur as subject
in an interrogative tag, as in [(38)]. And it is comparable with the other dummy pronoun,
it, a core member of the category. (CamG 427)
(38) There is an obvious solution to this problem, isn’t there? (CamG 427)
While the arguments brought forward by CamG are certainly valid, their conclu-
sion is nonetheless problematic. The fact that existential there “can fill the sub-
ject position in interrogative tags” (CamG 1391) may be taken as an argument in
favour of a pronoun analysis because it allows us to capture a generalization.
Given that existential there is marked neither for person nor for gender nor for
case, a personal pronoun analysis is however doubtful. The ability to occur in
canonical subject position is shared by indefinite pronouns such as something
(CGEL’s terminology; a compound determinative in CamG’s terminology), but
these cannot occur in tag questions. Accordingly, the generalization is only of
limited use given that it creates exceptions in another place of the grammatical
system. And, if we want to be precise about the application of the criteria used
to determine the word class of there, we have to exclude any criteria related to
subjecthood in order to avoid circularity in the present chapter.
Thus it would be equally valid if not preferable not to assign any word class
at all to existential there, a strategy implicitly adopted by CGEL and explicitly by
Herbst/Schüller:
Since there in such uses does not share enough properties with members of any other
word class occurring in similar positions, it would not make sense to classify there in such
uses as belonging to any other word class either. (Herbst/Schüller 2008: 72)
||
397 CamG points out that “[h]istorically, dummy there derives from the locative there [... but]
has been bleached of its locative meaning and reanalysed as a pronoun” (CamG 1391). See the
discussion in Section 8.1.2 for details.
398 Similarly Aarts, who calls existential there a pronoun and describes it “as a meaningless
word that fills the obligatory Subject slot” (2010: 48).
This argument will be followed here and thus existential there will not be as-
signed a word class in the present study and treated as a word of unique func-
tion instead.
However, since we use CamG’s criterion of category here, we can note that
in CamG’s classification, both there and understandable complications in (39)
fulfil the criterion.
(39) There were understandable complications. (EFN 663)
Matters become more complicated in the case of (40):
(40) There was a boy sitting in the car. (K8V 1640)
If we decide that a boy is the displaced subject, we have a perfect NP in post-

verbal position; if we decide that a boy sitting in the car is the displaced subject,
we still have to decide whether to treat it as an NP with a postmodifier or as
some sort of small clause (and whether the latter is a sensible category for sub-
jects).
It thus has to be concluded that category is not particularly helpful for the
establishment of subjecthood in the case of existential clauses, owing to the
difficulty of reliably assigning a category to the items in question.
2. Position
The canonical subject position in existential clauses is occupied by there.
3. Case
As we have seen above, there does not inflect for case, but personal pronouns
can occur in postverbal position in existential clauses. If they do, they are usual-
ly in objective case as in (41), as also noted by CamG (241). A corpus search
seems to suggest that subjective case can only occur with locative there as in
(42).
(41) There was me and Charlie and Maurice and Jack left and we went
when they closed. (A73 731)
(42) At the end she turned off to the right and there was I with nothing to
look at. (FAP 1970)
Thus case argues against the subject status of the postverbal [NP] in the main
clause of existentials.
256 | Existentials
4. Agreement
Typically, the postverbal [NP] in English existentials seems to determine con-
cord:
(43) a. On this floor there is one bathroom, but there are twenty of us. (HTG
168)
b. There are only two bedrooms at Tom’s house. (HHC 236)
However, we find singular verbs with plural postverbal [NP]s, too, even though
these appear to be much rarer:
(43) c. ‘There’s only two bedrooms,’ said the woman. (ABX 1027)
Accordingly, we cannot decide which element the verb agrees with in all cases,
but the postverbal [NP] seems to determine concord in the majority of cases. The
issue is rather complex and will thus be treated separately in more detail in
Section 8.4.2 below.
5. Inversion
Existential there occupies the subject position in sentences with subject-
auxiliary inversion:
(44) Are there any reported rapes between staff and students? (KRL 1291)
Hannay (1985: 10) points out that existentials with verbs other than be do not
allow subject-auxiliary inversion:
(45) ?Did there live in that castle anyone important? (Hannay 1985: 10)
He takes this behaviour as an indicator of the syntactically distinct status of

what he calls there-presentatives as opposed to existentials. However, the BNC
contains one acceptable counter-example:
(46) Did there emerge in the twentieth century a distinctive network of

Asian capital, embracing Chinese, Indian and Japanese capitalists,
distinct from the European network which had dominated South East
Asia from the middle of the nineteenth century? (HJ0 2015)
Thus even for presentational existentials the inversion criterion speaks in fa-
vour of there as the subject.
CamG observes that “the post-verbal NP can be questioned and then clearly
behaves like a non-subject” (CamG 243) as illustrated by (47a) and the (almost)
corresponding question in (47b).
(47) a. There are several options open to us. (CamG 241)

b. How many options are there available to us? (CamG 243)
However, example (48b) below illustrates that we can question the postverbal
[NP] of (48a), which is relatively uncontroversially the subject occurring in in-
version after a fronted locative expression, in a similar way as in (47b), so say-
ing that the postverbal [NP] behaves like a non-subject is misleading.
(48) a. At the far end were hundreds of skinned carcasses. (ABC 873)
b. How many skinned carcasses were at the far end?
In fact, if we recall the criterion, it is about the presence of subject-auxiliary

inversion if the subject is not questioned, so if CamG claims that there is such
inversion in (47b), this is only possible if it is presumed that there is the subject
in the first place. So in order to properly apply the test, it would be helpful to
use examples with auxiliaries, so that inversion can be reliably identified. Thus
if we take an existential like (49a), we have to ask which of the two questions
given in (49b–c) is the preferred option.
(49) a. There will be 300 people at the concert.

b. How many people will there be at the concert?
c. How many people will be there at the concert?
Corpus evidence in the BNC for this type of question is limited, but there are
four instances of the type will there be (one of which is given as (50)) and none
of the type will be there, so this speaks in favour of the former type.
(50) HOW MANY DISABLED ELDERLY WILL THERE BE IN THE FUTURE?

(ECE 816)
All three native speakers interviewed on the issue agree that (49b) is the pre-
ferred form, too. The underlined item in (49c) is best treated as an instance of
locative there.399
||
399 Such a treatment is backed by the fact that one informant commented that (49c) is only
acceptable without at the concert.
258 | Existentials
So far, we have concentrated on questions starting with how many, but the
typical questions for subjects are usually of the who/what pronominal type. The
corpus evidence in the BNC for who with the modal verb will consists of one
example:400
(51) Sir, — When the local fox hunts are just a memory who will be there to
control the ever-increasing fox population? (B03 1278)
Since a locative reading of there cannot be ruled out in this example, it is of very
limited help, so three native speakers were interviewed on the following set:
(52) a. There will be no one to remember us.

b. Who will there be to remember us?
c. Who will be there to remember us?
While they all accept both (52b) and (52c), there is a tendency to prefer the lat-
ter. However, their pronunciation of there in (52c) as a strong form suggests that
it is the locative adverb and not the existential there, which would be in line
with its postverbal position. In sum, the position in open interrogatives thus
also speaks in favour of there as the subject in existential clauses.
7. Tags
As we have seen above, the element repeated in tag questions is there:
(53) There’s something you want to know, isn’t there? (CEH 3448)
8. Coordination
Despite the acceptability of (54) – which is an indicator of the subjecthood of
there – CamG is right in observing that VP-coordination401 is not common with
there.
(54) There are several options open to us and have been from the begin-
ning. (CamG 243)
||
400 The queries used were “who will be there” and “who will there be”.
401 VP here is used in CamG’s sense. A coordination of VPs in the sense of CGEL does of
course exist but is not helpful in determining subjecthood: Pearce dismissed the programme’s
central theme with a pat circular argument: ‘There is, and will be, no socialist revolutionary
government to suppress, therefore it will not be suppressed.’ (ARD 569)
9. Obligatoriness
The maximal finite reduction of existentials contains there as a subject, which
also speaks in favour of its subjecthood:
(55) a. There were horses in the field when we came. (KCH 4081)
b. Were there horses in the field when you came?
c. #Horses were.
d. There were.
10. Uniqueness
As discussed in Sections 2.3.2 and 7.1.3.2, only CamG insists on the uniqueness
of the subject. However, contrary to the case of extraposition, researchers gen-
erally seem to agree that there is the subject in existential clauses, generating no
problems for the uniqueness constraint.402
The criterion of reflexive pronouns does not apply as no reflexive pronoun can
occur in an existential clause in one of the relevant functions.
12. Passivization
Existentials such as (56a) do not have a corresponding passive, which is hardly
surprising given that one of their characteristics is the copula or intransitive
verb:
(56) a. There must be a lot of documentation. (BND 1574)

b. *A lot of documentation must be been (by there).
c. *There must be been (by a lot of documentation).
Accordingly, no element can occur as a by-phrase. However, there are infinitival

existential structures after certain verbs where there occupies the position of a
so-called raised object (a generative term also used in CamG 1391):
(57) So you’d expect there to be a big change in the social impacts of un-
employment. (KRG 1448)
||
402 If we were to follow Anderson’s distinction between syntactic and morphosyntactic sub-
ject mentioned above, uniqueness would not be met, of course.
260 | Existentials
These structures can have passive counterparts403 and it is the ‘object’ (in tradi-
tional terms) that moves to preverbal position.404
(58) There is expected to be a £10 million write-down on its land bank.

(AHJ 199)
Accordingly, the criterion of passivization speaks in favour of there as the sub-

ject in (58) since it moved from object to subject position in CGEL’s terms.405
There are some cases where existentials appear to contain passive mor-
phology, such as (59a) and (60a), without following to be:
(59) a. In addition, there are attributed to lenders voting rights on shares

charged to them (except where they are controlled by the chargor).
(BP5 615)
(60) a. Less tangibly, there was noted in the interviews the tendency for the
specialist team members to be somewhat more articulate in the re-
sponses they made. (ALN 222)
In the case of the former, however, a reading in which the main clause is not
passive is also possible, as illustrated in (59b). If we adopt such a reading, we
may just as well interpret (59a) as showing heavy unit shift of the [NP] subject of
||
403 Not all verbs that allow an active with a postverbal existential structure also allow the
passive, though:
I never wanted there to be a war between us, Ingrid. (J19 2845)
*There was never wanted to be a war between us, Ingrid.
Conversely, with the verb say, “only the passive is possible” (CGEL 162) to express this meaning
(this is, however, a property of this particular reading of say and has been briefly discussed in
Section 5.2.2.2):
Between men and women, too, there is said to be a barrier. (A05 1141)
*He said there to be a barrier between men and women.
404 In sentences such as (57), the status of the postverbal elements is in fact a matter of debate
in linguistic theory. Thus CGEL (1217) states that expect in such structures should be analysed
semantically as taking one proposition as its argument, i.e. there to be a big change in the social
impacts of unemployment, but takes the fact that the first NP can become the subject in the
corresponding passive clause as a criterion to treat it as object of expect on the syntactic level.
See also the discussion in Matthews (2007b: 9ff).
405 Note however that agreement remains as described above, with the [NP] in the postverbal
to be-clause determining concord:
But in the first 10 months of 1989 alone over 7,000 have arrived, and there are expected to be
10,000 by the end of the year. (A8P 66)
the small postverbal clause (or, in terms of the more traditional analysis, of the
[NP], leaving the participial extension in front).
(59) b. In addition, there are voting rights attributed to lenders.
(60) b. ?There was the tendency to do XYZ noted in the interviews.
Why (60a) does not allow such a rephrasing (at least no fully acceptable sen-
tence similar to the pattern given in (60b) could be constructed) remains un-
clear. A possible reason might be the slightly different grammatical structure, as
attribute in (59a) has a valency slot for the [to_NP] whereas in the interviews in
(60a) is an adjunct. The more likely interpretation is, however, that there are
restrictions on information structure at work.406 Whatever the reason may be, it
would probably be misguided to analyse such structures as passive existentials.
13. Theme/topic
See following paragraph.
As already remarked in Section 2.3.2, CGEL does not always make a clear dis-
tinction between theme, topic and given, so these will be treated under the same
heading here. According to CGEL, existentials provide “some kind of dummy
theme which will enable the originator to indicate the ‘new’ status of a whole
clause, including its subject” (CGEL 1402). Furthermore the restriction on many
existentials for the postverbal [NP] to be indefinite (see above) is directly related
to the fact that it is discourse-new, as is also noted by Dowty, who remarks “that
existential constructions in many languages have a grammatical form that re-
moves the NP from normal grammatical subject status, possibly displacing it
with a dummy NP or locative (Clark 1978), thereby signifying that its referent is
NOT connected to previous discourse in the way that subject status would oth-
erwise indicate” (Dowty 1991: 564). The existential there can thus been regarded
as theme (and possibly given) by default.
15. Agentivity
Existential there is never agent. In bare existentials, no agent role is expressed,
so the criterion does not apply. In extended existential clauses such as (61) one
might argue that the postverbal [NP] can be an agent.
||
406 One might also suspect that length is responsible but *There was a tendency noted in the
interviews to do XYZ. was also judged unacceptable.
262 | Existentials
(61) There’s Paul McCartney doing a kids broadcast and a record about the
BEETLES [sic!] on this weird Australian label which is Australians do-
ing impersonations of a Liverpool accent. (K3J 515)
However, given the analysis of existentials provided here, it would probably

make more sense to state that the [NP] in question is agent only in the post-
verbal predication that comes after be and not in the main clause, as the verb
expressing the action of which the [NP] can be agent is part of that predication.
Further proof that the agentivity of the [NP] is dependent on the verb in the
postverbal predication is (62) below, which does not contain an agent because
the verb of the postverbal predication is in the passive.
(62) In 1991, there were 701,000 pupils being educated in Roman Catholic
schools of whom only 11.5 per cent. were non-Catholics. (FBY 89–90)
Finally, Gast/Haas (2011: 145) suggest a further kind of evidence, viz. the availa-
bility of existential there to subject-to-object raising (in the generative sense), as
in the following example (see also the paragraph on passivization above):
(63) On neurophysiological grounds one would expect there to be consid-

erable differences between different individuals with regard to the
most effective channels of learning; therefore, one must regard state-
ments such as that quoted with a certain amount of scepticism. (B3D
50)
So, to sum up, while there are issues with some of the criteria, most notably
agreement, the majority is clearly in favour of an analysis of existential there as
a subject. Or, in Hudson’s words, “[t]he grammatical subjecthood of THERE is as
close to being a fact as anything in grammar” (Hudson 1999: 200).
8.4 Theoretical treatment

This section concludes Chapter 8 with a discussion of the theoretical treatment
of existentials in grammatical models. Note that some approaches on which the
present study relies heavily do not feature in this chapter. As the reference
grammars’ analyses have been discussed in the descriptive part above, they
need not be repeated here and since Herbst/Schüller (2008) do not offer an in-
depth analysis of existentials, their model will only serve as the background of
the discussion of a possible treatment in valency theory in in Section 8.4.4.
8.4.1 Postverbal [NP] in extended existentials as subject of a small clause?
As we have seen above, extended existentials can usually be rephrased so that

the postverbal [NP] occurs as the subject of the modified version (or basic clause
in CGEL’s terms).
(64) a. There was no force involved. (JY5 2706)

b. No force was involved.
While nobody would contest the status of the underlined element as the subject
of the clause in (64b), we have seen above that usually there is treated as the
subject in (64a). Nonetheless, since the logico-semantic relationship between no
force and involved is the same in both versions, one may want to treat no force as
the subject of involved in both. This, however, would speak in favour of an anal-
ysis of no force involved as a sort of clausal constituent in the sentence, i.e. a
small clause in the terminology of generative grammar, which would in turn
mean that the structure of an extended existential may not contain a postverbal
[NP].407 On the other hand, as mentioned above, some grammars (e.g. LGSWE)
treat the extension as part of the postverbal [NP], which keeps the structure of
existentials uniform but obscures the relationship between postverbal [NP] and
the extension and treats structures as [NP] that cannot occur as [NP]s in other
structures. Neither CGEL nor CamG make statements about the syntactic status
of the extension in extended existential clauses. In the following sub-sections,
we shall review some arguments brought forward by Williams (1984), who is in
favour of a single [NP] analysis, in order to arrive at a balanced decision as to
how extended existentials could be modelled.
||
407 The problem is in fact very similar to the question of verbs of the consider type, where the
postverbal element(s) can be regarded as one item or as two items, depending on the criteria
used. See Section 5.2.2.2 for a discussion.
264 | Existentials
8.4.1.1 Heavy [NP] shift

On the basis of the evidence given in (65a–b), Williams (1984) shows that heavy
[NP] shift can occur in small clauses but cannot occur in existentials as illustrat-
ed by the pair (65c–d).
(65) a. I consider several of George’s recent acquaintances sick. (Williams

1984: 135)
b. I consider sick several of George’s recent acquaintances. (Williams
1984: 135)
c. There are several of George’s recent acquaintances sick. (Williams
1984: 135)
d. *There are sick several of George’s recent acquaintances. (Williams
1984: 135)
Consequently, he maintains, the postverbal element(s) cannot form a small

clause and that thus the underlined element is not a subject. However, as we
have seen above, there are cases which can be analysed as containing heavy
[NP] shift:408
(66) There should be produced to the tenant not only a copy of the policy
and/or a summary of the insured risks but also evidence of the pay-
ment of the last premium. (J77 853)
It is true, though, that the subject position in small clauses of the postverbal
consider type are much less restricted formally than the postverbal elements in
existentials are, i.e. we can get [V-ing] and extraposed [to_INF] and [that_CL]
subjects there (see Section 5.2.2.2 for discussion). Thus an analysis that treats
both structures as parallel may not be fully convincing.
8.4.1.2 Simplicity
Williams also claims “that the bare NP structure can generate all of the strings”
(Williams 1984: 132) we can find in existentials. However, as we have seen
above, there are postverbal elements in existentials that do not occur as [NP]s.
The fact that not the entire postverbal ‘string’ of words found in (26a) can be
used as an [NP] in (26b) contradicts Williams’ argument.409
||
408 See also the discussion of example (59a) above.
409 In the generative terminology, this would mean that the rule generating NPs would have
to over-generate in order to create the postverbal string in (26a).
(26) a. There are [some people] going to be disadvantaged by the new tax
system. (CamG 1395)
b. *Those people going to be disadvantaged by the new tax system will
have to be compensated in some way. (CamG 1395)
8.4.1.3 So-called ‘predicate restriction’410

Small clauses can consist of two [NP]s, i.e. a subject and a predicative element,
as in (67a) whereas, according to Williams (1984), no two [NP]s can occur post-
verbally in existentials as in (67b):
(67) a. I consider a friend of mine an imposter. (Williams 1984: 132)

b. *There was a friend of mine an imposter. (Williams 1984: 132)
However, Hannay shows that [NP]s can also exist as predicates, not only in the
form of a bare [NP] (such as ‘president’) as in (68) but also as a fully-fledged
[NP] as in (69), which would speak in favour of an analysis of the underlined
constituents as subjects in the small clause.
(68) There’s a friend of mine captain of the local football team. (Hannay
1985: 166)
(69) There’s one of the players a very good friend of mine. (Hannay 1985:
166)
Since a friend of mine captain of the local football team in (68) cannot sensibly
be analysed as an [NP], the argument speaks in favour of a small clause analysis
with the underlined elements as subjects.
The predicate restriction is often also discussed on the basis of adjectives.
Compare:
(70) a. There was a first year student sick yesterday. (Hannay 1985: 22)
b. *There is a first year student intelligent. (Hannay 1985: 22)
Hannay411 rejects the widespread interpretation of (70a–b) that “draws a distinc-

tion between property-assigning adjectival predicates and state-descriptive
||
410 See Hannay (1985: 21–23) for details.
411 Hannay’s model is rooted in functional grammar, so he models the restrictions identified
above as a restriction on the focus (“Focality Condition” [Hannay 1985: 160]) and posits a
requirement of a “non-identifying environment” (Hannay 1985: 160–163).
266 | Existentials
ones” (Hannay 1985: 146) and presents counter-evidence such as (71), in which
the italicized part is property-assigning but still acceptable.
(71) If you ask me there’s nobody here really clever. (Hannay 1985: 166)
Thus there seems to be no generally applicable restriction on adjectives that

would speak against a small clause analysis even though a tendency against
property-assigning adjectives can be observed.
8.4.1.4 [NP]s which resist conversion into a clause

On the other hand, Williams shows that the underlined part in (72a) can occur
as an [NP] in other contexts such as (72b) but cannot be turned into a clause as
in (72c).
(72) a. There is a man with a green coat. (Williams 1984: 133)

b. The man with a green coat is here. (Williams 1984: 133)
c. *The man is with a green coat. (Williams 1984: 133)
Such a restriction – the nature of which is unclear as it only occurs with a cer-
tain sense of with – is a point in favour of an [NP] analysis. One may be inclined
to argue that the evidence presented in (72a–c) speaks in favour of a bare exis-
tential analysis, but at least semantically, Williams is right when he claims that
(72a) “does not have the flavor of a purely existential sentence” (Williams 1984:
133).
Nonetheless we have seen that the arguments against the [NP] analysis are
convincing enough to reject it. This would leave the small clause analysis as the
preferred alternative in the generative framework.
However, in the light of the problems with a small clause analysis pointed
out above, Hannay (1985: ch. 3+4) argues against the small clause as modelled
in generative grammar and calls his postverbal element in extended existentials
an “embedded predication” (Hannay 1985: 73), which might be useful in order
to avoid the generative connotations of the term small clause in a non-
generative approach and to terminologically reflect the differences compared to
small clauses of the consider-type. We shall thus follow Hannay in calling the
postverbal structure in extended existentials a predication rather than a small
clause.
8.4.2 Issues of agreement
As outlined above, the typical case appears to be that the postverbal [NP] de-
termines concord since concord usually changes when the number of the post-
verbal [NP] changes. However, in word grammar (Hudson 1999; see also Hud-
son 1990, 2010), Hudson – as cited above – treats there as the subject of the
existential clause. He states first that “if [there] is a pronoun, it must have a
number” (Hudson 1999: 200) and then goes on to explain that in word grammar
the best way to model this is in parallel to the [NP] analysis in which “the de-
terminer is a pronoun which [...] has the common noun as its complement”
(Hudson 1999: 200). Given that in his model, pronoun and complement have the
same number and the same referent, he suggests treating “the delayed phrase in
each case as the complement of the pronoun that replaces it” (Hudson 1999:
201). Figure 24 shows “how the number agreement is explained by the extra
dependency (labeled ‘c’ for complement) shown beneath the words” (Hudson
1999: 201).
(73) There is a fly in my soup. (Hudson 1999: 201)
Fig. 24: Relationships in example (73) according to word grammar (Hudson 1999: 201)
While Hudson’s analysis offers a consistent model of the structure and a neat
explanation of certain agreement phenomena with coordinated structures, it
does not account for non-concord and it still has the disadvantage of having to
posit agreement between there and the postverbal [NP] and then there and the
verb, which seems psychologically less plausible than a direct agreement of the
verb with the postverbal [NP].
Similarly, CamG argues that “the dummy pronoun there does not have in-
herent person-number properties but inherits them from the NP that it ‘displac-
268 | Existentials
es’ as subject” (CamG 242). To support this claim, CamG compares the situation
to relative clauses in which the verb agrees with the antecedent and not with the
relative pronoun that is the actual subject of the relative clause. Examples (74a–
b) are used to illustrate the point:
(74) a. There tends to be a single pre-eminent factor in the breakup of a mar-

riage. (CamG 242)
b. There tend to be several contributing factors in the breakup of a mar-
riage. (CamG 242)
Ultimately, the choice between the verb-forms tends and tend is determined by the person-
number of the underlined NP, but that NP cannot be the subject of tend, for it is not locat-
ed in the tend clause, but in the be clause. (CamG 242)
Such an inheritance relationship between there and the displaced subject helps
to explain away the ‘odd’ concord and is in fact needed in catenative structures.
For CamG, this includes structures with modal verbs and related constructions
(see CamG 1209–1220 for an in-depth discussion of advantages and drawbacks
of such an analysis). CGEL and Herbst/Schüller (2008) prefer what CamG (1213)
calls a “verb group” analysis, with CGEL applying the term marginal auxiliaries
“to all four categories (marginal modals, modal idioms, semi-auxiliaries and
catenative verbs)” (CGEL 236), which means that agreement may be describable
without there inheriting the person-number from the postverbal [NP]. This is the
analysis adopted in the present chapter since it is much simpler in its grammat-
ical structure and keeps there and the verb in the same clause as the postverbal
elements, which is particularly preferable if we want to model that there + verb
combine to form a complex element which acts in a way as valency carrier, as
advocated below.412 In such an analysis, we can maintain the (more intuitive)
assertion that the postverbal [NP] determines concord.
Let us now turn to those cases where concord is not determined by the
number of the postverbal [NP]. CGEL (1405) states that in informal contexts
there may trigger singular agreement on the verb even if the postverbal [NP] is
in the plural as in (43c) reproduced here:
(43) c. ‘There’s only two bedrooms,’ said the woman. (ABX 1027)
||
412 It has to be stressed that the present chapter is intended to present a model that is well-
suited for existentials and is thus written from the comfortable position of not having to say
anything about the suitability and implications of the selected model for other aspects of the
description of English grammar. Accordingly, no statement will be made as to a general prefer-
ence of the ‘verb group’ analysis over the ‘catenative’ analysis.
This would suggest that – with regard to concord – in informal contexts, there
acts as the subject whereas the postverbal [NP] acts as the subject in other con-
texts.
CamG states that the agreement in (43c) is only possible because “the copu-
la is cliticised to the subject” (CamG 242).413 A corpus search of there is in the
BNC seems to confirm this as an overall tendency, although there are a few cas-
es which seem to contradict it. Most are from transcribed speech though, so the
quality of the transcription (or the recording in the first place) may be partly
responsible. Others, even though they are written language, do not reflect the
style one would usually expect in writing. Interestingly, the tendency seems to
apply to there has been vs there’s been as well, which may be an indicator that –
as CGEL claims – the style level is responsible for the difference and not wheth-
er “the copula is pronounced as a full independent word” (CamG 242), which
might only be a secondary effect of the style level. (75) is an example of the sin-
gular agreement with there’s been + plural noun taken from an interview.
(75) Yes there’s been many cases where lesbian and gay couples have left a
gay bar, have given each other a goodnight kiss at a bus stop or at a
tube station or in the street and they’ve been arrested under public
decency laws and dragged through the courts and fined up to £200.
(KRT 1759)
Martínez Insua/Palacio Martínez (2003) analysed a 1-million-word subcorpus

(50 % spoken) of the BNC and found that it contained 2410 there-existential
clauses, 487 ‘minimal’ and 1923 extended ones.414 Of these, 233 showed ‘non-
concord’ (2003: 276), 64 were minimal and 159 extended. This means that in
13.1 % of minimal clauses and in 8.3 % of the extended clauses, the verb does
not show concord with the postverbal [NP].415 Breivik/Martínez Insua (2008: 361)
even go so far as to claim that “there1 + singular be (notably the contracted form
||
413 Breivik/Martínez Insua (2008: 358) find that in the subcorpus of the BNC they used more
than 80 % of the instances showing non-concord contain the form there’s, but there is and
there was do occur as well.
414 Their classification of existentials as minimal is applied to instances in which no element
whatsoever follows the [NP]; no distinction between postmodification and extension is made.
415 Martínez Insua/Palacio Martínez actually claim that “the frequency of non-concord is
markedly higher among TCs with an extension […]. Minimal existential TCs […] as opposed to
those containing any kind of extension after the PVNP […] display lower rates of non-concord”
(2003: 276). Apparently, they were misled by the higher overall numbers. It is true that extend-
ed existentials are more common in the group of non-concord showing existentials, but this is
only due to the fact that they are more common overall.
270 | Existentials
there1’s) has acquired the status of a fixed pragmatic formula.” They do not,
however, explain how this can be reconciled with the occurrence of the con-
tracted form of has discussed above. Their analysis is, in fact, very close to what
Chomsky suggests in a footnote:
As is well known, agreement with the associate is sometimes overridden, as for example
in there’s three books on the table, there’s a dog and a cat in the room (vs. *a dog and a cat
is in the room). The phenomenon, however, seems superficial: thus, it does not carry over
to *is there three books ..., *there isn’t any books ..., and so on. The form there’s seems a
frozen option, not relevant here. (Chomsky 1995: 384)
Thus, to return to the original problem here, the question as to which element
the verb agrees with cannot be answered conclusively since agreement is de-
pendent on the style level.416 A model of existentials ideally should be able to
account for such conflicting evidence. In non-informal style, the simplest (and
thus possibly preferable) interpretation is, however, that the postverbal [NP]
determines concord.
8.4.3 Further studies
There are further studies on the structure of existentials that did not fit the
treatment in the previous chapter but add new aspects that are worth discuss-
ing.
||
416 In a more comprehensive study, Riordan (2007) found that a whole array of factors deter-
mines the occurrence of concord in existentials. His own summary of his distributional anal-
yses will serve here to show that the situation is more complex than can be modelled in the
present chapter:
We saw an effect of type of determiner on nonconcord, with postcopular NPs containing
cardinal numerals and non-count quantificational nouns significantly associated with
greater levels of nonconcord. There was an effect of the length of the predicate on con-
cord, such that shorter predicates were more associated with nonconcord, contradicting a
previous finding in the literature. There were strong effects of social and discourse factors
on concord: increasing age and formality of discourse context were associated with lower
levels of nonconcord. (Riordan 2007: 261)
Since Riordan’s study is based on a spoken corpus recorded in an academic setting, some
variables are not independent (e.g. higher age correlates with certain social roles and thus
possibly with a higher degree of formality). Consequently, he is careful not to make strong
claims about ‘English’, but even if the study may need revalidation based on other data, the
determiners of agreement he identifies appear convincing. For a variationist study based on a
UK dialect see Rupp (2005).
Collins (1992) adopts a relatively traditional treatment of existentials in

general but proposes a markedly different analysis for some of the existentials
that have a relative clause or participial extension. These he calls cleft existen-
tials for various syntactic, semantic and pragmatic reasons. Semantically, he
claims that “[w]hereas standard existentials predicate the existence of an entity
or entities, cleft existentials are concerned with the description of complex
events” (Collins 1992: 426). In this respect, the division appears to correspond to
that between bare and extended existentials presented above. However, for
Collins there are no locative extensions since the existence of a locative element
makes the structure a standard existential. While this may be right as a tenden-
cy, it still remains doubtful whether all existentials with a locative extension
can be seen predicating the existence of something as can be observed in the
following examples:
(76) There’s no gun in this house. (GW3 3228)
(77) That’s that’s the hundred metres that’s the length of his string. There’s
his kite on the end of that. (FMJ 472–3)
While (76) conforms to the prototype, (77) – while possibly not the description
of a complex event – is less straightforwardly conceived as an assertion of exist-
ence but rather as a predication as to the position of the kite. The latter type is
comparatively rare, though.
In generative grammar, there are a number of ways to model the structure
of existentials. As discussed above in Section 8.4.1, Williams (1984) argues in
favour of an analysis that treats the underlined words in (78) as an [NP] whereas
Lasnik (1995) prefers to analyse them as constituting a small clause, i.e. with a
knock as subject of the underlined structure.
(78) There was a knock on the door and Scales came in. (GW3 1994)
Some of the arguments brought forward for and against the respective analysis
are discussed in Section 8.4.1 above, others are of a theory-internal kind (i.e.
what principle of generative grammar prevents which sort of derivation, etc).
Law’s (1999) introduction gives a general idea of the debate:
Chomsky (1986, 1991) suggested that at some (abstract) level of representation [(79b)] the
associate DP [=the postverbal NP] ends up in the preverbal subject position by a process of
expletive replacement, where it would agree with the finite copula verb, just like it does in
[(79a)]: (Law 1999: 183)
272 | Existentials
(79) a. There are/*is many books on the table. (Law 1999: 183)
b. There + many booksi are ti on the table. (Law 1999: 183)
c. Many books are/*is on the table. (Law 1999: 183)
To draw a close parallelism between [(79a)] and [(79c)], however, one may have to assume
that the expletive there in [(79b)] deletes at some point in the derivation (Chomsky 1986)
[...]. (Law 1999: 183)
From a non-transformational point of view it would be highly unintuitive to

assume that there is an existential there at some underlying level of representa-
tion in (79c) which is then deleted in the derivation; other transformationalists
(e.g. Williams 1984) model the relationship between (79a) and (79c) as the result
of a process of “there-insertion” (which is also the title of Williams’ paper). Nei-
ther of the two treatments is compatible with any sort of usage-based approach.
Finally, Erdmann’s (1976) study of existentials is based on a rather idiosyn-
cratic theoretical model of relations which is too complex to discuss in great
detail in the context of the present chapter. Basically, he assumes underlying
representations of sentences which are based on relations of different types
between two elements and appear to be similar to X-bar theory. The underlying
representation of (80) is reproduced in Figure 25.
(80) There is someone on the stairs. (Erdmann 1976: 178)
Fig. 25: Graphical representation of (80) in Erdmann’s relational model (adapted from Erdmann
1976: 185)
As we can see, his approach departs sharply from other approaches in that the
two nominal elements someone and the stairs appear in a relation and the prep-
osition has a relation to that relation. There is definitely not the subject at the
underlying level given that it does not figure in the underlying representation.
Thus heavy use of derivational mechanisms is needed in Erdmann’s model in

order to arrive at surface structures, so his theory is also incompatible with us-
age-based approaches and a (surface-oriented) valency grammar as proposed
by Herbst/Schüller (2008).
8.4.4 Proposed structure
Given the conflicting evidence and competing treatments outlined above it is

not surprising that existentials are problematic to model in a valency frame-
work, too.
In terms of the valency structure, bare existentials resemble the so-called
obligatory extraposition with verbs such as appear and seem discussed in Sec-
tion 7.1.2. Thus in (11a), we have one element (there as subject) in front of the
verb and one after it.
(11) a. There is no cure. (A01 7)
Both are obligatory, so (11a) cannot be rephrased as (11b).
(11) b. #No cure is.417
Thus we have a typical divalent use of be. As discussed in more detail in Section
6.2, the valency of be is generally problematic in that one may argue that post-
verbal complement instead of the verb is responsible of valency restrictions,
even though the divalent syntactic structure of such sentences seems to be de-
termined by be.418 If we assume that be is the primary valency carrier in (11a), we
can state that both there and the postverbal [NP] are complements of the verb as
they are obligatory and formally specified. However, while the postverbal ele-
ment also likely fills an argument slot, it is more difficult to claim argument-
hood for there given its non-realization in the semantically similar (11c).419
||
417 This sentence is of course a grammatical and acceptable sentence of English in certain
communicative contexts. Thus in a short exchange of the type Can you offer a cure that is 100%
reliable? – No cure is. it is perfectly natural. However, (11b) is no acceptable alternative to (11a)
in the context in which it was used. (The example is taken from a leaflet on AIDS.)
418 The unpleasant side-effect of an analysis in which the postverbal element is a valency
carrier would be that we would have to posit that the nouns which occur in postverbal position
of existential clauses have a valency slot for there. This is of course neither desirable from a
theoretical point of view nor psychologically plausible.
419 See Helbig (1992: 9f) and Herbst/Klotz (2002) for a discussion of mismatches between
arguments and complements in valency theory.
274 | Existentials
(11) c. No cure exists.
We thus have to conclude that bare existentials cannot be modelled satisfactori-

ly in a traditional valency approach without devising specialised mechanisms
or exceptions to rules that are needed elsewhere in the model.
For the discussion of extended existentials, we are faced with two ques-
tions. The first is whether the postverbal [NP] and the extension form one con-
stituent or two and the other is what type of constituent the entire postverbal
element (in the case of a positive answer to the first question) or the extension
(in case of a negative answer to the first question) represents.
The treatment of extended existentials that will be advocated here analyses
the extension (underlined in (81)) as a predicate to the postverbal [NP], irrespec-
tive of the formal realisation of the extension.
(81) When we reached the start after a nervous descent there were no fewer
than seven climbers ahead of us. (ECH 283)
Whether one would want to analyse the whole postverbal part as one constitu-
ent is a matter of personal preference to some extent. The fact that it contains a
predication would speak in favour of it, agreement would speak against it since
clauses are usually treated as singular (see discussion on extraposed clauses in
Section 7.1.3.2). With regard to presentational existentials, Williams argues that
the underlined words in (82) cannot form a clause “since arrive and the other
verbs that appear in these TISs [= there-insertion sentences] are not verbs that
take clausal arguments” (Williams 1984: 146).
(82) There arrived some people very sick. (Williams 1984: 146)
However, as we have seen above, only a relatively limited set of verbs can occur
in such presentational existential structures, although it is not certain whether a
comprehensive list can ever be compiled. Since general semantic groups or
rules appear to be insufficient to predict their occurrence, it would of course be
desirable to state the possibility to occur in an existential clause as a lexical
property of the verb, similar to other valency information, but if no predictions
can be made reliably, a valency model does not appear appropriate, either. A
more promising model might be an argument structure construction model as
presented by Goldberg (1995), where verbs that are not incompatible can be
used in a certain argument structure pattern which is associated with a certain
||
In the generative framework, existential there is not assigned a theta role either (see Chomsky
[1981] 1993: 35).
meaning, but no storage of the potential of a verb to occur in a certain argument

structure construction is necessarily assumed. It would require a much larger-
scale study of presentational existentials to verify to what extent a network
model as discussed in Section 9.3.3 might be able to predict the verbs that can
be found in such structures based on different types of input data.
Still, in order to model existentials in a valency approach, there would be a
need to posit larger and internally complex valency carriers (cf. also the catego-
ries of lexically and contextually specified elements in the Erlangen Valency
Patternbank [Herbst/Uhrig 2009]) within a valency pattern approach, where
agreement is modelled via a corresponding sentence type (see Section 9.3.2). It
will be argued here that there combines with a verb (typically with a form of be)
to form a larger unit with one valency slot that allows for a noun phrase or a
predication, while one can still identify, conjugate and possibly replace the verb
in the complex valency carrier. However, this is already far removed from con-
ceived valency theory since the verb is not treated as the primary valency carrier
in the sentence, so the only similarity to valency is that the combination of there
+ be opens up a slot for another complement and restricts the form of that com-
plement. This is in principle in line with the idea of multi-word valency carriers
mentioned by Herbst/Uhrig (2010: 131).
Thus we have to conclude that any description of existentials that relies on
a strictly verb-centric valency model is unsatisfactory, as the idiomatic charac-
ter, the unique syntactic structure and the distinct pragmatic function420 of the
construction will not be represented adequately in such a model. There is an
important difference between existential there and the dummy subject it in ex-
traposed sentences: it can occur in subject position whenever the slot is not
occupied, be it due to extraposition or due to the fact that a verb such as rain
does not open up any valency slots. And it is a word that can usually occur in
subject position when it is used with referential function. Existential there,
however, is more difficult to model as its occurrence is limited to a small set of
closely related grammatical constructions, so it is impossible to assess its mean-
ing or function independently of this family of existential constructions. Thus,
any treatment in terms of general syntactic rules or valency will need to account
for the specific properties of the construction using the tools offered by the
model and thus make its description more complex than it probably is. We have
to agree with Lakoff (1987), who takes the peculiarities of existentials as an
||
420 It is outside the scope of the present study to describe the pragmatic functions of and
restrictions on existentials in detail. See CamG (1396ff) for an in-depth discussion of such
factors.
276 | Existentials
argument in favour of a construction grammar approach in the sense of Fill-

more/Kay/O’Connor (1988) and against an autonomous treatment in the syntax:
Of course, grammatical construction theory is not the only contemporary theory that per-
mits the direct pairing of syntactic and semantic information. However, it is the only theo-
ry I am aware of that permits the pairing of complex syntactic configurations with the ap-
propriate pragmatics – in this case, conveyed illocutionary force. Grammatical
construction theory permits such pragmatic factors to enter directly into the composition
of sentences. Generative theories with an autonomous syntax cannot do this. (Lakoff 1987:
481)
We thus simply have to accept that constructions without an easy-to-model

internal syntactic structure can be learned and used independently of supposed
general rules in the language,421 which is probably due to the fact that units of
meaning422 are often larger and more complex than traditional morphemes – an
insight that has gained substantial ground in linguistic theory over the past 20
years (see for instance Sinclair 2004, Goldberg 1995).
As to the question of the usefulness of the concept of subject, we have to
conclude that existentials are among the structures in the English language for
which the concept is of limited use since many but not all the properties typical-
ly associated with it are found in the existential there (e.g. no concord, no
aboutness). Also, cross-linguistically, this seems to be true of such structures as
observed by Gast/Haas:
It is well-known that presentationals are often characterized by a non-canonical distribu-

tion of subject-properties over the (pro)nominal constituents of a sentence […]. Moreover,
many presentational constructions contain an ‘expletive subject’, i.e. a (mostly pronomi-
nal) element which does not play an obvious role in the argument structure or interpreta-
tion of a sentence while still exhibiting some (or all) subject properties [references omit-
ted].” (Gast/Haas 2011: 128).
It even appears sensible to posit that, in the light of constructional approaches

and network models, the concept subject may do more harm than good since it
does not help in any way to describe this family of structures that are most like-
ly “learned pairings of form and function” (Goldberg 1995: 5) but forces on them
||
421 This is in line with Breivik/Martínez Insua’s position mentioned above, who argue “that
there1 + be functions as a presentative formula today, and that the use of non-concord […] is the
result of a long process of grammaticalization and subjectification” (Breivik/Martínez Insua
2008: 351).
422 It follows automatically that meaning is taken in a broad sense in such a statement so that
it includes not only lexical meaning but also functions such as focusing and the like.
an analysis in terms of categories that are smaller than psychologically plausi-

ble and thus simply not suitable for the description and modelling of their par-
ticular properties.
9 Conclusions and perspectives for syntactic
models
The present study has provided a review of the theoretical treatment of various
structures as well as a critical evaluation of these models based on large quanti-
ties of data from a range of sources. The point of the present chapter is not only
to summarize the findings and problems discussed above, but also to offer an
integrated perspective of a possible theoretical treatment of these phenomena
in a valency framework and beyond.
9.1 Data for linguistic analysis

The data-intensive approach taken in this study led to a whole array of prob-
lems of data analysis and data interpretation. One set of issues is related to the
corpora used and the other one to the native speaker interviews.
Compared to many other studies on syntax, the corpus basis of the present
study is quite substantial. It does not only rely on the BNC with its 100 million
words of running text but also on a range of additional corpora presented in
Section 3.2.2, which – together with the BNC – amount to more than 1.5 billion
words of text. Due to their opportunistic sampling method, they cannot be re-
garded as representative of ‘the English language’ to the extent to which the
BNC can, but representativeness is less of an issue in a study of the nature of a
syntactic phenomenon. Whether the corpora contain a higher or lower propor-
tion of clausal subjects than the population (i.e. ‘English’) does is of marginal
importance for the present study.423 However, there are a few issues that are
associated with such huge and less carefully sampled corpora that have to be
addressed.
The main problem is noise, i.e. problematic instances of data one would not
want to include in a carefully designed corpus. These comprise (but are not
limited to) the following:
– imperfect pre-processing (it turned out that headlines were often merged
with the following sentence, for instance)
– non-native usage (often cited in newspaper articles)
||
423 We can thus agree with Schierholz’ (2001: 96) argument that representativeness of the
sample is not the primary concern in the choice of corpus as long as we do not make claims
about the frequency distribution in the population based on the non-representative sample.
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110589801-299
280 | Conclusions and perspectives for syntactic models
– archaic language (some of the texts were about 100 years old)
– poetry (which was explicitly excluded from corpora such as the Brown cor-
pus due to its often highly deviant syntax and creative use of language).
While the first point may only lower precision and recall of search queries, the
second and third (and to some extent the fourth) are much more difficult to
detect, although detection is usually possible through careful checks of the
linguistic context. The problem of how to deal with such instances remains,
though. Should we discard words (supposedly) uttered by non-native speakers
of English but published in British newspapers? Should we ignore evidence if it
turns out to be over 50 years old? If so, since the corpora apart from the BNC do
not contain metadata and we can thus only check the status of individual in-
stances by trying to find the source, should we only discard evidence that ap-
pears to be dubious, i.e. contradicts the theory? All decisions of that sort are
problematic, so in order not to tamper with the data, no filter of any such kind
was applied. The respective instances were, however, marked with a comment.
Furthermore, there are technical limitations that have to be mentioned in
relation to the corpus evidence. One is that in the parsed corpora the reliability
of the stochastic parser used is far from perfect. The figures published by Cer et
al. (2010) suggest that we can expect about 85 % correct attachment of labelled
dependencies with the Stanford Parser that was used here, but these figures
might be overly optimistic given the varied nature of corpus text used in the
present study. In an evaluation using a different corpus, Proisl (personal com-
munication) found that labelled attachment with the model used here drops to
around 75 %.424 We thus have to expect that, for instance, we have missed out
on [to_INF] subjects that were present in the corpora but were analysed as
[to_INF] adjuncts of purpose instead. It was also impossible to automatically
retrieve [that_CL] subjects without that, but the analysis of extraposed [that_CL]
subjects is based on sufficient data, so that the overall results should not have
been influenced in a meaning-changing way by this limitation.
Let us briefly put the size of the corpora into perspective: For the BNC, As-
ton/Burnard claim that it “corresponds to roughly 10 years of linguistic experi-
ence of the average speaker in terms of quantity – though not, of course, in
||
424 A certain error rate is inherent given that there are syntactic ambiguities where even the
human annotator cannot decide which structure is ‘correct’, such as so-called PP attachment,
i.e. structural ambiguity between postmodifier and adjunct in cases such as He saw the spy with
the binoculars. As a consequence the figures often appear lower than they are because human
annotators could never score 100 % on this kind of task, either.
Data for linguistic analysis | 281
quality” (Aston/Burnard 1998: 28). Their estimate of how much language people
are exposed to seems to be rather conservative, though. Dąbrowska assumes
“an eight-hour ‘language day’ – that is to say, that most people spend about
eight hours a day engaged in some kind of linguistic activity (talking, reading,
watching television, listening to the radio, browsing the Internet, etc.)”
(Dąbrowska 2004: 19), which means that the BNC would correspond to roughly
four years of linguistic experience of the speaker.425 Given that most native
speakers interviewed for the present study were language professionals,
Dąbrowska’s estimate may actually be closer to the reality of their linguistic
exposure.
If we accept that estimate, our corpora would correspond to 60 years of lin-
guistic experience. Thus if we find a structure only once in the corpora (e.g. a
[that_CL] non-extraposed subject with a given verb), there is only a 50 % chance
that a 30-year-old speaker has come across this structure even only once in his
entire life so far.426 Given that many of the structures we studied are syntactical-
ly complex and are thus probably over-represented in our almost exclusively
written corpora and given that items that occur once in a corpus are often over-
represented statistically, the chance is probably much lower.
For most structures the corpus evidence was sufficiently large to identify ac-
tual restrictions and to enable us to base serious arguments upon them. Since
the data collection was carried out against the hypotheses (i.e. even dubious
evidence that contradicted the hypotheses was accepted as valid), the results
should of course not be read in a way that suggests that every construction with
a plus-sign in the tables presented above is equally acceptable – the opposite is
the case. But since much of the relevant data is made available in the appen-
dices, the reader can of course derive his or her own judgements from the pri-
mary data. Generally, the data available for the active clause was sufficient; for
the passives there was less data and there were huge differences between the
different lexical units studied. For non-extraposed subjects in copular clauses,
the availability of data was most severely restricted and the native speaker in-
formants’ verdicts were indispensable.
However, there are also problems with the native speaker data that need
mentioning. For purely practical reasons, most items could only be tested with
||
425 Calculated on the basis of a rate of 150 words per minute (see Dąbrowska 2004: 19 for
details).
426 Using the figures quoted by Aston/Burnard, the corpora would correspond to 150 years of
exposure and the chance of a 30-year-old native speaker having heard the construction once
would only be 20 %.
two, three or four native speaker informants, which was considered sufficient
because the main idea was to verify corpus data and exclude obvious errors. It
turned out that ‘obvious’ errors were not so obvious after all. We can illustrate
problems of that kind when we take a closer look at the evidence used for the
systematic study in Section 6.3.1.2 on adjectives that occur with an extraposed
[to_INF] according to the VDE but not with a [that_CL]: Since the VDE provides
very good coverage of almost all relevant adjectives that allow an extraposed
[that_CL], the vast majority of the adjectives that had to be checked because
they were not listed with a [that_CL] in the VDE disprefer the [that_CL] to some
extent (at least compared to the [to_INF]). Nonetheless, in the native speaker
interviews, NS1 and NS4 fully accepted 146 and 179 items respectively and cate-
gorically rejected 13 and 6. NS2 and NS3 fully accepted 80 and 84 and rejected
91 and 93. All native speakers were interviewed independently of one another.
The figures are charted in the following diagram:
200
150
100 rejected (1)

fully acceptable (5)
50
0
NS1 NS2 NS3 NS4
Fig. 26: Acceptance and rejection of test items for adjectives followed by a [that_CL] (see Ap-
pendix 19)
While the picture seems to suggest that NS2 and NS3 virtually share intuitions,
this is by no means so. They exactly agree in their verdict for the full acceptance
in 39 instances, for the rejection in 46 instances and they do not fully agree in
127 instances.427 In the light of such contradictory evidence it becomes obvious
||
427 This sounds slightly worse than it is since sometimes one speaker may have fully accepted
a sentence which the other would have accepted but dispreferred over another structure. Fur-
thermore, of the sentences tested, about 50 were made up (often with the help of NS4), so not
all of the disagreement is on corpus examples.
Data for linguistic analysis | 283
that a binary acceptable/unacceptable distinction is hard to maintain and that it

is important to additionally take frequency data from corpora into account.
In the case of the adjectives with extraposed subject that is comparatively
easy to do due to the usually high overall frequency of the construction. In the
corpora used above for research of the construction (about 780 million words),
no instance of illegal with an extraposed [that_CL] subject was found, so three
native speakers were asked for their verdict on the following example:
(1) It was illegal that she was fired just because she was pregnant. (in-
vented)
It was accepted by two out of three informants, but if we compare this structure
to the infinitive variants ([to_INF] plus [for_NP_to_INF] and [of_NP_to_INF]),
which occur roughly 2,000 times in the parsed corpora, it becomes immediately
obvious that whatever the native speaker informants might say when they are
presented with it, this construction is practically never used (or, to stay with the
model given above, it is likely that a speaker never hears this structure in his or
her entire life).428 In such cases, where the difference between the realisations in
the corpus is sufficiently large, even Stefanowitsch’s method for accounting for
negative evidence (Stefanowitsch 2006) would be usable in principle if it were
possible to determine the frequency of the construction as such (i.e. extraposed
subject with adjective). Unfortunately, it is currently impossible to determine
this frequency for two reasons: First, due to the large number of instances a
manual classification is out of the question. Secondly, the phenomenon resists
automatic analysis given that no distinction between the referential pronoun it
and a post-adjectival complement on the one hand and dummy it with an ex-
traposed subject on the other hand can be made reliably.429
In the case of rarer data, the situation is much more difficult. If we find one
example of hilarious with a non-extraposed [that_CL] and five or six430 with a
non-extraposed [to_INF] in the parsed corpora, we cannot tell from the corpus
data whether a [that_CL] is as acceptable as the [to_INF], so we have to revert to
native speaker judgements if we want to make a statement about hilarious at
||
428 The situation is similar for a [that_CL] subject with persuade, where only one example was
found and native speaker informants accepted the construction. Newmeyer’s (2003) conflicting
results presented at the end of 4.1.3 might thus be explained by the fact that one instance in our
corpora may correspond to less than one instance in the lifetime of a native speaker.
429 Similar difficulties arise due to the ambiguity of the forms that and to.
430 One of the sentences has different readings and might or might not be counted.
all.431 But since we saw with illegal that native speaker judgements need not
necessarily reflect actual usage, it is hard to decide whether it is preferable to
make a statement about acceptability or not if the corpus evidence is too thin.
The whole question of what data is adequate is related to the question of
what it is we would like to describe in a grammatical model. If a grammatical
description aims at being a model of the psychological reality of speakers, then
– given the huge disagreement among native speaker informants – it may be
problematic to base such a description on a corpus, since a corpus contains
average usage over a whole range of individuals with individual grammars.
Thus one may be inclined to follow the route taken by the Kiparskys, who were
faced with a similar problem of non-agreement among native speakers:
There are speakers for whom many of the syntactic and semantic distinctions we bring up
do not exist at all. Professor Archibald Hill has kindly informed us that for him factive and
non-factive predicates behave in most respects alike and that even the word fact in his
speech has lost its literal meaning and can head clauses for which no presupposition of
truth is made. We have chosen to describe a rather restrictive type of speech (that of C.K.)
because it yields more insight into the syntactic-semantic problems with which we are
concerned. (Kiparsky/Kiparsky 1970: 147)
While, at first sight, the idea of modelling the language of one person in order to
achieve a psychologically adequate model has a certain appeal (and is related to
Chomsky’s ideal speaker-listener), the general applicability of such a model is so
severely restricted that it may not be able to predict how language is actually
used. Since we know that (a) native speakers tend to change their minds432 and
(b) that native speaker judgements do not necessarily reflect their language use,
any model that relies exclusively on native speaker judgement is of course
bound to be much less accurate in describing language usage433 than a model
based on actual language use found in corpus evidence.
In sum we can state that if we want to model language use, it is helpful to
rely more on corpus data than on native speaker interviews. If the former is not
available in sufficient quantities, it may become indispensable to rely on the
latter, but the examples cited above indicate that such a step will reduce the
quality of the results in many cases since there is a substantial divergence be-
tween what native speakers accept and what they produce.
||
431 Just accepting one instance in a large corpus as proof of existence is what Schierholz calls
“naive Corpuslinguistik” (2005: 13).
432 See, for instance, Quirk/Greenbaum (1970: 48f).
433 However, it has to be stressed that Chomsky’s aim is not to describe language use but to
describe the internal grammar of a human being.
The concept of subject | 285
For the present study, after reviewing thousands of corpus examples and
eliciting roughly 3,500 judgements from native speaker informants, we can be
confident that most of the restrictions presented in this study will remain valid
even when verified with larger corpora and more native speakers. The policy of
accepting counter-examples even on a dubious empirical basis makes the de-
scriptive part of the present study weaker but the argument for arbitrary re-
strictions stronger, since it is likely that in actual usage there are many more
restrictions for most native speakers than claimed in this study.434
9.2 The concept of subject

One of the hypotheses stated at the beginning of this study was that the notion
of ‘subject’ may not be a sensible concept in grammatical theory and descrip-
tion. Chapters 7 and 8 on extraposition and existentials – and particularly the
detailed discussions of what should be analysed as the subject in such struc-
tures – have shown that some of the defining criteria run into problems in non-
canonical structures. Following up on these discussions it will be argued here
that these problems are due to the fact that subject incorporates a variety of
properties that only coincide in the same constituent in canonical structures.
9.2.1 Problems of diverging subject properties
Let us recall that traditionally subjects are prototypically defined in terms of

category, aboutness, agentivity, agreement, givenness and position, for in-
stance.435 But only the subject in the first of the following set of sentences
matches all these criteria:
(2) She is sleeping now. (G0X 3077)
(3) My sister is a secretary and I am studying biology. (A6V 2174)
The subject in a copular clause, as in (3) above, cannot be called agentive in the
sense of the original definition quoted in Section 2.3.2 as “the case of the typi-
||
434 It follows that for a purely descriptive enterprise, such as a lexicographic project, relying
exclusively on the vast amount of corpus data available would have been preferable.
435 See Section 2.3.2 for a discussion and a detailed list of relevant criteria. The properties
mentioned here were chosen in order to illustrate how they can diverge.
cally animate perceived instigator of the action identified by the verb” (Fillmore
1968: 24) since there is no action. With clausal subjects, as in the following ex-
ample, the subject is not animate and thus less typically agentive, although
concepts such as Dowty’s (1991) proto-roles or Herbst/Schüller’s (2008: 158ff)
clausal roles can remedy that issue.436
(4) That it should suddenly be privatised and handed over to a Cambodi-

an-Japanese joint venture has shocked many Cambodians. (newspa-
pers)
Accordingly, a clausal subject in a copular clause is neither animate nor the

instigator of an action:
(5) That she did not do so herself was beside the point. (GU9 907)
Also, a clausal subject is not the prototypical noun phrase either, so the criteri-
on of category is not fully met. Thus the fact that we have used the term subject
for clausal subjects throughout the present study in analogy to the prototypical
nominal subjects at least deserves reflection despite it being in line with the
major reference grammars and most grammatical models.
In clauses showing extraposition, as we have seen above, there are two el-
ements that might be regarded as subject in principle:
(6) ‘It’s true that they never consulted me. (CDB 58)
There are some criteria that speak in favour of it as a subject in (6), others speak
in favour of the [that_CL]. Specifically, in favour of it we can list category,
agreement (to some extent), position, possibly givenness.437 On the other hand,
aboutness has to be counted in favour of the [that_CL] and so does agentivity if
we regard it as a matter of degree or in terms of proto-roles/clausal roles in non-
copular clauses such as the following:
(7) It amazes me that there are still some people who equate morality with
Christianity. (K55 8936)
For existential clauses, the situation is equally difficult. Thus in the following
example, the verb seems to agree with the postverbal [NP] and the sentence is
about it. On the other hand, it is not usually given nor is it in preverbal position.
||
436 A similar agentive interpretation of some subjects that are not typically agents in German
is noted by Reis (1982: 182).
437 See discussion in Section 7.1.3.2.
(8) There are many good reasons. (A67 1662)
Similar issues in the identification of subjects occur for instance in so-called

cleft or pseudo-cleft sentences ((9) and (10) respectively):
(9) It is this typological point that I would like to consider now, bearing in
mind the question of historical divergence and convergence that I re-
ferred to above. (FAD 72)
(10) ‘What you’re hearing is the sound of sacred cows dying.’ (CSJ 247)
The motivation behind the use of such structures438 is usually that they allow to
assign topic or focus status (and/or given or new status) to elements that would
not have the same status in the canonical clause (or at least not to the same
extent). Halliday’s analysis of cleft sentences illustrates the difficulty in assign-
ing one element subject status:
(11) Pensioner Cecil Burns thought he had broken the slot machine; but it
was not the machine he had broken – it was the bank. (Halliday 1994:
98)
Halliday analyses it + he had broken as the subject in its clause in example (11),
which is another indicator of how inadequate the notion of ‘subject’ is for such
constructions.
Thus we can observe that subjecthood is not a unified notion in non-
canonical structures of English if subject is understood in the sense as defined
in Section 2.3.2, particularly if we include the semantic and pragmatic proper-
ties. The problem arises from the fact that instead of treating such non-
canonical constructions in their own right, many grammarians try to treat them
in terms of other, prototypical constructions, for which categories such as sub-
ject were established. It is of course possible to apply the criteria and classify
elements in such structures as subjects (see Sections 7.1.3.2 and 8.3), but since
such a classification has to remain arbitrary to some extent and since the ele-
ment in question does not carry all the features of a prototypical subject, the
explanatory value of such a classification is limited.439
||
438 See CGEL (1377–1389) for an overview of structures; also Lambrecht (2001) for a typology
of cleft sentences.
439 From a German valency perspective, Järventausta (2003: 781) comes to the same conclu-
sion. Similarly Helbig (2004: 460), who argues against the postulation of perfect mappings
(“Isomorphie”) of logical, semantic and syntactic levels in a model of language.
9.2.2 Consequences for modelling ‘subjects’
There are several possible ways of dealing with the challenges outlined above in
approaches to grammatical theory and description. The first is to ignore them
and to keep using the term subject even though there are many even relatively
basic structures (such as copular clauses) where some of the criteria fail. There
are good reasons for such a treatment since the term is well-established and
since many concepts in many linguistic models show no clear-cut boundaries
either, rather conforming to prototypes or a point on a gradient scale.440 This is
the approach taken by CGEL, the authors of which are obviously aware of all the
issues associated with the prototype approach taken and its shortcomings.
While CamG does not rely on evidence from the semantic and pragmatic levels
and also discards some of the traditional properties (e.g. passivization), the
authors nonetheless use a prototype approach in that they include marginal
subjects in their definition, too. This may be due to the fact that a model in
which (almost) every clause has a subject (and ideally only one, as expressed
through CamG’s uniqueness constraint discussed in Sections 2.3.2, 7.1.3.2 and
8.3) appears appealing for its neatness and systematic rigour.441
The second possible way is to restrict the use of the term subject to those
cases in which all or most of the prototypical features are united in one constit-
uent (i.e. prototypical active declarative clauses, for instance) and not use it in
structures such as existential sentences at all. The advantage of such a solution
is that the term is an established shorthand for a range of features which would
have to be lengthily listed even where they coincide. The disadvantage is that
any decision as to what is still called subject and what is not must remain arbi-
trary. Thus, if we follow Langacker, who seems to take such a position, we may
even want to exclude clausal subjects altogether:
||
440 One disadvantage of a prototype analysis is that one cannot predict any properties of an
element simply due to the fact that it is a subject since it may be a marginal member of the
category.
441 If there is no satisfactory definition of subject, the rigour is of course limited, but often
grammarians have the (sometimes implicit) aim to keep the number and complexity of rules
low, so difficulties can be ‘hidden’ in imperfect assumptions about syntactic relations (see also
Herbst 2014 for a critique of the use of the term object in Goldberg’s model of construction
grammar).
Thus complement constructions have to be considered in their own terms. They approxi-
mate subject and object constructions in different ways and to different degrees, fully in-
stantiating those constructions only as a special case. (Langacker 2008: 430)442
Should we also exclude non-agentive or non-given nominal subjects? A range of

arguments could be brought forward for and against each possible boundary
between subjects and non-subjects so that any decision is bound to remain
unsatisfactory.
The third possible reaction is to do away with the notion of subject alto-
gether443 and instead specify the features separately where necessary. To a lim-
ited extent something similar is done in all those approaches that try to keep the
levels of syntax, semantics and information packaging separate, as, for in-
stance, pointed out very explicitly by Halliday (1994: 30–34), who only uses the
term subject at the syntactic level.444 However, even with such a limitation to the
syntactic level, such models run into problems where there is more than one
possible subject position, as with extraposition, or where agreement and posi-
tion do not coincide, as with existentials. Thus the most radical option is to give
a set of features for each clause element of a given clause structure (such as
active declarative, existential, ...) in a way very similar to the feature structures
employed by the standard version of head-driven phrase structure grammar
(HPSG; Pollard/Sag 1994) – and quite similarly by Sign-Based Construction
Grammar (SBCG; e.g. Boas/Sag 2012) – which will be described briefly below:
||
442 Complement constructions in Langacker’s terminology are what the present study calls
clausal complements.
443 For German, Reis (1982: 195) advocates such an analysis as well; according to her, no
relational labels are necessary and nominative NP is all the information that is needed.
444 As mentioned above, CamG’s approach is similar.
Fig. 27: Feature structure for she in HPSG (Pollard/Sag 1994: 20) – © 1994 by The University of
Chicago Press, reproduced by permission
Figure 27 gives a very detailed picture445 of the features associated with the word
she in HPSG. For our purposes, the attribute-value pairs CASE nom, PER 3rd and
NUM sing are of relevance here. If we want to combine she with a verb, we need
the features to be compatible with the feature structure of the verb. An example
of the relevant features of the verb form walks is given in the following figure:446
Fig. 28: Relevant features of walks in HPSG (Pollard/Sag 1994: 28) – © 1994 by The University
of Chicago Press, reproduced by permission
In this structure we find nom, 3rd and sing in the subcategorization property,
indicating that walks can be combined with she (which is realised in the gram-
||
445 All following figures give a shorthand notation of the full structure. If they were expand-
ed, the representation would be as feature-rich as the one for she.
446 It has to be stressed that such entries for third person singular verb forms are created by
means of a lexical rule in HPSG so they need not be entered into the lexicon separately if they
conform to the rule.
matical model through a process of unification of the two feature structures).

Since she walks is no particular challenge to any grammatical model, we shall
consider how HPSG deals with existentials next. The feature structures dis-
cussed below apply to sentences such as the following:
(12) There is no one absent. (Pollard/Sag 1994: 148)
(13) There are no students absent. (Pollard/Sag 1994: 148)
The structure for existential there (treated as a pronoun, it appears) is given in

the following figure:
Fig. 29: Relevant features of existential there in HPSG (Pollard/Sag 1994: 147) – © 1994 by The
University of Chicago Press, reproduced by permission
Note that 3rd person agreement is specified but no number.447 The relevant lexi-
cal entry for be448 as used in the existential examples above is reproduced be-
low:
Fig. 30: Relevant features of be as used in existentials in HPSG (Pollard/Sag 1994: 147) –
© 1994 by The University of Chicago Press, reproduced by permission
||
447 In the entry for dummy it in extraposed structures it is of course classified as singular.
448 Again, the lexical entry is “possibly derived by a lexical rule” (Pollard/Sag 1994: 147) and
later the finite verb form is derived via another lexical rule.
We can see that the subcategorization list specifically selects there, the post-
verbal noun phrase and the extension. There and the postverbal [NP] are co-
indexed for number as is signalled by the number 4, so that the [NP], which has
number, will influence the number of there, which then again determines the
form of the verb.449 Such a treatment is compatible with inheritance views as
suggested by CamG or with the additional dependency in word grammar pre-
sented in Chapter 8.450 Yet the level of indirectness introduced through this kind
of analysis is probably only due to the fact that a pre-verbal [NP] is modelled to
determine concord and to avoid a modification of that rule. A model that posits
direct agreement between the postverbal [NP] and the verb in existentials may
thus be preferred due to a simpler but equally correct mechanism.451
The HPSG analysis should only be taken as an indicator as to what a model
can look like that atomizes the subject and lists properties instead – there are
countless other possible ways to model the exact technical details. For instance,
such an analysis is in principle compatible with a valency approach such as that
presented by Jacobs (1994) for German, as observed by Oppenrieder in his dis-
cussion of extraposition in German, since it allows a dissociation of various
types of valency relations. For extraposition, the clausal complement is seen as
the logico-semantic argument whereas the anticipatory element is specified
formally (Oppenrieder 2006: 908).452 One major drawback of such a model is
that it makes the analysis of language a very complex and technical endeavour.
However, since it is the more accurate and more systematic model it is still pref-
erable compared to the other ideas mentioned above.
All views presented here on subjects in English can be defended. However,
they all presume that there is one single way of analysing a grammatical struc-
ture and that grammatical structures necessarily have to be analysed. It will be
argued in Section 9.3.3 that there is an alternative way of understanding the
phenomena in which subject can be regarded as an emergent notion.
||
449 Note that the lexical entry of be is not yet specified for tense, number and person.
450 It has to be noted that in later HPSG, a distinction between subjects and other comple-
ments is made (see Pollard/Sag 1994: ch. 9 for a detailed discussion of the reasoning behind
this decision).
451 The discussion is of course irrelevant for cases of non-concord (see Section 8.4.2 for de-
tails), where we would expect there to carry a third person singular feature.
452 For English, we have seen that formal specification usually extends to the clausal ele-
ment, too.
9.2.3 A universal category?
While the focus of the present study is on English, the idea that the term and
concept of subject are universal is such a frequent topos in linguistic literature
that it has to be addressed here. As has been shown in Section 2.1, the term was
developed in Europe and applied to European languages at different levels of
analysis. It is thus not surprising that these different levels of subjecthood coin-
cide in European languages more than in others:453
In English and the familiar languages of Europe, topics are usually also subjects, and
comments are predicates: so in John | ran away. But this identification fails sometimes in
colloquial English, regularly in certain special situations in formal English, and more gen-
erally in some non-European languages. (Hockett 1958: 201)
This becomes even more apparent if one unified concept of subject is postulated
and if it is said to have a range of properties at different levels:
[I]t seems to me that subjects in some Ls will be more subject-like than those of other Ls in
the sense that they will in general, present a fuller complement of the properties which
universally characterize b-subjects. Very possibly, for example, European Ls are more sub-
ject oriented than those Sino-Tibetan Ls discussed by Li and Thompson (this volume).
(Keenan 1976: 307)454
Perhaps a concept that was developed for and most often applied to European
(Indo-European is possibly a better term here) languages does not readily lend
itself to the study of structurally quite different languages, despite Pullum’s
wish that “[i]t would also be undesirable for a relation like SUBJECT itself to be
non-universal” (Pullum 1980: 9).455 In fact, why should we expect to find clause
elements that share such theoretically distinct properties as agentivity, topicali-
ty, agreement and initial position across a variety of languages that are genet-
ically unrelated? When Pullum says “I view it as unfortunate (though I am sure
it will not ultimately be harmful) that controversy should still be raging about
the status of this basic grammatical notion after two thousand years or more of
||
453 As seen in Chapter 2, the topic of the following citation has been called psychological
subject in some accounts.
454 L: language; b-subject: subject of a ‘basic sentence’ – a construct Keenan uses to exclude
the influence of as many factors as possible in his analysis. See also the brief discussion of
Keenan’s criteria at the beginning of Section 2.2.1.3.
455 Of course, even the subjecthood across Indo-European languages is far from uniform. See,
for instance, Spanish “null” subjects or the relatively free word order in German combined with
comparatively strong case markings.
grammatical theory” (Pullum 1980: 16), he ignores the fact that he is referring to
over 2,000 years of Western (i.e. mainly European) grammatical theory, which
makes it appear as if he regards the terms developed there as primary and likely
to be universal.456
Perlmutter, by contrast, appears to differentiate between the universality of
an item subject and a universal definition of such an item. While he takes sub-
ject to be a theoretical primitive of relational grammar – which is thus applica-
ble to all languages – he states “that there is probably no phenomenon statable
in terms of the same notion of subject in every language” (Perlmutter 1982: 324;
his italics).457 He concludes that “different notions of subject […] will prove to be
necessary” (Perlmutter 1982: 324).
Davies/Dubinsky also note that “the full range of ‘subject’ properties is
mapped to a single argument in English” (2001: 12), which “creates the illusion
of a single set of ‘subject’ properties in English (and other languages like it)”
(2001: 13). It thus comes as no big surprise that “[t]he cross-linguistic evidence
[...] shows that the notion of subject is epiphenomenal rather than primitive”
(Davies/Dubinsky 2001: 13).458 Thus Falk’s analysis provides a good summary of
the discussion presented in this section:
Problems have arisen because the concept “subject” originates in traditional studies of
classical Indo-European languages such as Greek and Latin, languages which are closely
related genetically, areally, and typologically. Investing “subject” with theoretical content
thus usually depends on either focusing on languages which are typologically similar to
classical Indo-European languages or attempting to extend an Indo-European notion to
languages which have very different typological properties. (Falk 2006a: 1)
9.2.4 Summary
We have seen in the present chapter that the term subject is in fact highly prob-
lematic due to the difficulty of defining it satisfactorily. The last hypothesis
stated in Section 1.3, namely that the ‘concept of subject in grammatical theory
||
456 Halliday makes a similar point when he states that “[o]ne of the concepts that is basic to
the Western tradition of grammatical analysis is that of Subject” (Halliday 1994: 30; my italics).
457 Perlmutter even claims that “[c]ertainly there is no reason to assume any such phenomena
to exist” (1982: 324), by which he also explicitly rejects Keenan’s (1976) position on the matter.
458 Although universal grammar plays a very important role in the Chomskyan framework,
the term subject – not being a primitive of that model – is of limited importance and thus its
universality is not an issue for generative grammar. See Section 2.2.1 for a discussion of the
status of subjects in generative transformational grammar.
Perspectives for grammatical models | 295
represents an amalgam of properties that can be mapped onto a single constitu-

ent in canonical clauses but less so in non-canonical structures’ thus can fully
be confirmed. We can now add that for (typologically) different languages, the
situation appears to be even more difficult. Evidence for this problem has been
available for a long time (see for instance Jespersen’s observations cited in Sec-
tion 2.1.2) and it is quite remarkable that researchers from theoretical back-
grounds as diverse as generative grammar,459 relational grammar, LFG, HPSG
and valency grammar460 have all come to similar conclusions. Nonetheless,
reference grammars have to some extent ignored these results in favour of an
accessible description of language. From the point of view of the accuracy of the
description, however, models that discard the notion of subject and list the
atomic properties often used for its definition instead have to be preferred.461
9.3 Perspectives for grammatical models
9.3.1 Item-specific selection of subjects
The present study set out to show that there are syntactic restrictions on the
form of the subject of a clause which are imposed by the valency carrier in the
clause, regardless of whether the valency carrier is an active verb, a passive
verb, an adjective or a noun (Hypotheses 1 to 3 presented in Section 1.3). In
Chapters 4 to 6, we were able to confirm these hypotheses with the help of dif-
ferent clausal realisations of the subject the acceptability of which seems to
depend on the valency carrier, as illustrated below for all types of valency carri-
er:
The verb pay, for instance, does not allow a [that_CL] subject but a [to_INF]
is fully acceptable.
(14) a. So to say they are a bad team does not pay them the respect they de-
serve. (newspapers)
b. *So that he says they are a bad team does not pay them the respect
they deserve.
||
459 See the quote by McCloskey (1997) at the end of 2.2.1.
460 See the first quote by Jacobs (1994) in Section 2.2.2.2.
461 For consistency’s sake we will have to continue using the term as before in the remainder
of this chapter, though.
Generally, while we found sufficient evidence for restrictions on both [that_CL]

and [to_INF] subjects, the [V-ing] appears to be much more versatile and is ac-
ceptable with virtually all verbs that allow a clausal realisation of the subject.
In the passive, the verb avoid cannot be combined with a [to_INF] subject
but can with a [V-ing], just like in the active clause for the postverbal comple-
ment:
(15) a. Threatening one with a knife is probably best avoided. (newspapers)

b. *To threaten one with a knife is probably best avoided.
However, the range of possible clausal subjects in the passive cannot be derived
entirely from the postverbal complements in the active clause. Some verbs allow
the same complements as passive subjects, some more than occur postverbally
in the active, some less, and some simply different ones. Again, [V-ing] can
often be used even if it does not occur in the active. While some researchers
might want to take this as evidence of the noun-like character of [V-ing] clauses,
there are also restrictions on this form.
No [that_CL] subject seems to be possible with the adjective smart, whereas
the [of_NP_to_INF] is established usage:
(16) a. I haven’t read either, but I think it is smart of HarperCollins to cash in

on the classic revival vogue. (GWL 1163)
b. *I haven’t read either, but I think it is smart that HarperCollins cashes
in on the classic revival vogue.
And for nouns, task shows a restriction on the [that_CL] complement, too.
(17) a. It is the task of pressure groups to pressurise, not to imitate big busi-
ness by offering glorified bribes. (newsmerge)
b. *It is the task of pressure groups that they pressurise, not that they
imitate big business by offering glorified bribes.
Interestingly, for subjects in copular sentences with nouns as predicative ele-

ment, the [to_INF] realisation seems to be almost universally acceptable, so we
can observe that they behave differently from verbal valency carriers.
More evidence is available in the respective chapters and in the relevant
appendices. Other researchers have come to similar conclusions on the non-
predictability of the variation over clausal elements,462 but their studies usually
had a focus on postverbal complements. However, CamG’ discussion of the
||
462 See for instance Faulhaber (2011).
differences between [to_INF] and [V-ing] complements is perfectly compatible

with our findings for these elements in subject position:
[W]e cannot assign distinct meanings to the form-types and treat the selection as semanti-
cally determined. On the other hand, the selection is not random: [...] Prepositional to is
characteristically associated with a goal, and a metaphorical association between to-
infinitivals and goals is to be found in the fact that they commonly involve temporal pro-
jection into the future [...]. Linked with this is the modal feature of potentiality. [...] But it
must be emphasised that we are talking here of historically motivated tendencies and as-
sociations, not constant elements of meaning. (CamG 1240f)
The modal component associated with [to_INF] subjects was studied in Section
4.2, where we came to similar conclusions, i.e. that there is definitely a tendency
for [to_INF] subjects to occur with markers of epistemic modality. Still, only
about half of the [to_INF] subjects show such behaviour, so that its predictive
power is rather limited and cannot replace item-specific knowledge.463
Langacker’s view is also compatible with our interpretation:
The meanings and distribution of to and -ing are complex matters that we can barely touch
on here [...]. Both are polysemous and hard to disentangle from the varied constructions
they appear in. Convention often dictates a particular choice, and when both are possible,
the semantic distinction may be subtle at best. [...] Still, the various meanings of to and
-ing center on different prototypes. (Langacker 2008: 439)
Duffley, on the other hand, claims with regard to [V-ing] and [to_INF] that “[i]t
will be assumed here that these forms do have an inherent meaning that pre-
exists and is stored outside of any particular use that is made of them” (2003:
329). This is in stark contrast to CamG, Langacker and the perspectives on
grammatical models outlined later in Section 9.3.3.
For German, many studies also find that the variation in clausal subjects is
item-specific (see, for instance, Järventausta 2003: 784).464
||
463 See Herriman (2000) for a detailed analysis of the modality of matrix clause predicates in
extraposed structures.
464 See also the long lists of permissible clausal subjects for verbal, nominal and adjectival
predicates in German in Zifonun/Hoffmann/Strecker (1997: 1450ff), which also point in the
direction of item-specificity, particularly due to the frequent hedges used in the semantic
groupings.
9.3.2 Valency
This section will cover the challenges that the findings of the present study pose
to valency theory, and what a suitable model to account for these problems may
look like.
9.3.2.1 Valency patterns

As we have seen in the previous section, the choice of subject is item-specific
and thus the approach of valency theory to treat it as a complement of the verb
(or of an adjectival or nominal valency carrier) is backed by the data. It is not
possible to predict the form of the subject solely on semantic grounds (e.g. by
semantic role). However, there are various forms such a valency approach could
take and we shall show that a pattern approach is most suitable to account for
some problematic structures identified in the present study.465
Traditionally in valency theory, each valency carrier has an inventory of
complements that can occur with it. In a basic model, these are given as a sim-
ple list of possible realisations for each valency slot in the active clause. Hel-
big/Schenkel ([1969] 1973) offer such a description in the form of what they call
valency frame (‘Valenzrahmen’).466 The order in the valency frame does not
specify an actual constituent order in the sentence, which would be difficult
anyway due to German word order idiosyncrasies. For English, a simple exam-
ple would be the verb accuse, which can also be described as having three va-
lency slots. The first would be the subject [NP], the second a postverbal [NP]
(traditionally called object) and the third an [of_NP/V-ing] (see VDE 8):467
(18) The president accused her government of scandalous corruption and

incompetence. (VDE 8)
||
465 See Herbst (2007) for arguments in favour of a valency pattern approach that are not
based on subjects but on possible and not possible combinations of postverbal complements.
466 Thus, for the German verb schenken the valency frame is “II. schenken  Sn, Sa, (Sd)”
(Helbig/Schenkel [1969] 1973: 180), indicating an obligatory nominantive [NP] (= Sn), an oblig-
atory accusative [NP] (= Sa) and an optional dative [NP] (= bracketed Sd).
467 For English, there are also approaches that do not specify order. Thus, despite the fact that
the arguments in Goldberg’s model of argument structure constructions (Goldberg 1995, 2006)
are presented in the order of constituents in the active declarative sentence, they do not specify
linear order (Newmeyer 2003: 169). While the complement block of the VDE only gives a com-
plement inventory, the canonical order (i.e. without heavy unit shift or similar phenomena) of
the postverbal elements (usually for the active declarative clause) is given in the pattern block.
As mentioned in Section 5.1, many valency grammarians opt for a so-called

valency reduction in order to be able to account for passive sentences with the
same valency inventory as for the active. For the example of accuse we would
then reduce the valency by eliminating the first [NP] complement (or, to be pre-
cise, by making it optional in the form of a by-phrase):468
(19) Four leading stockbroking companies are accused of wrongfully

compensating privileged clients for losses they sustained in share
dealing. (VDE 8)
Since not all postverbal elements can become subjects of a passive clause, the
ones that can will have to be indicated in the valency description of the verb.469
Such a simple model is sufficient to describe the valency properties of many
verbs but, as discussed in the previous chapters, cannot accurately account for
all the linguistic facts.
The first such problem is presented by passive clauses in which a subject
occurs that does not normally occur as a postverbal complement in active
clauses with the verb in question, such as the [V-ing] clause with influence in
the following example:470
(20) Buying a house should not be influenced by the existence of mort-

gage tax relief, and scrapping it would raise £ 2,800 million a year at
the last estimate. (newsmerge)
Cases of this type (more examples can be found in Section 5.2.2.1) show that we
cannot derive the passive clause complement inventory from the active clause
complement inventory by means of a rule such as valency reduction, since the
[V-ing] has to be added specifically in the description of the passive. Thus we
would either have to specify complements for their ability to occur in the active
or passive clause or posit different inventories for active and passive clauses.
The problem of so-called prepositional passives, however, cannot be accounted
for in such a model at all. On the evidence presented in (21a–d) any complement
||
468 The situation is actually slightly more complex given that the second valency slot is only
contextually optionally filled according to the VDE, but for the simplicity of illustration such
issues will be ignored.
469 This is the approach taken in the VDE, for instance.
470 There are some postverbal complements realised by an -ing form in the corpus, but these
seem to be more nominal in character since they occur without their own postverbal comple-
ments.
inventory-based approach has to fail since it cannot explain why the particle on
is impossible in (21a) but perfectly acceptable in (21c):
(21) a. *They agreed on that they would meet. (CGEL 1178)

b. They agreed that they would meet. (CGEL 1178)
c. That they should meet was agreed on. (CGEL 1178)
d. That they should meet was agreed. (CGEL 1178)
In the valency pattern471 approach advocated here, one would give the following
patterns for the active and the passive clauses above:472
[NP]subj...agreeact...[that_CL]
[that_CL]subj...agreepass...[on]
[that_CL]subj...agreepass
[that_CL]subj...agreepass...[on]...[by_NP]
[that_CL]subj...agreepass... [by_NP]
For the sake of brevity, one could introduce brackets to indicate optionality and
thus reduce the four passive patterns to one:
[that_CL]subj...agreepass...([on])...([by_NP])
In some cases, such a purely formal specification of the pattern may be mislead-
ing. Thus, in analogy to the case of agree, one may be inclined to form a similar
passive pattern to cover (22a–b) discussed in Chapter 5:
(22) a. That the moral imperative was not a sufficient condition has already
been remarked upon. (CS7 1331)
b. That the moral imperative was not a sufficient condition has already
been remarked.
The pattern could take the following form:

[that_CL]subj...remarkpass...([upon])...([by_NP])
||
471 As mentioned in Note 165 on page 107, the German concepts of Satzmuster and
Satzbauplan are related but not identical to the concept of valency pattern used here. One
major difference is that the former are always based on active declarative clauses.
472 The form is a mixture of the styles used in the Erlangen Valency Patternbank (Herbst/Uhrig
2009) and in Herbst/Schüller (2008). The subscript act or pass next to the verb indicates active
or passive morphology. The subscript subj indicates subject status and would be redundant if
the patterns were read to represent linear order. As discussed below, they are not meant to
represent such an order although they are given in the order of a declarative clause pattern for
ease of readability.
However, the form of the pattern suggests that the [that_CL] in both variants of
the pattern is the same complement, which, one may argue based on the VDE, is
not the case since each [that_CL] fills a different valency slot of the verb and
corresponds to a different participant role in the two sentences. Thus we need
some sort of indication of either the valency slot or the participant role. Since
valency slots are often determined based on the participant role of the comple-
ments and since the structure of such patterns is much more transparent we
shall opt for the inclusion of participant role labels. The representation corre-
sponding to (22a–b) above would thus be the following:
[that_CL “topic”]subj...remarkpass...[upon]...([by_NP “remarker”])
[that_CL “content”]subj...remarkpass...([by_NP “remarker”])
As there is formal as well as semantic information, Herbst/Schüller (2008: 139)

use the term valency construction (where construction is to be read in the con-
struction grammar sense as a form-meaning pair [Goldberg 1995: 4]) for such a
representation. This sort of representation has the further advantage of showing
that in our analysis [upon] does not fill an argument slot in the passive pattern
since it is not assigned a participant role.
The second problem that argues against a complement inventory approach
is the case of extraposition. As we have seen in Chapter 7, extraposition is item-
specific, which confirms the fourth hypothesis formulated in Section 1.3. For
most cases, it would be possible to describe extraposition in a complement in-
ventory approach if the relevant complements are marked as obligatorily or
optionally extraposed. But the complement inventory approach runs into prob-
lems where the same complement can occur in extraposed position in one pat-
tern while another pattern allows only the non-extraposed variant, as illustrated
for attract in (23a–c):
(23) a. But to do so could attract severe penalties such as deduction of points

and, more seriously, a ban from European competitions. (newspapers)
b. Labour sources dismissed the claim, pointing out that to take such
drastic action would only create martyrs and might even attract more
MPs to the rebel cause. (newspapers)
c. As I thought it might attract suspicion to walk the same way again, I
looked at the shops in Tottenham Lane instead. (fiction)
The non-extraposed variant occurs both in the divalent (23a) and in the trivalent
(23b) pattern, but the extraposed variant only occurs in the divalent (23c) ver-
sion. A verbose valency construction representation of the three examples could
take the following form:
[to_INF “ATTRACTER”]subj...attractact...[NP “ATTRACTED”]

[to_INF “ATTRACTER”]subj...attractact...[NP “ATTRACTED”]...[to_NP “TARGET”]
[it]...attractact...[NP “ATTRACTED”]...[to_INF “ATTRACTER”]subj
There are two possible ways of reducing the patterns. One is to introduce a sym-
bol such as (it) to indicate that the complement could also occur in extraposi-
tion:
[to_INF “ATTRACTER”]subj(it)...attractact...[NP “ATTRACTED”]
[to_INF “ATTRACTER”]subj...attractact...[NP “ATTRACTED”]...[to_NP “TARGET”]
The other is to use brackets to indicate the optionality of the [to_NP]:

[to_INF “ATTRACTER”]subj...attractact...[NP “ATTRACTED”]...([to_NP “TARGET”])
[it]...attractact...[NP “ATTRACTED”]...[to_INF “ATTRACTER”]subj
We cannot, however, combine all three into the following:

*[to_INF “ATTRACTER”]subj(it)...attractact...[NP “ATTRACTED”]...([to_NP “TARGET”])
Such a structure, just like a purely complement based approach where the
[to_INF] is marked as optionally extraposed, would wrongly predict that the
following construction is possible, too, although it is not attested in the corpus:
*[it]...attractact...[NP “ATTRACTED”]... [to_NP “TARGET”] ...[to_INF “ATTRACTER”]subj
Thus if one wants to conflate valency constructions for economy of description,

one has to decide in such cases whether one wants to combine the two divalent
or the two non-extraposed structures in one valency construction. The decision
is to some extent arbitrary but one might prefer the combination of the non-
extraposed constructions since the introduction of it and the ‘movement’ of the
[to_INF] towards the end of the sentence are much more structure-altering.
Here, we shall argue for using the verbose solution where each valency con-
struction is listed individually, an approach also adopted for the valency pat-
terns in the Erlangen Valency Patternbank (Herbst/Uhrig 2009), where only by-
phrases are treated as an optional part of the pattern (where they are). The rea-
son is that the situation becomes much more complicated and any conflation of
patterns thus will become arbitrary when the combinability of postverbal com-
plements is taken into consideration.473
||
473 See also the discussion in Herbst/Schüller (2008: 140f).
The valency pattern approach outlined here can be used to describe the se-
lection of complements, but it has to be made very clear that valency is just one
component of a larger model of grammar. Thus one needs other mechanisms in
order to fully describe the structure of sentences. Herbst/Schüller (2008) have
argued convincingly for a combination of a valency component with a constitu-
ent structure approach and present different sentence types that specify the
meaning associated with such sentences and the order in which the subject and
other parts of the sentence occur. For instance, the representation of the inter-
rogative 'yes-no-question'-construction is reproduced in the following figure:
Interrogative ‘yes-no-question’-construction
Meaning: ‘question’
Formal criteria: [op__Subj__rPred]
I. Typical constituents:
(a) Interrogative ‘yes-no-questions’ usually have a subject
(b) Interrogative ‘yes-no-questions’ usually have a predicate containing
a pre-head functioning as operator
II. Word order: operator + subject + (rest of predicate)
III. Intonation: rising
Fig. 31: Representation of the interrogative ‘yes-no-question’-construction (adapted from

Herbst/Schüller 2008: 151)
The formal side of the construction specifies where the subject is positioned in
relation to the different parts of the verb (or VHC in Herbst/Schüller’s terms).474
Thus the valency construction does not need to give such information and while
the valency constructions listed above have a form that suggests a linear order,
this is merely a notational convention for ease of readability.475
We shall also suggest here that valency patterns can be partially lexically
filled or have further contextual properties. In this respect we shall again follow
work done on the Erlangen Valency Patternbank (Herbst/Uhrig 2009), where
contextual and lexical specification are distinguished as two types of additional
||
474 In Herbst/Schüller’s terminology, the operator is a pre-head in the verbal head-complex
(VHC), which in turn is part of the predicate.
475 See also Herbst (2014) for a discussion of what exactly valency constructions specify.
information given on a pattern. Contextual specification is illustrated in the

following example:
(24) They were at a loss to know what to do with this sullen rebel who kept
bursting out against them so unjustly. (CBN 801)
Since at a can hardly be said to fill a valency slot of loss in the first example and
since it was decided to make no statement about the exact theoretical status of
at a, the neutral term contextually specified was chosen for this sort of phenom-
enon. The problem is relevant to the description of the valency of loss as the
combination at a loss takes a [to_INF] complement whereas loss on its own does
not usually allow this form. Thus, “it might be more appropriate to treat such
cases in terms of multi-word valency carriers” (Herbst/Uhrig 2010: 131) in a
valency framework. Such an analysis is one argument in favour of a theory that
allows for constructions or patterns of arbitrary size, such as constructions (e.g.
Goldberg 1995, 2006), MacWhinney’s (2014) item-based patterns or Sinclair’s
(2004: 24ff) extended units of meaning. In such a framework much of the com-
binatory properties of such larger units can be described by means of valency,
too.
The case of of importance (or, more frequently, of [ADJ] importance, as in
example (25) below) discussed in Section 6.3.4.1 can be described in such terms:
(25) To encourage succinct writing about science is of great importance –

cation. (newspapers)
A pattern representation with a clausal subject may then take the following
form, in which of is simply given in pre-nominal position. Such a pattern can
represent the syntactic facts independently of the theoretical treatment, i.e.
irrespective of whether one prefers to read it as an instance of contextual speci-
fication by of or as a complex valency carrier of importance:
[to_INF]subj...of importance
[to_INF]subj...of [AdjP] importance476
||
476 Since the Erlangen Valency Patternbank does not list non-extraposed subjects of adjec-
tives, this pattern is not included, but there are contextually specified patterns for extraposed
variants. The pattern without the intervening [AdjP] does not exist in the VDE since it is less
common, but there is corpus evidence which shows that it also occurs.
Another type of additional information to include in valency patterns is lexical

specification, which can be observed in the following example:
(26) Puzzled, he tore open the envelope. (FPM 2396)
In (26), we could of course describe tear with a valency pattern of the following
type:
[NP]subj...tearact...[AdjP]...[NP]
However, the only adjective that regularly occurs in the AdjP slot with tear is
open, so we can analyse the pattern to be lexically specified and write it as fol-
lows:
[NP]subj...tearact...[AdjP]:open...[NP]477
In the present study, the case of plain to see discussed in Section 6.3.1.1 and
illustrated in (27) below can also be modelled in this way.
(27) Whatever the disciplinary practices across the generations, it is plain

to see that without a reasonable amount of co-operation and compli-
ance from the child, parents wouldn't get far in fulfilling their objec-
tives. (B10 23)
The corresponding pattern for the relevant clause would look as follows:
[it]...plain...[to_INF]:see
Here, the [that_CL] would be treated as a complement of see in the [to_INF]

clause. Again, it may be preferable to treat tear open or plain to see as units of
meaning and not as compositional, i.e. as single choices in Sinclair’s idiom
principle view of language,478 even though their internal structure is of course
transparent. In this case, one may prefer the analysis of the [that_CL] in (27) as a
complement of the complex valency carrier plain to see:
[it]...plain to see…[that_CL]
||
477 This pattern is very similar to the pattern for which the Patternbank identifies an idiomatic
phrasal verb tear apart, so one could also justify an analysis of tear open in such terms.
478 “The principle of idiom is that a language user has available to him or her a large number
of semi-preconstructed phrases that constitute single choices, even though they might appear
to be analysable into segments.” (Sinclair 1991: 110)
To sum up, we were able to show that a valency pattern model can, with minor
additions, account for phenomena that are more idiosyncratic than the catego-
rial information usually indicated by valency. If we add such specifications to
our valency description it also becomes clear that item-specificity at the level of
grammar and at the level of lexis cannot be fully separated, so that such a mod-
el moves closer to construction grammar or similar approaches, where a lexico-
grammatical continuum is assumed (see Herbst 2014 for a discussion of the
relationship between construction grammar and valency grammar; see also the
discussion in Section 9.3.3 below).
9.3.2.2 Long-distance dependencies and multiple valency carriers

The term long-distance dependency is a cover-term for a range of phenomena
(see Falk 2006b: 316) of which only tough movement is of interest here. It will,
however, be argued below that it might also make sense to include a certain
passive construction that is not usually treated under this heading. According to
Crystal’s definition the term479 describes “a CONSTRUCTION in which a SYNTACTIC
RELATION holds between two CONSTITUENTS such that there is no restriction on the
structural distance between them (e.g. a restriction which would require that
both be constituents of the same CLAUSE)” (Crystal 2008: 501; his emphasis). The
following two sub-sections aim to discuss what a valency model may look like
in order to account for such structures.480
9.3.2.2.1 Tough movement

As shown in Section 7.4, there are good reasons to analyse the subject this route
in the following sentence as governed by the verb follow (for which it would
have to be analysed as a postverbal complement and not a subject):
(28) In bad weather even this route is tough to follow. (CMD 254)
This becomes clearer if we compare it to the standard extraposed version:
(29) It is tough to follow this route.
||
479 Crystal’s definition describes the synonymous term unbounded dependency.
480 The representation is also largely compatible with the one given by Matthews for some
such structures (Matthews 1981: 185f).
Here, we can analyse tough as a valency carrier that licenses a [to_INF] ex-
traposed subject in which this route is a postverbal complement (traditionally
called object) of follow. We can illustrate this in a syntactic representation where
the strong arrow shows the valency relation between the two:481
clause
dummy predicate
subject
constituent structure predicator predicative extraposed subject
element
it is tough to follow this route

valency structure
Fig. 32: Syntactic representation of (29)482
If we come back to the version that shows tough movement, the classic analysis
is to keep the relationships as they are even though the ‘postverbal’ comple-
ment of the subordinate clause occurs in canonical subject position of the main
clause:
||
481 See Section 6.4.2 for a discussion of the valency relations in copular clauses.
482 The representation is based on Figure 19 on page 174 and is in principle compatible with
the model proposed by Herbst/Schüller (2008). The constituent structure is also largely com-
patible with CamG’s treatment. Only the relevant valency relations are shown since for our
discussion it does not matter whether the verb follow is a dependent of the infinitive marker
and whether this is a dependent of route or the opposite. The dummy subject it is not governed
by a valency carrier in the clause and is only supplied for syntactic well-formedness.
clause
tough-moved predicate
subject
constituent structure predicator predicative remainder of
element extraposed subject
this route is tough to follow

valency structure
Fig. 33: Syntactic representation of the relevant part of (28)483
What makes this phenomenon particularly difficult to model is that the so-
called ‘movement’ is not restricted locally, so the ‘moved’ element need not
occur in the clause one level above the subordinate clause from which it is said
to be moved.484 Let us illustrate this with an example:
(30) In parts of Egypt, Bangladesh, Indonesia, China, and other low-lying

coastal areas already suffering from poor drainage, agriculture is like-
||
483 The treatment of (28) is in fact similar to the approach taken by lexical functional gram-
mar (LFG). In LFG, a sentence is modelled with two structures at the same time, a functional
structure (‘f-structure’) and a constituent structure (‘c-structure’).
At f-structure, the multifunctionality of elements in LDD [=long distance dependency]
constructions is represented directly. [...] Such a representation differs from other theo-
ries, particularly transformational theory, in not conceptualizing LDD constructions as in-
volving the displacement of an element from its natural position. Instead, the element has
two functions, and the c-structural position that it occupies is the canonical position of
one of those two functions. (Falk 2006b: 321)
484 In fact, in generative grammar, the item is moved up in the grammatical structure via a
series of smaller movements now and thus does not take the direct route:
The issue can be formulated in a more theory-neutral way by asking whether the relation-
ship between a gap and its filler is a direct one, or is instead mediated by intervening ma-
terial. This was a hotly debated topic within generative grammar in the 1970s (sometimes
labeled the ‘swooping vs. looping’ controversy). A real measure of progress in the field is
that this debate has been definitely settled in favor of ‘looping.’ All generative grammari-
ans now recognize that long-distance filler-gap dependencies are mediated by the inter-
vening material. (Wasow 2001: 309)
Since the evidence for the progress can be found in languages that are typologically different
from English, the discussion is more or less irrelevant for the model in the present study, so we
shall prefer the simpler direct route.
ly to become increasingly difficult to sustain.

(www.twnside.org.sg/title2/resurgence/216/cover2.doc)
Again, we could analyse agriculture as a postverbal complement of sustain,

which leads to a long-distance dependency over multiple levels of embed-
ding:485
Fig. 34: Dependency representation of the relevant part of (30)486
The phenomena discussed so far were described in great detail in early genera-
tive grammar in terms of a transformation or movement analysis (e.g. Chomsky
1973, Lasnik/Fiengo 1974). If we allow valency to be at work across the bounda-
ries of the clause in which the valency carrier occurs, we can account for such
structures in a valency approach, too.
As shown in Section 7.4, however, the subject of a sentence that appears to
exhibit tough movement may or may not be a complement licensed by the verb
in the extraposed [to_INF] subject. Thus our model should be able to account for
such behaviour. Let us examine two examples discussed in Section 7.4 again:
(31) That this may not be the case in certain instances does not take much
(32) For this to happen within the past 12 months is hard to believe.
(newspapers)
||
485 This sentence fragment is analysed to contain two nested extraposed subjects, i.e. the
clause with become as its main verb is an extraposed subject in the main clause and the clause
with sustain as its main verb is an extraposed subject within the become clause. Bars under the
constituents illustrate the level of embedding. Since the sentence is structurally ambiguous,
different analyses are possible, so one could instead analyse the sustain clause as the ex-
traposed subject of the main clause and the become clause as a standard post-adjectival com-
plement of likely.
486 This and all following diagrams only contain the dependency structure since the constitu-
ent structure is not of interest here.
In (31) we find a [that_CL] subject that is most convincingly analysed as being

licensed by comprehend, given that take does not usually allow [that_CL] sub-
jects.487 In (32) we find a [for_NP_to_INF] subject that is best analysed as being
licensed by hard, given that believe does not usually allow a [for_NP_to_INF]
postverbal complement.488 Nonetheless, even in the second example, the se-
mantic relationship between believe and the [for_NP_to_INF] corresponds to the
relationship that believe has to [that_CL] postverbal complements it licenses in
canonical clauses.
It will be argued here that both structures can be modelled uniformly with
an approach that allows an element to be dependent on more than one valency
carrier at the same time. For a formal realisation to occur it is sufficient if one of
the two valency carriers licenses this specific formal realisation. We can illus-
trate this graphically as follows (only the relevant relations are shown; the bro-
ken line indicates that the valency carrier does not license this formal realisa-
tion):
Fig. 35: Two possible valency carriers for the subject in (31)
The advantage of such an approach is that with the broken line we can still
model that there is a relationship between believe and the clausal subject even
though the latter is not formally licensed by believe.
||
487 Except, of course, in the pattern [that_CL]...takeact...[NP]...by surprise, but there again one
would probably prefer to speak of a complex valency carrier, a contextual specification, or, at
the very least, of a different lexical unit take.
488 We can see in the following example that hard does allow [for_NP_to_INF] subjects: For us
to be reduced to the level of a Balkan state is very hard. (AE8 1066)
If both valency carriers allow a certain complement, we can treat it as va-

lency dependent of both at the same time as in the following sentence:
(33) To go out on penalties is hard to accept. (newspapers)
To sum up, in the analysis suggested here, we find that the element that occurs
as subject (i.e. pre-verbally, determines agreement, etc.) is not necessarily a
valency complement of the verb of the main clause and, in the case of copular
clauses such as the one given in Figure 33, possibly not even of the predicative
adjective, which is one further indicator of the fact that the various properties of
what we treat as subjects (e.g. governed by X, agrees with Y) need to be ac-
counted for independently as outlined in Section 9.2.
9.3.2.2.2 Passives and small clauses

Now that we have established that a valency model can allow for long-distance
dependencies and that one element can occur as valency dependent of two
valency carriers, we can apply a similar analysis to another phenomenon we
have discussed in Chapter 5, i.e. the passives of sentences with a so-called small
clause in postverbal position of the corresponding active clause. The [that_CL]
in the following example could be analysed as subject of consider and of fact at
the same time:
(34) a. That housing will decline is considered a fact like Isaac Newton’s
laws. (housingpanic.blogspot.com)
So we might extend the analysis proposed for tough movement structures to

these passives as well, which would result in the following diagram:
Fig. 38: Possible dependency relations for (34a)
The reasoning behind such an analysis is that the postverbal structure in the
active clause given in (34b) can be analysed as a so-called small clause in which
fact acts as a valency carrier and determines the form of the [that_CL] (see Sec-
tion 5.2.2.2 for details).
(34) b. He considered it a fact like Isaac Newton’s laws that housing will
decline.
Thus consider and fact share a complement in such an analysis. However, un-
like for tough movement structures, it is not sufficient if one of the two valency
carriers licenses the subject, as indicated by the unacceptability of the following
sentence:
(34) c. *For housing to decline is considered a fact like Isaac Newton’s laws.
Given that consider can occur (even in parallel structures) with a

[for_NP_to_INF] complement in subject position as long as the second valency
carrier allows it, it appears as if the second valency carrier, the noun fact, re-
stricts the possible form of the subject. Due to a lack of data (see the discussion
in Section 5.2.2.2) it is impossible to state with any degree of certainty whether
the verb, consider in this case, also restricts the subject in terms of valency.
Therefore one could also opt for a model in which the subject is not governed by
the verb of the main clause and is only a dependent of the postverbal valency
carrier, which would result in a diagram of the following form:
Fig. 39: Possible dependency relation for (34a)
Such an analysis appears appealing mainly because the postverbal predication

or small clause of the active clause is the only predication remaining in the
passive clause, so that the passive verb could be understood as a sort of copula
verb. Additionally, if the quantitative valency of consider in the active clause is

determined as 2 (i.e. the postverbal structure is treated as a small clause and
thus one complement only), this would mean that there is only one complement
left in the passive clause, which is then split into subject position and post-
verbal position. Accordingly, the subject would not be a complement of the verb
but still agree with it, which again is an argument in favour of a multi-level
analysis of the type found in HPSG or proposed by Jacobs (1994) or Ágel (2000)
(see also section 9.2.2). In a dependency approach, such structures could also be
analysed with the help of the catena concept as discussed in detail by Osborne/
Putnam/Groß (2012) or Groß/Osborne (2013).
A similar analysis can be proposed for sentences of the type shown in (35)
and discussed in more detail in Section 5.2.2.2:
(35) Knocking two small reception rooms into one is virtually guaranteed
to create value, as is enlarging a family kitchen so they can eat in it.
(newspapers)
Here, the passive verb appears to function in a way similar to semi-auxiliaries,

so we would expect the verb create in the postverbal [to_INF] clause to deter-
mine the form of the subject as well.
In conclusion we can state that there is definitely a long-distance depend-
ency relation between a postverbal valency carrier and the subject in both types
of structures. As shown in Section 5.2.2.2, the postverbal valency carrier in the
consider type of structures can also occur within a [to_INF] clause with be or
within a prepositional phrase with as, which increases the distance between
this valency carrier and the subject even more. While the treatment shown in
Figure 38 is a possible analysis, we shall treat the simpler version given in Fig-
ure 39 as more appropriate as long as there is no counter-evidence.
We have thus shown that valency models can account for some problematic
cases if we allow valency relations to work over longer distances in the syntactic
structure. More research is needed to determine how to model restrictions on
long-distance dependencies (such as so-called islands [Ross 1967]) in a valency
model.
9.3.2.3 Limitations
There are, however, constructions which can less easily be reconciled with a
valency analysis. The most important case in the context of the present study is
that of existentials. It is of course not impossible to construct a valency pattern
representation with some sort of lexical or contextual specification and a corre-
sponding sentence type that covers the special agreement patterns, but it has
been argued here (in Section 8.4.4) that valency is not the model best suited for
describing such structures.
Instead, valency is most profitably regarded as a useful and powerful
mechanism for the description and theoretical modelling of complementation
patterns in many sorts of sentences, but it may not make sense to apply it to all
sentences, even if these contain a verb and some other elements around it. Any
model that allows for the storage of larger units of meaning (e.g. construction
grammar; see Goldberg 1995, 2006) that are not necessarily fixed will be able to
account for the idiosyncrasies of structures such as existentials or the lexical
and contextual specifications we have seen in the present chapter relatively
easily. In the long run, it may make sense to incorporate valency and construc-
tion grammar into one approach, and Herbst (2014) presents a model of how
these two may be merged and interact to form a more powerful and flexible
grammatical model. After all, it will be maintained here that there is no such
thing as valency in the language – what we do is describe language in terms of
valency, which is an entirely different thing. In addition, valency is of course
not a model of grammar as a whole but only of the aspect of complementation
and has to be embedded in a larger framework anyway, so constructional ap-
proaches (many of which have not yet been extended to a full grammatical
model either, however) seem the perfect candidates due to the many similar
fundamental assumptions (usage-based, no transformations or deep structures,
important role played by storage).
9.3.3 The bigger picture
As mentioned in the previous section, valency could be regarded as one compo-

nent489 of a larger grammatical model. The reason for stressing this is that va-
lency is not necessarily the only determinant of the syntactic structure of a sen-
tence and that there are various other factors that influence what exactly a
given sentence looks like, sometimes working against valency.
||
489 The term component is used in a theory-neutral way here. No claims as to the modular
nature of a model of language will be made.
9.3.3.1 Conflicting determinants

Let us for instance recall the example of illegal discussed in Section 9.1. We
found that illegal followed by an extraposed [to_INF] (or [for_NP_to_INF]/
[of_NP_to_INF]) subject occurred more than 2,000 times in the 1.5 billion word
parsed corpora, whereas there was no instance of it followed by a [that_CL] in
the 780 million word corpora used for Section 6.3.1.2. We concluded that the
structure is not acceptable. However, there is one example in the parsed corpo-
ra, where one may want to analyse illegal as occurring in this construction:
(36) a. It is illegal, degrading and inhuman that prisoners in Ireland must

carry out slops from their toilet cells each morning. (newspapers)
In fact, this example does not sound particularly problematic to native speak-
ers’ ears, unlike the following version, in which degrading and inhuman was
removed:
(36) b. *It is illegal that prisoners in Ireland must carry out slops from their
toilet cells each morning.
We can thus observe that it must be the coordination of illegal with degrading
and inhuman in (36a) that renders its use with an extraposed [that_CL] accepta-
ble, even though a valency description of illegal would not contain an ex-
traposed [that_CL] due to the unacceptability of (36b) and the complete absence
of other corpus evidence in our large corpora. Thus, in this case, the coordina-
tion ‘wins’ over the valency of illegal. However, we cannot say that coordination
always takes precedence over lexical valency, but it is important to note that
valency is not necessarily stable, although it is probably relatively fixed for
illegal. If all constructional variants are relatively rare, we would expect valency
to be less stable. This is in line with the position taken by Stefanowitsch (2007:
68), who finds that say is very stable in not allowing ‘ditransitive’ comple-
mentation whereas donate and explain are less so:
There are conventions that are strong enough to be near-insurmountable, such as [Det N]
or the fact that, for example, say does not occur ditransitively under any circumstances
that I have been able to determine (cf. Stefanowitsch 2006). However, there are also con-
ventions that are weak enough for speakers to discard them at the first opportunity that
presents itself. A linguistic theory should be able to deal with both extremes and with eve-
rything in between [...]. (Stefanowitsch 2007: 68)
In order for a linguistic theory to be able to deal with such cases, it must take
other factors influencing the syntactic structure into consideration, too.
For instance, we also find conflicting factors in the case of extraposition. In

Chapter 7, we discussed the different relevant factors, two of which were infor-
mation structure and weight. If a subject is given, it is more likely to be in ca-
nonical position; if it is heavy, it is more likely to be extraposed. In the following
examples, the subjects are both heavy and given (as determined from the re-
spective contexts in which they occur):
(37) a. That it was division of labour which gave modern humanity its edge
over the Neanderthals is not a completely new idea. (newspapers)
b. It is no new idea that RNA copies of genes can be copied back again
into DNA and reinserted into new positions. (B7N 888)
Nonetheless, in (37a) givenness seems to take precedence whereas in (37b)

weight seems to be the decisive factor. We cannot identify any reason for the
preference of one over the other in many such cases apart from the speaker’s
choice, but it would be difficult to have these sentences predicted exactly and
only in this form by a grammatical model.
Textual organisation also plays a role; as it makes sense to have the follow-
ing relatively close to what it refers to, extraposition is preferable in the follow-
ing example:
(38) It is essential that any topic should meet all of the following: (HPD
1544)
Countless other factors are relevant to the grammatical structure of English

sentences,490 and a model that tries to mechanically predict the structure of
sentences, for instance through the order of modules in the grammatical archi-
tecture (as some generative models do), is likely to fail in one of the two cases
given in (37a–b) above. But even network models such as the one advocated
below will have to accept that speakers have a choice: For a speaker in a partic-
ular situation, givenness may seem more important than weight (subconscious-
ly, that is), for another speaker, it may be the opposite. And even the same
speaker may use the alternative structure on another occasion. We thus have to
agree with Gries:
Also, it is highly unlikely that we will ever be able to predict native speakers’ behaviour
completely flawlessly irrespective of the number of variables we might still want to in-
clude in the analysis. (Gries 2003: 16)
||
490 A whole range of factors is discussed in detail in the volume Determinants of Grammatical
Variation in English edited by Rohdenburg/Mondorf (2003).
Besides the obvious point that there is variation across native speakers we can-
not even satisfactorily account for the variation of one and the same native
speaker if we do not introduce a non-deterministic element that allows for the
speaker’s choice into our model.
9.3.3.2 A cognitive approach

The model advocated here corresponds to a representation used by Bybee (1995,
2007: 323–326) for the storage of linguistic forms. One of the premisses of the
model is that a large amount of storage takes place in the acquisition of a lan-
guage, which is consistent with present-day usage-based theory:
Usage based accounts of acquisition assume that learning takes place by generalising over
concrete usage events (see Tomasello 2003 for a summary). They do not draw a distinction
between universal and innate core grammar, which is acquired by deduction, and the pe-
riphery, which has to be learnt by induction. Instead, it is supposed that all properties of
languages can be acquired from the input by powerful generalization abilities in connec-
tion with social cognition. (Behrens 2007: 201)
Thus input leads to storage, and stored items are not stored in isolation but are
connected to existing stored items and structures and thus form a network with
them. Bybee illustrates the relationships with two diagrams that represent two
views onto the network, i.e. both diagrams should be understood as snippets
taken out of the huge network that is our mental representation of language:
Fig. 40: Simplified possible organization of NPs (adapted from Bybee 2007: 324)
Fig. 41: Simplified possible organization of NPs (adapted from Bybee 2007: 325)
Speakers can then access the network and can retrieve individual, stored in-
stances of language or abstractions over these instances that emerge from the
network. In Figure 40, common nouns emerge from stored usage; in Figure 41,
determiners emerge. According to Bybee, who follows Langacker (1987) in this
respect, “schemas are formed at various levels of abstraction” (Bybee 2007:
325). She gives an example of what such levels of abstraction may look like for
English NPs based on the figures above:
1. Very specific: my mother, my computer, the car, a problem, an idea

2. Partially general: [my + NOUN], [POSS PRO + mother]
3. More general: [POSSESSIVE + NOUN]
4. Fully general: [DETERMINER + NOUN] (Bybee 2007: 325)
The main appeal of such a model is that it allows us to treat item-specificity and
regularity using the same mechanisms and that there is a very strong focus on
idiosyncratic language use:
Language is a mixture of regularity and idiosyncrasy. By training and inclination, lin-

guists are better equipped to deal with the former than the latter, with the consequence
that far more effort goes into the formulation of general rules than into the patient eluci-
dation of their limitations (cf. Gross 1979). The notion of a usage-based model represents
an attempt to redress this imbalance, and to overcome the problems it engenders. The
central claim is that a reductive account of grammatical constructions is unworkable: a
speaker’s conventional knowledge of a construction is not given by any single structure
(such as a prototype or high-level schema). Its cognitive representation is more adequate-
ly treated as a full schematic network, where specific structures co-occur with categoriz-
ing schemas extracted to describe their commonality at various levels of abstraction.
(Langacker 1987: 411)
We can now apply the model to structures we have looked at in the present
study. It follows from what we have just discussed that similar structures are
connected by more links, dissimilar structures by fewer or none.
In Figure 42 below, there are sentence fragments with an extraposed
[that_CL] subject with the adjective important, with an extraposed [to_INF] sub-
ject also with the adjective important and with an extraposed [to_INF] subject
with the adjective illegal. 491 To keep the diagram at least partially readable, only
two types of connections are shown:492 the connections between identical va-
lency carriers (dotted line) and the connections between identical first words
(possibly heads) of the clausal subjects, i.e. to or that, (dashed line).
We can see that the sentences in which important occurs with a [to_INF] ex-
traposed subject are densely connected to both other groups since they share
the form of the subject with one group and the valency carrier with the other.
The speaker is said to abstract over individual instances along dense paths,
which in this figure would not lead the speaker to produce a sentence with ille-
gal and a [that_CL] extraposed subject. This does of course not mean that it is
impossible to produce such sentences; the opposite is the case, as we have
shown with the invented example in Section 9.1, but such a use is not conven-
tionalised and thus much less likely to be produced subconsciously. In this way
we can understand valency as emergent from such networks of stored and in-
terconnected, conventionalised language use.493
Let us reconsider the problem of obligatory extraposition and the subject
status of as if-clauses discussed in Section 7.1.2. We found that there is no
agreement among theorists as to the treatment of sentences such as the follow-
ing:
||
491 All sentence fragments are taken from actual corpus evidence from the BNC.
492 In the fully detailed version of the diagram, all sentences are connected because they
share it and a form of be.
493 As of now, many questions as to the nature of the mental representation of such structures
are still open, and it may well turn out that the network model has no neural correlates (see
Ullman et al. 2005 for neurological evidence in favour of a model that separates lexicon and
grammar; see also MacWhinney’s 2005 commentary for an opposing view), but experiments on
morphology (Bybee 1995) and phonology (Bybee/Scheibman 1999) have shown that the model
shows a behaviour similar to that of humans.
Fig. 42: Aspects of a network representation of extraposed sentences

(39) a. It is perfectly clear that Charles and Diana are less and less comforta-
ble in each other’s company. (CEN 3385)
b. It appears that Charles and Diana are less and less comfortable in
c. It appears as if Charles and Diana are less and less comfortable in
For (39a), all models discussed (e.g. CamG, CGEL and Herbst/Schüller 2008)
agree that it should be treated in terms of extraposition. For (39b), CamG rejects
an extraposition analysis because there is no non-extraposed counterpart
whereas CGEL and the VDE treat it as an instance of obligatory extraposition.
Since as if-clauses as in (39c) can never occur in canonical subject position, they
are not treated as subjects by CamG, and CGEL also treats them under the head-
ing of complementation by an adjunct (CGEL 1174f); the VDE, however, treats
them as extraposed subjects. Figure 43 tries to illustrate that all three positions
are possible abstractions from a network model, depending on how far one
would like to take generalisations.494
The figure represents not a network of actual exemplars of language use but
of abstractions over these exemplars. The only reason for using this form of
representation is readability, so one could imagine a set of densely connected
instances instead for each construction. The size of these smaller-scale net-
works (i.e. the frequency of the construction) is represented by font size. The
dashed lines between the instances of clear, obvious and helps together with the
dashed/dotted lines between the instances of is and some of the dashed lines
between the instances of [that_CL]s form a comparatively dense network that
represents the relationship between extraposed and non-extraposed variants.495
||
494 Larger font size indicates higher frequency, but the font size is not directly proportional to
frequency. For readability, only third person present tense verb forms are given, but the con-
structions were searched with a lemma in the corpus. Actual frequencies with relevant queries
for the BNC (100 million words): it {be/V} clear that: 1806; it {be/V} obvious that: 473; it
{help/V} that: 18; it {seem/V} that: 1863; it {appear/V} that: 936; it {seem/V} as if: 221; it {ap-
pear/V} as if: 13; it {look/V} as if: 515. The non-extraposed variants were searched in the parsed
corpora (1.5 billion words): clear –csubj--> [any word] –complm--> that: 102; obvious: –csubj-->
[any word] –complm--> that: 93; help% –csubj--> [any word] –complm--> that: 46. As can be
seen from the queries, all numbers are very simple approximations in that the BNC queries do
not account for negation, modal verbs and the like, and the queries in the parsed corpora may
include other copula verbs or irrelevant structures due to parsing errors.
495 It must be made very clear that due to the fact that only a small portion of the network is
shown, some items appear to be relatively isolated, but due to the high frequency of, for in-
This is the generalisation CamG makes. The solid connections between different
instances of it and the dashed ones between [that_CL]s create an additional link
to so-called obligatory extraposition in the sense of CGEL, i.e. to it seems that
and it appears that. Together with the part mentioned above, we can thus cover
what CGEL calls subject.496 The wider use in the VDE can be captured if we add
the dashed lines between instances of seems and appears, and the dotted lines
between [as_if_CL]s to the solid connections between instances of it.
We can conclude that all three positions taken by the different grammatical
models are possible generalisations over the instances in the network. The dif-
ferences between the models stem from the criteria they apply for their decision
as to where the limit of the generalisation is to be found, but all models are
compatible with a network view.
There are some further properties of such network models related to fre-
quency that will be discussed here. Bybee (1995) shows that type frequency and
token frequency have very distinct influences on the predictions the model
makes. A high token frequency leads to a strong entrenchment of the relevant
structure, so even structures with few connections to other structures are very
stable in such a model. Also, high token frequency seems to lead to a certain
independence and separate storage as illustrated by the case of the phonologi-
cal reduction of I don’t compared to less frequent structures such as we don’t
discussed in Bybee/Scheibman (1999).
As we have seen in Chapter 8, existential structures show some very distinct
grammatical properties. We can thus imagine existentials in terms of such a
comparatively independent and separate tightly-knit network. Of course exis-
tentials are bound to have connections to other sentences with a copula verb
and with a noun phrase,497 but since they are considerably more frequent than I
||
stance, help, the non-extraposed version will be densely connected to other instances of help
without a clausal subject and form a large network with them.
496 Reality is of course more complex since there are sentences with seem and appear that
have a non-extraposed version if the verbs are used in certain divalent patterns (see discussion
in Section 7.1.2).
497 For existential there we would have to assume separate storage due to its reduced phono-
logical form, which does of course not exclude connections to locative there.
Fig. 43: Non-extraposed and extraposed [that_CL] subjects together with the analogous struc-
ture with an [as if_CL] in a network representation.
don’t we would expect them to be stored separately, to be deeply entrenched

and accordingly to show different features in the model.498
On the other hand, a high type frequency leads to the generation of general-
isations which, if they are strong and relatively abstract, could be understood as
rules. For morphology, Bybee (1995) shows that if there are many instances of a
certain type of past tense formation, this type comes to be interpreted as a rule
and is generalised by analogy to novel verbs. Similarly, if we regard valency as
emergent from the network around specific lexical items (see Herbst’s valency
realisation principle [Herbst 2011, 2014]) we can regard argument structure con-
structions (Goldberg 1995) as emergent over structures across a range of lexical
items, as a generalization at a higher level of abstraction. Accordingly, if we
have many valency carriers that can be used in extraposed and in non-
extraposed sentences, the extraposition rule can emerge (such a ‘rule’ need not
be represented as such but may simply be an ad-hoc abstraction that leads to
analogy) that allows us to create a non-extraposed version of a sentence with a
valency carrier that we have only heard used in sentences with extraposition.
Thus even without explicit knowledge of grammatical rules, speakers will be
able to recognise regularities that emerge from their stored networks of the lan-
guage use they experienced, as long as a sufficient number of types show iden-
tical behaviour.
In the context of his discussion of grammaticality cited in Section 3.3,
Sampson uses a catchy metaphor to describe a network model that seems to be
largely compatible with the view presented here:
[T]he grammatical possibilities of a language are like a network of paths in open grass-
land. There are a number of heavily used, wide and well-beaten tracks. Other, less popular
routes are narrower, and the variation extends smoothly down to routes used only very
occasionally, which are barely distinguishable furrows or, if they are used rarely enough,
perhaps not even visible as permanent marks in the grass; but there are no fences any-
where preventing any particular route being used, and there is no sharp discontinuity
akin to the contrast between metalled roads and foot-made paths – the widest highway is
only the result of people going that way much more often and in far greater numbers than
in the case of narrow paths. (Sampson 2007: 10f)
||
498 In the BNC there are about 200,000 instances of there_EX0 + {be/V} (existential there
followed by a form of be) and more than 52,000 of I followed by a form of do followed by a form
of not, which is a very generous way of counting I don’t (since it includes I did not and others).
If we limit our search to the spoken part of the BNC, there are still about 50 % more existentials
than instances of our generously counted I don’t.
However, Sampson’s account does not explain why we would want to exclude
illegal with an extraposed [that_CL] subject (as discussed above and in Section
9.1) from our model description of English clausal subjects.499 But we can show
how this can be done if we use Stefanowitsch’s (2006) method of accounting for
negative evidence with the help of frequency, which is compatible with our
network representation.500 In Figure 44, we shall consider only one aspect of the
network, frequency. Every dot represents one instance of use.501 No connecting
lines between items are necessary, even though one should imagine several
connecting lines from every dot to every other dot in the same box, fewer con-
necting lines from every dot in a box to every dot in the adjacent box and even
fewer lines (for it and possibly the copula verb) from every dot in the image to
every other dot in the image.
In the boxes for extraposed [that_CL] and [to_INF] subjects with important,
we can observe that both occur very frequently, so what we would find is a
densely connected bifocal network. Both structures can be easily accessed since
they are strongly entrenched. In the case of selfish, only four instances with a
[that_CL] extraposed subject were found in the parsed corpora, compared to
roughly 85 with a [to_INF]502 clause. If we consider the figures on corpus size
given in Section 9.1, this means that some native speakers possibly have never
heard selfish constructed with a [that_CL] extraposed subject, whereas they
probably have come across it with a [to_INF] a few times. So the [to_INF] exam-
ples could form a small network and the [that_CL] might or might not be present
at all. However, an application of analogy with other adjectives may lead to the
production of selfish with a [that_CL] if the need arises, basically because there
is no evidence contradicting such a use. Actual evidence against the use of ille-
gal with a [that_CL] does of course not exist either, but the high frequency of
illegal with a [to_INF] (and other infinitival constructions) creates a very dense
and – as we have seen above – more independent network of uses, which is a
strong competitor for a [that_CL] use. If this way of expressing a clausal subject
||
499 Sampson may not want to exclude it, though – see the discussion in Section 3.3.
500 As we have seen in Section 9.1, we cannot use Stefanowitsch’s calculation due to limita-
tions on the corpus evidence, but we can show how his concept of significant absence (Stefan-
owitsch 2006: 62ff) can emerge from a network model representation.
501 In the corpora, frequency differences are much bigger than can be sensibly depicted in
such a diagram, but since the idea here is to demonstrate how the mechanism works, this
inaccurate representation should be sufficient.
502 This number excludes [for_NP_to_INF] and [of_NP_to_INF] and instances where coordina-
tion may have influenced the valency pattern.
Fig. 44: Schematic representation of the frequency distribution of extraposed subjects with
three adjectives (not to scale)
with illegal is so highly frequent, it will be so strongly entrenched (and thus the
combination of the infinitival constructions with illegal so strongly associated)
that this route is chosen automatically in the network unless the language user
deliberately deviates from the norm. Thus the high frequency of the alternative
construction in a way pre-empts the non-conventional construction. In the case
of selfish, the much lower frequency of occurrence of extraposed [to_INF] sub-
jects is not sufficient to pre-empt a [that_CL] use as strongly as in the case of
illegal.
Thus with a few simple assumptions we can make the network model pre-
dict valency restrictions based on corpus data, provided that the data available
is rather large scale.
We can also conclude that the notion of subject in this view of the language
is emergent just like all other concepts, “rather than given a priori or by design”
(Bybee 2010: 2). So basically what exactly counts as a subject is once again a
matter of how far one would like to extend the generalisations possible in the
model. In the present study, a case was made against using the term with exis-
Summary | 327
tentials since existential there shares fewer properties with other subjects and
thus shows less integration with other subjects in a network graph.503
9.4 Summary
In this chapter we were able to show that the relationship between corpus data
and native speaker data is problematic and that once a certain threshold of
corpus size is reached, the corpus may permit a much better description of the
language use of native speakers than native speaker intuition, even for rare
phenomena.
Furthermore we showed that we were able to confirm our hypotheses pre-
sented at the beginning of the present study: Subjects are indeed valency com-
plements and are governed by valency carriers in the clause, no matter whether
the valency carrier is an active verb, a passive verb, an adjective or a noun be-
cause they are formally restricted by the valency carrier. Extraposition of sub-
jects is also item-specific and depends not only on the valency carrier but also
on other complements present in the clause. The idiosyncratic nature of existen-
tials led us to conclude that the term subject is not as ideally applicable to exis-
tentials as to canonical sentences and that it may make sense not to give any
element in an existential the name subject at all. Since criteria for subject status
do not necessarily coincide, a model that attempts to describe all aspects of
their grammatical behaviour will have to spell out the individual properties
independently, as for instance suggested by frameworks such as HPSG (Pol-
lard/Sag 1994).
As for valency theory we were able to show that valency can only be satis-
factorily described if we give up the notion of complement inventories and go
for patterns instead, which is in line with Herbst’s (2007) conclusions on the
basis of postverbal complements. These patterns need a semantic representa-
tion as in Herbst/Schüller’s (2008) valency constructions, which include a par-
ticipant pattern in addition to the valency pattern. Valency needs to be de-
scribed for active and passive clauses independently (or at least a model must
allow for such descriptions). Long-distance dependencies need to be accounted
for by not restricting valency patterns to the clause in which the valency carrier
occurs and by allowing a dependent to be governed by more than one valency
||
503 As mentioned before, such a model does not per se restrict the kinds of generalisations
people can make, so the decision to regard existentials as a separate construction is of course
arbitrary to some extent, too.
carrier. Given that the criteria for complement status do not necessarily coin-
cide, it is also preferable to describe the properties of such elements individual-
ly in a model similar to that presented by Jacobs (1994) or Ágel (2000) for Ger-
man.
Valency is, however, only a descriptive device that is unlikely to correspond
to language organisation in the mind. Bybee (1995, 2007) proposed a network
model of language that performed well in the prediction of morphological and
syntactic rules and the limitations of these rules. This model appears to be well-
suited for the sort of evidence we found in relation to subjects. It also allows for
the individual behaviour of language items to occur side by side with regularity
that arises from generalisations over items in the network. This behaviour also
makes it compatible with other cognitive linguistics approaches such as con-
struction grammar in the sense of Goldberg’s (2006) revised model.504 Of course
there are still many open questions as to the exact nature of such a network, the
most pressing of which is probably where and why generalisations stop, i.e.
why it is not acceptable to construct sentences such as, say, *I want that he
leaves. Using Stefanowitsch’s (2006) model of negative entrenchment we have
been able to show that frequency seems to play an important role, but it does
not seems to be the only factor at work (see the quote from Stefanowitsch 2007
at the beginning of Section 9.3.3).
All in all, what the present study showed is that item-specificity plays an ex-
tremely important role in language use. What is striking is not so much that
these idiosyncrasies exist – exceptions are said to confirm the rule, after all –
but the scale at which these phenomena occur. Their high frequency suggests
that the ‘exceptions’ may in fact be the rule. The scope of ‘rules’ (such as the
prediction of the syntactic form of a complement from a semantic representa-
tion) appears to be much more limited than many linguists may have thought –
or may still think if they do not work with corpora systematically.
||
504 The original model (Goldberg 1995) did not allow for storage of constructions that were
predictable on the basis of smaller constructions (e.g. regular past tense forms) whereas the
revised version accounts for the counter-evidence presented by Bybee (1995, 2007) and others.
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Index
A Valency Dictionary of English (VDE) 4, 31, Behaghel, O. 209
56, 59, 71ff., 95ff., 99ff., 108ff., 112ff., Behrens, H. 317
118ff., 129ff., 134, 136ff., 142, 144ff., BNC 55f., 58f., 62, 64, 76, 84ff., 102, 104,
149, 152, 161, 165f., 169, 179ff., 185ff., 110, 116, 129, 135, 146, 157, 204f., 241,
221f., 224ff., 248, 282, 298f., 301, 304, 252, 256ff., 269, 279f., 319, 321, 324
321f. Breivik, L. E. 241, 243, 253, 269, 276
Aarts, B. 9, 54, 105, 107ff., 171, 242, 254 Bresnan, J. 20, 23, 38, 95
Aarts, F. 13, 93f., 128 Bybee, J. 19, 82, 187, 236, 317ff., 322, 324,
Aarts, J. 13, 93f., 128 326, 328
acceptability 55, 59, 67ff., 79f., 91, 102, 114,
116f., 136ff., 143, 147ff., 152, 156f., 174f., CamG 8f., 13ff., 23, 26f., 37ff., 47, 49, 51, 64,
184, 191, 195f., 211f., 230, 245, 249, 258, 71, 82, 93f., 119, 124, 127ff., 157, 159,
284, 295 173ff., 182ff., 196f., 199, 201f., 204ff.,
accusative 38, 190, 298 209ff., 225, 229ff., 234, 237f., 240ff.,
active 3, 12, 30f., 44, 46, 71–91, 93ff., 107ff., 246ff., 257ff., 263, 265, 267ff., 275,
113ff., 120f., 169, 197, 202, 221f., 224f., 288f., 292, 296f., 307, 321f.
231, 245, 260, 281, 288f., 295f., 298ff., canonical 4, 13, 37, 39ff., 50, 64, 75, 86, 96,
311f., 327 103, 136, 149f., 153f., 159, 161f., 169f.,
adjective 4, 29, 47, 56, 82, 123ff., 149ff., 157, 172, 176, 179, 185ff., 189, 193, 195, 203,
160, 162, 164, 166, 171, 179ff., 184, 204, 209ff., 213ff., 219ff., 228, 230, 232f.,
215, 220f., 229ff., 233ff., 265f., 282f., 236f., 243, 254f., 285, 287, 295, 298,
295f., 304f., 311, 319, 325ff. 307f., 310, 316, 321, 327
adjunct 29, 31ff., 38, 43, 45, 101, 106, 128, Cardinaletti, A. 24
164, 204f., 207f., 239, 241, 252, 261, CGEL 9, 12ff., 26, 36ff., 44ff., 51, 53, 71, 82,
280, 321 93f., 96, 110, 112ff., 120, 123f., 130, 147,
adverb 64, 82, 157, 198, 240, 258 159, 171ff., 177f., 182, 185ff., 191, 197ff.,
adverbial 38, 85, 157, 175, 178, 185, 198, 205, 206ff., 212f., 229, 232, 237f., 240ff.,
240f., 249 251ff., 258, 260f., 263, 268f., 287f., 300,
Ágel, V. 8, 32, 50, 313, 328 321f.
agent 12, 44, 46, 50f., 82, 114, 197, 199, 202, Chomsky, N. 2, 13, 16ff., 25, 28, 31, 42, 54f.,
261f., 286 67f., 94, 105, 124, 210, 231, 233, 253,
agentive 45f., 285f., 289 270ff., 274, 284, 309
agentivity 46, 197, 199f., 202, 262, 285f., clausal role 46, 202, 286
293 clausal subject 2ff., 35, 39, 43, 45f., 49f.,
Allerton, D. J. 2, 29, 33, 94 55f., 60, 64, 71–236, 279, 286, 288,
Anderson, J. M. 253, 259 296f., 304, 310, 319, 322, 325f.
anticipatory it 171, 179, 187ff., 193, 195, cleft 204, 230, 287
198ff., 202ff., 212, 219 cleft existentials 271
argument (see also complement) 3, 8, 15, Coates, J. 86ff.
20f., 23, 26, 30, 32f., 50, 128, 180f., 199, cognitive 7, 209, 235, 317f., 328
201, 229, 260, 273ff., 292, 294, 298, Collins, P. 217f., 239, 243ff., 250f., 271
301, 324 complement 1f., 13ff., 23, 27ff., 38f., 43f.,
Aristotle 6f., 26 47f., 50, 56, 60, 66, 68, 71, 76ff., 86, 91,
93ff., 111ff., 123, 127, 130, 132f., 136ff.,
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110589801-365
346 | Index
146, 151f., 157, 164ff., 172, 177, 179ff., dependency 2, 13, 16, 22, 29, 33ff., 51f., 64,
184, 186ff., 190f., 193, 197, 201ff., 211, 127, 206, 229, 267, 280, 292, 306,
213, 215, 217ff., 226ff., 233ff., 247f., 250, 308f., 311ff., 327
267, 273, 275, 283, 289, 292f., 296ff., determiner 2, 63, 67, 267, 270, 318
301ff., 309ff., 327f. direct object 41, 44, 94, 97, 113, 244
complement inventory 95f., 115, 120, 235, dislocation 147f., 171, 173ff., 219, 240
298ff. divalent 29, 97, 108, 123, 166, 224, 226f.,
complementation 3, 58, 76, 94, 156, 230, 273, 301f., 322
241f., 314f., 321 Dowty, D. 45ff., 199, 261, 286
complex transitive 94, 124, 166f. Dubinsky, S. 19, 22, 28, 294
concord 11f., 39, 44, 61, 126, 158, 172, 253, Duffley, P. J. 88, 297
256, 260, 267ff., 276, 292
conjunction (see also particle) 6, 62ff., 125 Eisenberg, P. 33, 124, 189, 191, 201, 203
constituency 33f., 51 Emons, R. 2, 29, 33, 188
constituent 4, 7, 12ff., 17, 26f., 33f., 36, 38, Engel, U. 33f., 96, 188, 235
40f., 52, 63, 93, 106, 108f., 113, 125, Erdmann, P. 172, 181, 206, 218ff., 225f., 239,
163f., 170, 173f., 178, 189ff., 209f., 212, 272f.
229, 236, 241, 245, 263, 265, 274, 276, Erlangen Valency Patternbank 56, 59, 96,
285, 288, 295, 298, 303, 306ff. 129ff., 134, 139f., 142, 146f., 149, 153,
construction 12, 14, 19, 27, 37ff., 43, 55, 59f., 161, 169, 222, 236, 275, 300, 302ff.
68, 86, 89, 101, 106, 109f., 112, 119, 124, Eroms, H.-W. 33ff., 124, 126f.
128, 130, 132ff., 137f., 144, 146, 149, 154, existential 4f., 42, 51, 61, 198, 230, 237–77,
157f., 171ff., 177, 182ff., 189, 196, 201, 285f., 288f., 291f., 313f., 322, 324, 327
206, 214, 216,220, 224, 229f., 232, extraposition 4, 28, 42, 51f., 56, 64, 75, 79,
236ff., 241, 244ff., 261, 268, 274ff., 281, 81, 83, 87ff., 100, 103, 106, 112f., 118f.,
283, 287ff., 297f., 302ff., 306, 308, 129ff., 142, 144, 146ff., 151, 153, 155, 157,
313ff., 318, 321, 324ff. 160f., 164, 167, 169–236, 252ff., 259,
contextual specification 275, 304, 310, 313 264, 273ff., 280ff., 285f., 289, 291f.,
contextually optional 29f., 165, 299 297, 301f., 304, 306f., 309, 315f., 319ff.
coordination 37, 40ff., 85, 100, 136, 183f.,
190f., 193f., 196, 200f., 204, 208, 213, Falk, Y. N. 24, 50, 294, 306, 308
222f., 258, 267, 315, 325 Faulhaber, S. (see also Schüller, S.) 1, 46, 78,
copula 3, 34, 71, 78, 83, 87, 90f., 123–67, 91, 95, 97, 100, 107f., 114ff., 152, 202,
182, 222, 232, 259, 269, 271, 312, 321f., 296
325 Fillmore, C. J. 8, 45, 54, 158, 246, 276, 286
copular 3f., 11, 14, 34, 105f., 123–67, 182, Fischer, K. 29, 33f., 188
192, 281, 285f., 288, 296, 307, 311 frequency 2, 54, 59, 61, 86f., 89, 116, 138,
Crystal, D. 53, 58, 61, 306 153, 177, 217, 219, 225, 241f., 252, 269,
279, 283, 321f., 324ff., 328
Dąbrowska, E. 281 frequent 38, 55, 60, 63, 74, 76, 82, 87, 93f.,
Davies, W. D. 19, 22, 28, 294 104, 129f., 142, 145, 171f., 214, 218f.,
declarative 3, 14, 30f., 38, 40, 46, 71, 94f., 225, 232f., 293, 297, 322, 326
120, 163, 191, 202f., 237, 288f., 298,
300 Garside, R. 62, 64
definite 10, 36, 200, 243f. Gast, V. 238, 241, 262, 276
deletion 29, 107, 114, 206, 234, 272 generative grammar 2f., 5, 9, 16ff., 24ff., 30,
52, 66, 91, 94f., 105, 107ff., 123, 169,
Index | 347
181, 190, 210, 228f., 234, 236, 239, 241, Jespersen, O. 5, 8ff., 36, 46, 82, 94, 105,
247, 259, 262ff., 266, 271f., 274, 294f., 171f., 177, 181, 206, 219, 237, 295
308f., 316
gerund 11, 14, 88, 119, 175, 214, 216 Kaltenböck, G. 157f., 171, 174, 198, 206, 214,
Goldberg, A. E. 19, 74, 89, 109, 128, 158, 187, 217ff., 221, 231
202, 274, 276, 288, 298, 301, 304, 314, Keenan, E. L. 25f., 50, 293f.
324, 328 Kiparsky, C. and P. 213ff., 284
gradient 25, 82, 198, 234, 288 Klotz, M. 27, 46, 54, 152, 202, 273
Greenbaum, S. 55, 58ff., 65f., 206, 284
Gries, S. Th. 54, 316 Langacker, R. W. 19, 68, 119, 288f., 297, 318
lemma 62, 64, 321
Haas, F. 238, 241, 262, 276 lexical unit 14, 71f., 74, 89, 108, 130, 137,
Halliday, M. A. K. 8, 44, 51, 54, 178, 188, 287, 139f., 142, 144ff., 150, 161, 169, 222,
289, 294 226, 281, 310
Hannay, M. 241, 248, 251, 256, 265f. lexicon 18f., 30, 35, 128, 170, 290, 306, 319
Hawkins, J. 210 LGSWE 58, 83, 86, 94, 247, 263
head 10, 13, 22, 26, 34, 67, 125, 167, 189, locative 159, 238ff., 243, 254f., 257f., 261,
201, 203, 240, 248, 250, 284, 289, 303, 271, 322
319
Helbig, G. 2, 8, 29ff., 95, 124ff., 164, 202, Mair, C. 3, 54, 86f., 125, 173, 175, 178, 214,
273, 287, 298 216f., 219, 221, 231, 234
Herbst, T. 2ff., 12, 27, 29ff., 34f., 41, 46, 56, Marantz, A. 23, 27, 50f.
59, 64, 71, 94ff., 107, 109, 112ff., 121, Martínez Insua, A. E. 241, 252f., 269, 276
125, 129, 132, 136, 149, 153, 159, 163ff., matrix 37, 109, 119, 171, 184, 194, 204ff.,
179, 187f., 197, 201f., 215, 236, 238ff., 214, 221, 225, 230f., 297
254, 263, 268, 273, 275, 286, 288, 298, Matthews, P. 5, 31, 33f., 51f., 124, 175, 179,
300ff., 306f., 314, 321, 324, 327 203, 260, 306
Heringer, H. J. 29f., 33f. McCloskey, J. 20ff., 28, 295
Huddleston, R. D. 2, 9, 13f., 37, 124, 128, 178, meaning 6ff., 12, 32, 42ff., 67, 77, 82, 86ff.,
188f., 193ff., 199, 201, 204 104, 114ff., 128, 134, 138, 144ff., 159,
Hudson, R. 2, 165, 262, 267 181, 198, 216, 239ff., 243, 245f., 252,
254, 260, 275f., 280, 284, 297, 301,
imperative 41, 50, 114f., 300 303ff., 314
impersonal 130, 184ff., 220, 224 modal verb 58, 81ff., 182, 215, 242, 258, 268,
indefinite 10, 29, 174, 243, 254, 261 321
indirect object 44, 197 modality 71, 77, 81f., 87, 91, 133, 176, 181f.,
infinitive 21, 62, 66, 88, 110, 113, 151, 172, 215f., 297
229, 231, 243f., 253, 283, 307 modifier 157, 250f.
interrogative 14, 39f., 71, 136, 191ff., 195f., monovalent 15, 126, 226
200ff., 224, 254, 257f., 303
intransitive 14f., 46, 124, 240, 251, 259 negation 82, 130, 136, 145, 152, 321
inversion 38ff., 136, 154, 159, 191, 196, 200f., Newmeyer, F. J. 16, 38, 81, 191, 283, 298
203, 238f., 242, 256f. nominative 2, 30, 35, 38f., 190f., 289
non-canonical 4f., 37, 170, 236, 276, 285,
Jacobs, J. 32f., 35, 292, 295, 313, 328 287, 295
Järventausta, M. 35, 287, 297 noun 2, 4, 17, 29, 38, 46f., 56, 58f., 62, 67,
76, 82, 107, 123, 125, 129f., 138ff., 143f.,
348 | Index
146ff., 153ff., 161ff., 172, 174, 189, 191, 224, 231ff., 238, 241, 243, 246f., 253,
204, 210, 214, 216, 220f., 230f., 235f., 255ff., 260ff., 266ff., 273f., 286, 292,
242, 244, 248, 267, 269f., 273, 275, 286, 296, 298f., 302, 306f., 309ff., 327
292, 295f., 312, 318, 322, 327 pragmatic 13, 15, 31, 36, 51, 145, 209, 213,
236, 244, 270f., 275f., 287f.
object (see also direct object and indirect predicate 3, 6ff., 10ff., 15, 17f., 24, 26ff., 37,
object) 3, 10, 12ff., 23, 32, 38, 41, 47, 40, 51, 95, 98, 110, 123ff., 157f., 173, 179,
49, 51, 93f., 97, 113, 127ff., 177, 185, 197, 184, 206, 212ff., 221, 231, 237, 265,
229, 234, 246f., 259f., 262, 288f., 298, 270f., 274, 284, 293, 297, 303
307 Predicate Complement Unit (PCU) 98f., 101ff.,
obligatoriness 2, 31ff., 35, 41f., 193ff., 200, 117f., 163, 238
222 predication 11, 17, 22, 24, 27, 105, 110, 124,
obligatory 2, 4, 13, 22, 27, 29ff., 41f., 97, 100, 128f., 237, 239, 251, 262, 266, 271,
103, 118, 129, 133, 136, 178ff., 182, 274f., 312
184ff., 188, 191, 195f., 208, 215, 217f., predicative 3, 11, 14f., 34, 47, 90, 106f., 121,
220f., 223ff., 235f., 240, 254, 273, 298, 123ff., 150, 154, 158, 160ff., 167, 173,
319, 321f. 179f., 186, 229, 231, 243, 265, 296, 311
operator 39f., 191f., 242, 303 predicator 13, 15, 38f., 127, 179
Oppenrieder, W. 14, 23, 39, 46, 49, 185, 292 premodifier 142, 156
optional 4, 29, 31, 114, 128, 130, 147, 165, preposition (see also particle) 64, 93, 112f.,
169, 179, 206f., 213, 215, 221, 225, 235, 115, 230, 240, 272
298f., 302 prepositional 38, 43f., 93f., 96, 105, 109,
optionality 30, 96, 128, 165, 193, 206, 300, 112f., 116, 120, 157, 210, 224, 299, 313
302 presentational 237f., 242, 251f., 256, 274,
276
Palmer, F. 38f., 82, 87f. pronoun (see also personal pronoun) 2, 24,
participant pattern 327 40, 44, 171f., 174, 177, 183, 192f., 195f.,
participant role 46, 121, 202, 234, 301 198, 200, 203, 212, 244, 254, 259, 267,
particle 107, 111f., 114f., 126, 157, 239f., 253, 283, 291
300 prop it 198, 203
passive 3, 12, 20, 25, 30, 44f., 49, 51, 58, 93– proposition 27, 45, 237, 260
121, 197, 202, 225, 247, 259ff., 281, pseudo-cleft 287
295f., 299ff., 306, 311ff., 327 psychological 7f., 30, 37, 51, 267, 273, 277,
passivization 18, 44, 94f., 112, 119, 197, 200, 284, 293
202, 260, 262, 288 Pullum, G. K. 9, 13f., 25, 37, 43, 66, 124, 128,
patient 46f., 50, 199 178, 188f., 193ff., 199, 201, 204, 293f.
periphery 8, 18f., 317 putative 135f.
Perlmutter, D. 20, 294
personal pronoun 39, 174, 195, 254f. question 10ff., 68, 158, 192, 194f., 203, 250,
plural 44, 47, 158, 172, 190f., 193, 256, 268f. 253f., 257f., 303
Pollard, C. 289ff., 327 Quirk, R. 9, 12f., 82, 86, 124, 171, 174, 188,
Postal, P. 19f., 173, 228 196ff., 204, 284
postmodification 242, 247, 249ff., 269
postmodifier 106, 156, 210, 248f., 255, 280 referent 20, 46, 48f., 80, 165, 180, 198, 244,
postverbal 1f., 14, 39, 56, 71, 78, 80, 91, 93f., 261, 267
96ff., 100ff., 104ff., 116ff., 120, 123, 128, referential 174, 196, 275, 283
152, 157f., 164, 166, 190, 202f., 205, 211, reflexive 44, 196, 200, 259
Index | 349
relative clause 39, 71, 176, 210, 244ff., 268, tag question 40, 43f., 174, 193, 196, 200,
271 214, 253f., 258
relative pronoun 244, 268 tense 18, 23f., 39, 77, 79, 215f., 292, 321,
Rizzi, L. 24 324, 328
Roe, I. 2, 27, 30f., 35, 41, 202 Tesnière, L. 2, 8, 29f.
Rothstein, S. D. 5, 26f. theme 8, 44f., 51, 198, 200, 258, 261
theta role (see also semantic role) 2, 21ff.,
Sag, I. A. 289ff., 327 27f., 274
Sampson, G. 16, 59, 61, 66f., 324f. traditional grammar 8f., 12, 18, 20, 22, 28,
Satzbauplan 96, 300 50, 82, 93, 100, 105, 156, 158, 169, 179,
Satzmuster 96, 300 189, 235, 260f., 271, 274, 276, 288, 294
Schenkel, W. 2, 126, 298 trivalent 97, 108, 166, 224, 227, 301
Schierholz, S. 29, 57f., 279, 284
Schüller, S. (see also Faulhaber, S.) 3, 12, Uhrig, P. 56, 59, 64, 96, 129f., 132, 149, 153,
29f., 34f., 46, 64, 71, 94, 96f., 109, 112, 236, 275, 300, 302ff.
121, 159, 163f., 188, 197, 201f., 238ff.,
254, 263, 268, 273, 286, 300ff., 307, 321 valency carrier 3f., 29, 32f., 35, 56, 105, 111,
semantic 7f., 12ff., 23, 26ff., 31f., 39, 45ff., 124ff., 164ff., 179, 186f., 203f., 220ff.,
50ff., 71, 74, 78, 80f., 86, 91, 95ff., 102, 225f., 231, 235f., 268, 273, 275, 295f.,
105, 107, 109, 112, 115, 118, 121, 123ff., 298, 304ff., 309ff., 319, 324, 327
133f., 136f., 145f., 152, 157, 164, 181, valency construction 109, 121, 301ff., 327
186, 198f., 201ff., 215, 229f., 235f., 241, valency pattern 96, 109, 115, 120, 144, 226,
245, 251ff., 263, 271, 274, 276, 284, 235, 275, 298, 300, 302f., 305f., 313,
287f., 292, 297f., 301, 310, 327f. 325, 327
semantic role 13, 23, 26f., 31, 46, 50, 91, 95, valency slot 31, 35, 93, 95ff., 102, 105, 108,
97, 121, 164, 199, 202, 298 114, 116, 156, 166, 179f., 228, 232f., 261,
semantics 8, 36, 81, 86, 91, 133, 145, 153, 273, 275, 298f., 301, 304
202, 216, 289 valency theory 1f., 5, 13, 22, 29ff., 33, 35, 52,
Seuren, P. A. M. 7f. 94, 109, 121, 128, 156, 163, 178f., 187,
Shlonsky, U. 24 235, 263, 273ff., 292, 295, 298, 306,
Sinclair, J. McH. 19, 54, 109, 158, 276, 304f. 309, 327, 334
small clause 21, 105, 108ff., 128, 255, 263ff., verbless clause 48, 109
271, 311f.
spoken 44, 53, 56, 94, 173ff., 177, 205, 217ff., Wasow, T. 209f., 308
269f., 324 Welke, K. M. 2, 25, 29f., 32ff., 95, 126
Stefanowitsch, A. 19, 54f., 66ff., 283, 315, Williams, E. 19, 23, 263ff., 271f., 274
325, 328 word class 62ff., 254f.
storage 30, 89, 146, 159, 187, 236, 252, 275, written 32, 36, 41, 44, 53, 56, 110, 177, 217ff.,
297, 314, 317ff., 322, 324, 328 240, 249, 268f., 281
Subject Complement Unit (SCU) 34, 98f.,
101ff., 117f., 163, 238 Zandvoort, R. W. 9, 12, 36
subjunctive 136
subordinate clause 13f., 37, 48, 152, 169,
181, 193, 204f., 207, 210ff., 229f., 307f.
Peter Uhrig
SUBJECTS IN
ENGLISH
FROM VALENCY GRAMMAR TO A CONSTRUCTIONIST
TREATMENT OF NON-CANONICAL SUBJECTS
Appendices
https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110589801-222
i
Table of Contents
Appendix 1 List of clausal subjects with active verbs in the VDE ...................................... 1
Appendix 2 List of clausal subjects with active verbs with added corpus results ............ 5
Appendix 3 Native speaker judgements on clausal subjects with convince ....................... 8
Appendix 4 Native speaker judgements on clausal subjects with persuade ..................... 12
Appendix 5 Native speaker judgements on clausal subjects with annoy ......................... 16
Appendix 6 Native speaker judgements on clausal subjects with offend ......................... 18
Appendix 7 Native speaker judgements on clausal subjects with upset .......................... 20
Appendix 8 Native speaker judgements on clausal subjects with amuse ......................... 22
Appendix 9 Native speaker judgements on clausal subjects with please .......................... 24
Appendix 10 Native speaker judgements on clausal subjects with confuse ....................... 26
Appendix 11 Native speaker judgements on clausal subjects with shock .......................... 28
Appendix 12 Native speaker judgements on clausal subjects with surprise ...................... 30
Appendix 13 Native speaker judgements on clausal subjects with puzzle ......................... 32
Appendix 14 Sentences with pre-verbal [to_INF] classified for modality ......................... 34
Appendix 15 Corpus evidence for passive clauses ............................................................... 80
Appendix 16 Sentences with extraposed [that_CL] classified according to position

of [that_CL] ......................................................................................................... 91
Appendix 17 List of adjectives that allow a [that_CL] but no [to_INF] extraposed

subject according to the VDE .......................................................................... 109
Appendix 18 Native speaker judgements on adjectives with extraposed [to_INF]

subjects ............................................................................................................... 110
Appendix 19 List of adjectives that allow a [to_INF] but no [that_CL] extraposed

subject according to the VDE .......................................................................... 117
Appendix 20 Native speaker judgements on adjectives with extraposed [that_CL]

subjects ............................................................................................................... 118
Appendix 21 Native speaker judgements on nouns with extraposed [to_INF]

subjects ............................................................................................................... 133
Appendix 22 Native speaker judgements on nouns with extraposed [that_CL]

subjects ............................................................................................................... 136
ii
Appendix 23 Native speaker judgements on nouns with extraposed [V-ing]

subjects ............................................................................................................... 140
Appendix 24 Native speaker judgements on non-extraposed subjects with

adjectives starting in h ..................................................................................... 145
Appendix 25 Native speaker judgements on non-extraposed subjects with nouns

starting in i......................................................................................................... 147
Appendix 26 List of active verbs with [to_INF] subject with and without
extraposition according to the VDE ............................................................... 150
Appendix 27 Social information on native speaker informants ........................................ 152

Appendix 1 1
Appendix 1 List of clausal subjects with active verbs in the VDE
[to_INF] [that_CL] [V-ing] [NP_V-ing] [wh_CL] [wh_to_INF] [for_NP_to_INF]
account(A) - + + + - - -
act(C) - - + + - - -
add(A) - - + - - - -
afford(B) - + + + - - -
agree(E) - - + - - - -
allow(A) - - + - - - -
allow(B) - + + - - - -
amuse(A) + + + + + - -
annoy() + + + + + - +
appear(B) + + + + - - +
attract(A) + + + - - - -
attract(B) - + + + + - -
bar(B) - + + - - - -
become() + - + + - - +
begin() + - + + - - +
belong(A) - - + - - - -
bind(B) - + + - - - -
breathe() - + + + - - -
breed(C) - + + + - - -
bring(B) + + + + - - +
buy() + + + + - - -
call(F) + - + - - - -
catch(zeta) - + - + - - -
cause() + + + + - + -
change(A) - + + + - - -
charge(D) - - + - - - -
charm() - + - - - - -
check(B) - - + - - - -
come(B) - + - + + - -
come(F) + + + + - - +
commit(A) + + + + - - -
compare(B) + - + - - - -
compel() - + + + - - -
concentrate(A) + - + - - - -
concern(A) - + + + - - -
confirm() + + + + - - -
confuse(A) - + + - - - -
convince() - + + + - - -
cost(A) + - + - - - +
cost(B) + + + + - - -
count(B) + + + + + - +
count(C) + + + + - - +
create() - + + + - - -
decide(alpha) + + + - - - -
delay(B) + + + - - - -
demand(A) + - + - - - -
depend(A) - - + - + - -
determine(A) - + + - + - -
discourage() + + + - - - -
do(alpha) + - + - - - +
Appendix 1 2
drive(B) - + + - - - -
earn() - + + + - - -
ensure() + + + + - - -
entertain(B) - + + - - - -
establish(C) - - + - - - -
excite() + + + + - - +
excuse(A) - + + - - - -
explain() - + - + - - -
fail(A) - + + - - - -
fall(E) + - - - - - -
feel(C) + + + - - - -
fill() + + + + - - -
fit(B) - + + - - - -
follow(B) - + - - - - -
force() - + + + - - -
form() + + - + - + -
free() + + + - - - -
frighten() + + + - - - -
furnish(B) - + + - - - -
get() - + + - - - -
get(epsilon) + + + - - - -
get(gamma) + + + - - - -
give() + + + - - - -
give(gamma) + + + + - - -
go() - + + - + - -
go(zeta) - - + - - - -
grieve(alpha) + + - - - - -
grow(B) - - + - - - -
guarantee() + + + + - - -
guide() - - + - - - -
hang(B) - + + - - - -
happen(B) - + - - - - -
harm() + + + - - - -
have(A) + + + + + - -
have(C) - + + - - - -
have(E) + + + - - - -
help() + + + + - - +
hit(A) + + + + - - -
hit(E) - + - - - - -
identify(A) - + + - + - -
indicate(A) + + + - - - +
influence() - + + - + - -
interest(A) - + + - + - -
introduce(B) + - + - - - -
keep(D) + + + - - - -
land(B) - + + - - - -
land(C) + + + - - - -
lead(C) - + + + - - -
leave(C) - + + + - - -
lend(B) - + + - - - -
let(A) + + + + - - +
Appendix 1 3
lift(B) + + + + - - +
limit() + + + + - - -
link() - + + - - - -
look(C) + - + - - - +
lose() - + + + - - -
maintain(A) - + + - - - -
make(D) + + + - - - -
make(E) + + + + - - +
mark(B) + + + - - - +
mark(D) - + + - - - -
matter() - + - - + - -
mean(C) + + + - - - +
mean(D) + + + + + - -
meet(D) + + + - - - +
meet(E) + + + - - - -
move(D) + + + + - - -
need() + - + - - + +
occur(A) - + - - - - -
occur(B) - + + - - - -
offend(A) - + - + - - +
offer(B) + + + + - - +
owe(B) + - - - - - -
pass(D) + - + - - - -
pay(alpha) + - + - - - +
persuade() - + + - - - -
place() + + + + - - -
please() + + + + + - -
prepare() + + + - - - -
present(C) + + + + + + -
preserve() + + + - - - +
prevent() + + + - - - -
promise(alpha) - + + + - - -
protect() + + + - - - -
prove(A) + + + - - - -
prove(B) + + + + - - -
push(B) - - + - - - -
put(delta) - + + + - - -
put(epsilon) - + + + - - -
raise(A) - + + + - - -
raise(B) - + + + - - +
raise(D) - - + - - - -
recall() - - + - - - -
reduce() - + + - - - -
reflect(A) - + - - - - -
remain() + - + - + + +
remind(A) - - + + - - -
remind(B) + - + + - - -
remove() - + + + - - -
replace() - - + - - - -
represent(B) + + + - - - -
require() + - + - - - +
Appendix 1 4
result(B) - - + - - - -
reveal() - - + - - - -
rob() - + + + - - +
satisfy(A) - + + - - - -
satisfy(B) - + + + - - -
save(A) + + + + - - -
save(B) + + + + - - -
save(C) - - + + - - -
say() - + - - - - -
seem() + + + + - - +
sell(alpha) - + + - - - -
send(E) - + + + - - -
serve(B) - + + + - - -
set(B) - + + + - - +
set(F) - + + + - - -
settle(B) - + + + - - -
shape() - + + - - - -
shock() + + + + - - -
show(B) - + - + - - -
signal(B) + + + + - - +
smell(D) - + + - - - -
sound(B) + - + + - - +
spell(alpha) - + + - - - -
stretch(C) - + + - - - +
stretch(D) - + + - - - +
strike(H) - + - - - - -
strike(J) + + + + - - +
suit() + + + - - - +
support(alpha) - + + - - - -
surprise(B) + + - + + - +
take(gamma) + - + - - - +
teach() - - + - - - -
tell(A) - + + - - - -
tell(C) - + + - - - -
threaten() - + - - - - -
touch(B) + + + - - - -
trouble(A) + - - - - - -
turn(B) + + + - - - -
unite() + + + - - - -
warn() - + + - - - -
wash(C) + - - - - - -
weigh(C) + + - - - - -
weigh(D) - + + - - - -
win() - + + - - - -
work(B) - - + - - - -
work(F) - + + + - - -
worry() - + + - + - -
Appendix 2 5
Appendix 2 List of clausal subjects with active verbs with added

corpus results
account o + +
act + + +
add + + +
afford + + +
agree o - +
amuse + + +
annoy + + +
appear + + +
bar - + + [to_INF] and [that_CL] not attested
become + + +
begin + + +
belong o - + [to_INF] only in one near-quotation from Shakespeare's Sonnet 23
bind - + + [to_INF] and [that_CL] not attested

breathe - + + [to_INF] and [that_CL] not attested
breed + + +
bring + + +
buy + + +
call + + + [that_CL] only one example (with coordination)
catch + + + [to_INF] examples not perfect
cause + + +
change + + +
charge - - +
charm - + + no [to_INF] and no [that_CL] attested, [V-ing] only one example
check + - + [to_INF] only one example
commit + + +
compare + - +
compel - + + but [for_NP_to_INF] attested
concentrate + - +
concern + + + [to_INF] only one example but some more extraposed
confirm + + +
confuse + + +
convince + + +
create + + +
decide + + +
delay + + +
demand + - +
depend + - +
determine + + + [to_INF] only one example
discourage + + +
do + + + [that_CL] examples may not be the same lexical unit
drive + + +
earn + + +
ensure + + +
entertain - + + [to_INF] and [that_CL] not attested; few real [V-ings] but lots of
cases with "entertaining" as predicative element
establish + o + [that_CL] example dubious, may be adjective
excite + + +
excuse + + + [to_INF] only one example
explain + + +
fail + + +
fall + + + [that_CL] only one example ("fall short of")
feel + + +
Appendix 2 6

fill + + +
fit + + +
follow + + + [to_INF] only one example
force + + +
form + + +
free + + +
frighten + + +
furnish - + + no clausal subjects attested at all
grieve + + - no [that_CL] attested non-extraposed, only extraposed
grow - - +
guarantee + + +
guide - - +
hang - + + no [to_INF] and no [that_CL] attested
happen + + +
harm + + +
help + + +
identify + + +
indicate + + +
influence + + + [to_INF] only one example
interest - + + no [to_INF] and no [that_CL] attested
introduce + - +
keep + + +
lead + + +
leave + + +
lend + + +
let + + +
lift + + +
limit + + +
link - + + no [to_INF] and no [that_CL] attested
look + + +
lose + + +
maintain + + + [to_INF] only one example
matter - + +
move + + +
need + + +
offend + + +
offer + + +
owe + + + [to_INF] only one example, [V-ing] only one example
pass + o + [that_CL] only one dubious example ("pass sb. by")
pay + - +
persuade - + + no [to_INF] and only one [that_CL] attested
place + + +
please + + +
prepare + + +
present + + +
preserve + + +
prevent + + +
promise o + +
protect + + +
prove + + +
prove + + +
push + o + [that_CL] only one dubious example ("is pushing it")
recall - - +
reduce + + +
reflect + + +
remain + - + borders on copula; extraposed [that_CL] attested
Appendix 2 7

remove + + +
replace - - +
represent + + +
require + + +
result + o + [that_CL] only one dubious example
reveal + + +
rob + + +
say + + +
seem + + +
sell o + + only one very dubious example of [to_INF], none for [that_CL],
three for [V-ing] with "sell short"
send + + +
serve + + +
settle + + + only one example for settle and two for settle down with [to_INF]
shape - + + no [to_INF] and no [that_CL] attested

shock + + +
show + + +
signal + + +
smell + + + no [that_CL] attested
spell + + +
suit + + +
support + + + [to_INF] only one example
surprise + + +
take + - + [that_CL] only in tough movement
teach + + + [to_INF] only one example, [that_CL] only one example
threaten + + +
touch + + +
trouble + + +
turn + + +
unite + + +
warn + + + only one example for warn and one for warn off with [to_INF]
wash + - +
win + + + [to_INF] only one example
worry + + +
convince with clausal subject NS5 NS6 NS7 NS8 NS9 comments
1: no; 2: "not completely wrong but nobody would say it", "might be American/British", "I can
hear people say that, but I wouldn't accept it"; 3: "maybe"; "not sure"; "ok in conversation but
not in written language"; 4: acceptable but would prefer to rephrase it; 5: ok
[that_CL] non-extraposed
Appendix 3
That 45% of all subjects had never heard of Project X before convinced me to spend more NS7: only with "The fact"; NS8: acceptable, but not
Appendix 3
money on advertising. 5 5 1 4 1 good. That at the beginning: "bad English"

That the programme had been a huge success in Britain convinced me that we should also try it NS8: correct, bad usage because of initial "that"
in Germany. 5 5 5 4 5
That 45% of all subjects had never heard of Project X before convinced me of the necessity to NS7: ok, but better with "The fact"
spend more money on advertising. 5 5 4 5 5
That the programme had been a huge success in Britain convinced me to also try it in Germany.
convince
5 1 5 5 5
[that_CL] extraposed
It convinced me to spend more money on advertising that 45% of all subjects had never heard NS6: "replace that with because"; NS7: "It" at the
of Project X before. beginning is weird. "I was convinced"; NS8: back to
5 1 1 1 1 front
It convinced me that we should also try the programme in Germany that it had been a huge
success in Britain. 5 1 1 1 1
It convinced me to also try the programme in Germany that it had been a huge success in
Britain. 1 1 1 1 1
It convinced me of the necessity to spend more money on advertising that 45% of all subjects
had never heard of Project X before. 5 5 5 1 1
It convinced me that the programme had been a huge success in Britain to also try it in
Germany. 5 1 1 1 1
[to_INF] non-extraposed
Yes, to see the merchandise would convince me that you’re telling the truth. 5 5 5
Yes, to see the merchandise would convince me that it's a good idea. 5 2 NS7: sounds weird
To promise him stock options would certainly convince him. 5
To promise him stock options will probably/may convince him. 5 3 1 1 5 NS7: "promising"
Yes, to see the merchandise convinced me that you were telling the truth. 5 1 1 Should be "having seen"
Native speaker judgements on clausal subjects with
Yes, to see the merchandise convinced me that it was a good idea. 5 5

8
[to_INF] extraposed
It convinced me that he was not fit to work to hear about his sore throat. 5 1 1 1
Yes, it would convince me that you’re telling the truth to see it. 1 5 5 NS6: prefer "if I saw it"
Yes, it would convince me that it's a good idea to see it. 5 1 BEWARE: 2 readings
It will probably/may convince him to promise him stock options. 5 5 5 1 5 BEWARE: 2 readings
Yes, it would convince me that you’re telling the truth to see the merchandise. 1 5 3
Yes, it would convince me that it's a good idea to see the merchandise. 5 1 BEWARE: 2 readings
Appendix 3
Yes, it convinced me that you were telling the truth to see the merchandise. 1 1 1
Yes, it convinced me that it was a good idea to see the merchandise. 5 1 BEWARE: 2 readings
It convinced me that something was wrong to hear loud screams from downstairs. 5
[for_N_to_INF] non-extraposed
For him to show me the merchandise would convince me that he’s telling the truth. 5
For you to show me the merchandise would convince me that you're telling the truth.
5 5
For him to show me the merchandise would convince me that it's a good idea. 5 2 NS7: No one would say it like that
For him to show me the merchandise convinced me that he was telling the truth. 5
For you to show me the merchandise convinced me that you were telling the truth. 1 5 NS8: "For you to show me" -> future or would
For him to show me the merchandise convinced me that it was a good idea. 5 1 NS7: "Him showing"
For the company to promise him stock options may convince him. 1 1 1
For the company to promise him stock options will probably convince him. 5 5
[for_N_to_INF] extraposed
It will probably/may convince him for the company to promise him stock options. 1 1 1 1 1
[V-ing] non-extraposed
Having seen John in the basement the day before convinced Paul that he/John was the
murderer. 5 1 5 5 5
Yes, seeing the merchandise would convince me that you’re telling the truth. 5 5 5
Yes, seeing the merchandise would convince me that it's a good idea. 5 5
Promising him stock options will probably/may convince him. 5 5 5 5 5
Yes, seeing the merchandise convinced me that you were telling the truth. 5 5 4 NS9: "Should be fine"
Yes, seeing the merchandise convinced me that it was a good idea. 5 5
Hearing about his sore throat convinced me that he was not fit to work. 5 5 5 1
Hearing her voice on the telephone convinced me that she was alive. 5 5 5 4 5 NS8: Not wrong, but not a sentence I'd use
9
Hearing loud screams from downstairs convinced me that something was wrong. 5
[V-ing] extraposed
Yes, it convinced me that you were telling the truth seeing it. 1 1 1
Yes, it convinced me that it's a good idea seeing it. 5 1
It will/would probably/may convince him promising him stock options. 5 1 5 2 1 NS8: not correct, but excusable
Yes, it would convince me that you’re telling the truth seeing it. 1 1 1
Yes, it would convince me that it's a good idea seeing it. 1 1
Appendix 3
[N_V-ing] non-extraposed
Him showing me the merchandise would convince me that he is telling the truth. 5
You showing me the merchandise would convince me that you're telling the truth. 1 4 NS9: "not great"
Him showing me the merchandise would convince me that it's a good idea. 5 3 NS7: Yeah, no one would say it like that.
Him showing me the merchandise convinced me that he was telling the truth. 5 4 NS8: prefer "His showing"
Him showing me the merchandise convinced me that it was a good idea. 5 5
I didn’t know a lot about John, but him helping me convinced me that he was a nice guy/chap.
5 5 5 1 5
John leaving the country hastily convinced her of his guilt. 5 5 5 1 5
You showing me the merchandise convinced me that you were telling the truth. 4 NS9: "not great"
[N's_V-ing] non-extraposed
John’s leaving the country hastily convinced her of his guilt. NS9: No, because John is not trying to persuade her.
5 5 1 5 1
I didn’t know a lot about John, but his helping me convinced me that he was a nice guy. NS7: "He convinced me that … by helping"/"When
he helped me I was …" NS8: "by helping…" is better
5 5 1 4 5
His showing me the merchandise convinced me that he was telling the truth. 5 5
Your showing me the merchandise convinced me that you were telling the truth. NS8: "Your" is unnecessary, not incorrect but
4 1 clumsy
His showing me the merchandise convinced me that it was a good idea. 1 1
Your showing me the merchandise would convince me that you were telling the truth.
1
[wh_CL] non-extraposed
When he said he was innocent convinced me. 1 1 1 1 1
How you managed to solve this problem convinced me that you’re the right guy for the job. NS8: better: "The way (in which) you …"; NS9:
understandable, don't like it, unusual, but ok. better:
10
5 5 5 3 4 "The way (in which) you managed"

When you show me the merchandise would convince me that you’re telling the truth.
1 1 1
When you show me the merchandise would convince me that it's a good idea. 1 1
[wh_CL] extraposed
It convinced me that you’re the right guy for the job how you managed to solve this problem.
5 1 1 1 1
It convinced me that he was telling the truth when he showed me the merchandise. 5 1 NS8: Should be "I was convinced"
Appendix 3
It convinced me that you were telling the truth when you showed me the merchandise.
5
It convinced me that it was a good idea when he showed me the merchandise. 5 2 NS7: weird; "I was convinced that … when"
It convinced me when he said he was innocent. 5 1 5 1 5
[if_CL] non-extraposed
If we promise him stock options will probably/may convince him. 1 1 1 1 1
[if_CL] extraposed
It will probably/may convince him if we promise him stock options. 5 5 1 5 5 NS7: understand but no
NS5: difference persuade/convince for

For the company to promise him stock options may
convince him.
It convinced me that it was a good idea when he
showed me the merchandise.
was re-validated by double-checking
11
persuade with clausal subject NS5 NS6 NS7 NS8 NS9 comments
Appendix 4
That 45% of all subjects had never heard of Project X before persuaded me to spend more NS5: better with "the fact that"; NS7: originally no,
Appendix 4
money on advertising. has to be "the fact that"; changed her mind later;
NS9: better than with convince, but still no.
4 5 4 5 2
That the programme had been a huge success in Britain persuaded me that we should also try it
in Germany. 5 5 5 4 5
That 45% of all subjects had never heard of Project X before persuaded me of the necessity to NS5: "of the necessity" is weird
persuade
spend more money on advertising. 1 5 5 5 5

That the programme had been a huge success in Britain persuaded me to also try it in Germany. NS8: "ok, but structure doesn't seem right, should
5 5 5 4 5 begin with 'The success…'"
It persuaded me to spend more money on advertising that 45% of all subjects had never heard NS8: "ok, but wouldn't use it"
of Project X before. 1 1 5 4 1
It persuaded me that we should also try the programme in Germany that it had been a huge NS8: "sentence structure wrong"
success in Britain. 1 1 1 1 1
It persuaded me to also try the programme in Germany that it had been a huge success in
Britain. 1 1 1 1 1
It persuaded me of the necessity to spend more money on advertising that 45% of all subjects NS5: "of the necessity" is odd; NS8: "clear and
had never heard of Project X before. understandable, but I don't think the sentence is
1 1 5 2 1 correct"
It persuaded me that the programme had been a huge success in Britain to also try it in
Germany. 1 1 5 1 1
Yes, to see the merchandise would persuade me that you’re telling the truth. 5 5 5
Yes, to see the merchandise would persuade me that it's a good idea. 5 5
To promise him stock options will/would certainly/probably/may persuade him. 5 5 5 5 5
Yes, to see the merchandise persuaded me that you were telling the truth. 5 5 1 Should be "having seen"
Yes, to see the merchandise persuaded me that it was a good idea.
12
1 5
[to_INF] extraposed
It persuaded me that he was not fit to work to hear about his sore throat. 3 1 5 1
Yes, it would persuade me that you’re telling the truth to see it. 1 5 5
Yes, it would persuade me that it's a good idea to see it. 1 5 BEWARE: two readings
It will probably/may persuade him to promise him stock options. 4 5 5 1 5 NS8: "badly formed", prefer non-extraposed
Yes, it would persuade me that you’re telling the truth to see the merchandise. 1 1 3
Yes, it would persuade me that it's a good idea to see the merchandise. 1 5 BEWARE: two readings
Appendix 4
Yes, it persuaded me that you were telling the truth to see the merchandise. 1 1 1
Yes, it persuaded me that it was a good idea to see the merchandise. 1 5 BEWARE: two readings
It persuaded me that something was wrong to hear loud screams from downstairs. NS9: "to hear" not person-induced -> problematic
3 with persuade
For him to show me the merchandise would persuade me that he’s telling the truth. 5 5
For him to show me the merchandise would persuade me that it's a good idea. 1 5
For him to show me the merchandise persuaded me that he was telling the truth. 3 5
For him to show me the merchandise persuaded me that it was a good idea. 1 5
For the company to promise him stock options will probably/may persuade him. 5 1 5 5 5
For you to show me the merchandise would persuade me that you're telling the truth. 5
For you to show me the merchandise persuaded me that you were telling the truth. 5
It may persuade him for the company to promise him stock options. 1 1 1 5 1
Having seen John in the basement the day before persuaded Paul that he/John was the NS8: "wrong"
murderer. 5 5 5 1 5
Yes, seeing the merchandise would persuade me that you're telling the truth. 5 5 5
Yes, seeing the merchandise would persuade me that it's a good idea. 5 5
Promising him stock options will probably/may/would persuade him. 5 5 5 5 5
Yes, seeing the merchandise persuaded me that you were telling the truth. 5 5 4 NS9: "Should be fine"
Yes, seeing the merchandise persuaded me that it's a good idea. 5 5
Hearing about his sore throat persuaded me that he was not fit to work. 5 4 5 1 5 NS6: ok on second thoughts
Hearing her voice on the telephone persuaded me that she was alive. 1 1 5 4 1 NS5: wrong use of persuade
Seeing the sailboat persuaded me to take a vacation. 5 5 5
13
Hearing loud screams from downstairs persuaded me that something was wrong. NS9: "Hearing" not person-induced -> problematic
3 with persuade
[V-ing] extraposed
Yes, it persuaded me that you were telling the truth seeing it. 1 1 1
Yes, it persuaded me that it's a good idea seeing it. 1 5 BEWARE: two readings
It will/would probably/would certainly/may persuade him promising him stock options. 1 5 5 5 5 NS5: prefer non-extraposed
Yes, it would persuade me that you’re telling the truth seeing it. 1 1 1
Yes, it would persuade me that it's a good idea seeing it. 1 1
Appendix 4
Him showing me the merchandise would persuade me that he is telling the truth. NS6: 1x yes, 1x no (sentence was in the test data
3 5 twice)
Him showing me the merchandise would persuade me that it's a good idea. 5 5
Him showing me the merchandise persuaded me that he was telling the truth. 5 5
Him showing me the merchandise persuaded me that it was a good idea. 5 5
I didn’t know a lot about John, but him helping me persuaded me that he was a nice guy/chap. NS9: "convince is better here"
5 5 5 5 2
John leaving the country hastily persuaded her of his guilt. 5 1 5 1 1 NS8: no, genitive version is better
You showing me the merchandise would persuade me that you're telling the truth. 4 NS9: "not great"
You showing me the merchandise persuaded me that you were telling the truth. 4 NS9: "not great"
John’s leaving the country hastily persuaded her of his guilt. NS6: convinced would be better because of guilt;
5 1 5 5 4 NS9: sounds ok, a little bit bizarre
John's leaving the country persuaded her to flee as well. 5
I didn’t know a lot about John, but his helping me persuaded me that he was a nice guy/chap. NS6: must be convince because helping is an action,
not talking; NS9: "convince is better here"
1 1 5 5 2
His showing me the merchandise persuaded me that he was telling the truth. 5 5
His showing me the merchandise persuaded me that it was a good ida. 1 1
Your showing me the merchandise would persuade me that you're telling the truth. 1
Your showing me the merchandise persuaded me that you were telling the truth. 1
When he said he was innocent persuaded me. 1 1 1 1 1
How you managed to solve this problem persuaded me that you’re the right guy for the job. NS9: unusual but ok
5 5 5 1 4
14
When you show me the merchandise would persuade me that you’re telling the truth. 1 1 1
When you show me the merchandise would persuade me it's a good idea. 1 1
[wh_CL] extraposed
It persuaded me that you’re the right guy for the job how you managed to solve this problem.
1 1 5 1 1
It persuaded me that he was telling the truth when he showed me the merchandise. 5
It persuaded me that it was a good idea when he showed me the merchandise. 5 1
Appendix 4
It persuaded me that you were telling the truth when you showed me the merchandise. 2 5 NS8: prefer "I was persuaded"
It persuaded me when he said he was innocent. NS8: prefer "I was persuaded"; NS9: "He persuaded
1 1 5 1 1 me…"
[if_CL] non-extraposed
If we promise him stock options may persuade him. 1 1 1 1 1
[if_CL] extraposed
It may persuade him if we promise him stock options. 5 5 5
It will/would probably persuade him if we promise him stock options. 5 5
NS6: better to convince sb. that you are telling the

truth than to persuade sb.
NS9: convince: by circumstances is easier; persuade:
by people
15
annoy with clausal subject NS5 NS6 NS7 NS8 comments
That I forgot my homework annoyed me so much that I wasn’t able to listen to the teacher 1 5 5 NS5: "No that at the beginning"
Appendix 5
anymore.
Appendix 5
It annoyed me that I forgot my homework. NS6: semantic problem, structure ok, see below
5 1 5
It annoyed me that he was late. 5
annoy
To be so forgetful annoys me. 4 5 5 NS5: prefer extraposed

[to_INF] extraposed
It annoys me to be so forgetful. 5 5 1
For her to be so forgetful annoys me. 5 1 5
It annoys me for her to be so forgetful. 1 1 1
Being so forgetful annoys me. 5 5 5
[V-ing] extraposed
It annoys me being so forgetful. 5 5 5
Joanna being so forgetful annoys me. 4 5 5 NS5: prefer extraposed
[N_V-ing] extraposed
It annoys me Joanna being so forgetful. 5 1 1
Joanna’s being so forgetful annoys me. 1 1 1
Her being so forgetful annoys me. 1 2 5 NS6: prefer sentence below
Her forgetting to close the window annoys me. 5
[N's_V-ing] extraposed
It annoys me Joanna’s being so forgetful.
16
1 1 1
It annoys me her being so forgetful. 1 1 5 NS6: not even with a change of content
annoy with clausal subject NS5 NS6 NS7 NS8 comments
When she is so forgetful annoys me. 1 1
When she forgets to close the windows annoys me. 1
[wh_CL] extraposed
It annoys me when she’s so forgetful. 5 1 5
Appendix 5
It annoys me when she forgets to close the window. 5

[if_CL] extraposed
It annoys me if she is so forgetful. 5 1 1
[wh_CL] as sentence-initial adjunct
When she is so forgetful, it annoys me. 5
When she forgets to close the window, it annoys me. 5
17
offend with clausal subject NS5 NS6 NS7 NS8 comments
Appendix 6
That I called him a fool offended him more than I thought it would. NS5: ok, but prefer the sentence not to start with
Appendix 6
4 5 5 that
It offended him more than I thought it would that I called him a fool. NS6: "I guess you could say that but it could be
4 2 1 rearranged" -> following sentence is better
offend
It offended him that I called him a fool more than I thought it would. 5 5 1 NS5: flows better than the one before
To call him a fool offended him more than I thought it would. 5 5 5
To be mooned by a bunch of first-years offended him more than I thought it would. 5 5 5
[to_INF] extraposed
It offended him to call him a fool. 4 5 1 NS5: prefer following sentence
It offended him to be called a fool. 5
It offended him to be mooned (by a bunch of first-years). 5 5 5
For me to call him a fool offended him more than I thought it would. 5 5 5
For them to moon him offended him more than I thought it would 5 5 1
It offended him more than I thought it would for me to call him a fool. 5 5 1
It offended him more than I thought it would for them to moon him. 5 5 1
It offended him for them to moon him. NS5: does make sense but strange way of putting it;
2 3 1 souns strange
It offended him for them to insult him. 5
It offended him for me to call him a fool more than I thought it would. 5 1
It offended him for me to call him a fool. 5
It offended him for them to moon him more than I thought it would. 1 3 1 NS5: "too muddled"
18
Calling him a fool offended him more than I thought it would. 5 5 5 NS5: "uttered by the one who called him a fool"
Being called a fool offended him more than I thought it would. 5 5 5 NS5: "uttered by anyone"
offend with clausal subject NS5 NS6 NS7 NS8 comments
[V-ing] extraposed
It offended him more than I thought it would calling him a fool. 5 1 1
It offended him calling him a fool more than I thought it would. NS5: ok, but not good. prefer the one before; NS6:
4 5 1 "makes sense at least"
Appendix 6
Her brother being called a fool offended her more than I thought it would. 5 5 5
Jack calling her names offended her more than I thought it would. 5 5 5
It offended her more than I thought it would Jack calling her names. 1 1 1 NS5: prefer that-cl
It offended her Jack calling her names more than I thought it would. 1 1 1 NS5: prefer that-cl; NS6: doesn't make sense
When I called him a fool offended him. 1
[wh_CL] extraposed
It offended him when they mooned him. 5
It offended him when I called him a fool. 5
It offended him more than I thought it would when I called him a fool. 5
It offended him when I called him a fool more than I thought it would. 5
When I called him a fool it offended him. 5
19
upset with clausal subject NS5 NS6 NS7 NS8 comments
Appendix 7
That I called him a fool upset him more than I thought it would. 4 5 5 NS5: but not happy with initial that-cl
Appendix 7
It upset him more than I thought it would that I called him a fool. 5 4 1 NS6: prefer following sentence
It upset him that I called him a fool more than I thought it would. 5 5 1
upset
To call him a fool upset him more than I thought it would. 5 5 5
To be mooned by a bunch of first-years upset him more than I thought it would. 5 5 5
[to_INF] extraposed
It upset him to call him a fool. 4 4 1 NS5+NS6: prefer following sentence
It upset him to be called a fool. 5 5
It upset him to be mooned (by a bunch of first-years). 5 5 5
For me to call him a fool upset him more than I thought it would. 5 5 4 NS7: ok but not sure
For them to moon him upset him more than I thought it would 5 5 1
It upset him more than I thought it would for me to call him a fool. 5 5 1
It upset him more than I thought it would for them to moon him. 5 5 1
It upset him for them to moon him. 5 3 1 NS5: prefer upset over offend and insult
It upset him for them to insult him. 4 NS6: still ok, but not as good as with offend
It upset him for me to call him a fool more than I thought it would. 5 1
It upset him for me to call him a fool. 5
It upset him for them to moon him more than I thought it would. 5 3 1 NS5: prefer upset over offend and insult
Calling him a fool upset him more than I thought it would. 5 5 5
Being called a fool upset him more than I thought it would. 5 5 5

20
[V-ing] extraposed
It upset him more than I thought it would calling him a fool. 4 1 1 NS5: prefer following sentence
upset with clausal subject NS5 NS6 NS7 NS8 comments
It upset him calling him a fool more than I thought it would. 5 5 1
Her brother being called a fool upset her more than I thought it would. 5 5 5
Jack calling her names upset her more than I thought it would. 5 5 5
Appendix 7
It upset her more than I thought it would Jack calling her names. 1 1 1
It upset her Jack calling her names more than I thought it would. NS5: prefer non-extraposed, should have a comma
4 1 1 after the first her or a that-cl instead
When I called him a fool upset him. 1
[wh_CL] extraposed
It upset him when they mooned him. 5
It upset him when I called him a fool. 5
It upset him more than I thought it would when I called him a fool. 5
It upset him when I called him a fool more than I thought it would. 5
When I called him a fool it upset him. 5
21
amuse with clausal subject NS5 NS6 NS7 NS8 comments
Appendix 8
That the King lost his crown amused me. 1 3 5

Appendix 8
That the King lost his crown amused me so much that I couldn’t stop laughing. 1
That Stuttgart lost the game amused me. 5
It amused me that the King lost his crown. 5 5 5
amuse
It amused me that Stuttgart lost the game. 5

To see her lose her balance on the ice amused me. 4 5 5 NS5: prefer extraposed
[to_INF] extraposed
It amused me to see her lose her balance on the ice. 5 5 5
For her to lose her balance on the ice amused me. 1 1 5
For her to dress up amused me. 5 1
For her to dress up like a princess amused me. 5
It amused me for her to lose her balance on the ice. 1 1 1
It amused me for her to dress up. 1 1
It amused me for her to dress up like a princess. 1
Seeing her lose her balance amused me. 4 5 5 NS5: prefer extraposed
[V-ing] extraposed
It amused me seeing her lose her balance. 5 1 4 NS7: prefer non-extraposed
It amused me seeing her lose her balance on the ice last night. 5
Melanie losing her balance amused me. 4 5 NS5: prefer extraposed

22
Melanie losing her balance on the ice amused me. 5

amuse with clausal subject NS5 NS6 NS7 NS8 comments
It amused me Melanie losing her balance. 5 1 1
It amused me Melanie losing her balance on the ice last night 1 NS6: "seeing Melanie lose" is better
Where the King lost his crown amused me. 5 1 5
When the King lost his crown amused me. 1 1
Appendix 8
[wh_CL] extraposed
It amused me where the King lost his crown. 5 1 5
It amused me how she fell. 5 1 5
When the King lost his crown it amused me. 5 5
23
please with clausal subject NS5 NS6 NS7 NS8 comments
Appendix 9
That I got an A pleased me. 1 5 5

Appendix 9
It pleased me that I got an A. NS6: GENERALLY against "It pleased", favours "I
5 5 5 was pleased"
please
To get an A pleased me. 5 5 5

[to_INF] extraposed
It pleased me to get an A. 5 1 5
It would please me to get an A. 3 NS6: “I guess it’s correct, but I wouldn’t say it.”
For Jenny to get an A in maths pleased me. 1 5 1
It pleased me for Jenny to get an A in maths. 5 1 1
It would please me for Jenny to get an A in maths. 5
Getting an A pleased me. 5 5 5
[V-ing] extraposed
It pleased me getting an A in maths. 5 1 1 NS6: "I was pleased to get an A in maths."
Jenny getting an A in maths pleased me. 5 5 5
It pleased me Jenny getting an A in maths. 5 1 1
Jenny’s getting an A in maths pleased me. 1 3 1 NS6: "sounds ok, not sure"
Her getting an A in maths pleased me. 1
24
It pleased me Jenny’s (genitive) getting an A. 1 1 1

please with clausal subject NS5 NS6 NS7 NS8 comments
When I got an A pleased me. 1 1 1
How I got an A pleased me. 5 1 5
[wh_CL] extraposed
It pleased me when I got an A. 5 1 5
It pleased me how I got an A. 5 1 5
Appendix 9
[wh_CL] as sentence initial adjunct

When I got an A it pleased me. 5 5 5
25
confuse with clausal subject NS5 NS6 NS7 NS8 comments
That she failed her finals confused me.
Appendix 10
1 1 5
That she didn't go to class for a week confused me. 5
It confused me that she failed her finals. 5 5 5
confuse
To be singled out confused me a lot, and I declined comment. 5 5 5

To fail her finals confused me. 1 1 1
[to_INF] extraposed
It confused me to be singled out, and I declined comment. 5 1 5
It confused me to fail her finals. 1 1 1
It confused me to see 20 clowns at the bus stop 5
For her to say that really confused me. 1 1 5
It really confused me for her to say that. 5 5 1
Seeing her name on the draft list really confused me. 5 5 5
[V-ing] extraposed
It confused me seeing a man Hansen’s age using so many cyber style abbreviations. 5 5 5
It confused me seeing the relatively low prices. 5 5 5
Peter failing his finals confused me a lot. 5 5 5
It confused me a lot Peter failing his finals. 5 1 1 NS6: not even with semantic change
Appendix 10 Native speaker judgements on clausal subjects with
26
Peter’s failing his finals confused me a lot. 1 1 1 NS5: "Doesn't flow as well as without genitive"
confuse with clausal subject NS5 NS6 NS7 NS8 comments
It confused me a lot Peter’s failing his finals. 1 1 1
When he failed his finals confused me a lot. 1 1 1
[wh_CL] extraposed
It confused me when he failed his finals. 5 5 5
Appendix 10
27
shock with clausal subject NS5 NS6 NS7 NS8 comments
That Stuttgart lost shocked me.
Appendix 11
1 1
That she turned up shocked me. 1
It shocked me that Stuttgart lost. 5 5
It shocked me that she turned up.
shock
5
To win the first prize in the spelling bee really shocked me. 5 5
To drive to Istanbul in one week would shock me. 5 1
To drive across the US in one week would shock me. 5 1
To see the scorpion shocked me. 1 5
To see her die shocked me. 5
To pass my exam shocked me. 1
To get to Istanbul in one week would shock me. 1
[to_INF] extraposed
It really shocked me to win the first prize in the spelling be. 5 1
It would shock me to see him outside at 6 o’clock in the morning. 5
It shocked me to see the scorpion. 4 5 NS6: "ok, but not sure"
It shocked me to pass my exam. 5
For him to buy a brand new BMW shocked me. 1 5
For him to kill a cat shocked me. 5
It shocked me for him to buy a brand new BMW. 1 1
It shocked me for him to kill a cat. 1
28
Seeing the scorpion shocked me. NS6+NS7: "better than to see, but you can say both"
5 5
Seeing a scorpion in Germany would shock me. 5 NS6: better than the one before
shock with clausal subject NS5 NS6 NS7 NS8 comments
Seeing her die shocked me. 5
Seeing the spider shocked me 5
[V-ing] extraposed
It shocked me seeing the scorpion. 5 1
It shocked me seeing the spider. 5
Appendix 11
John buying a brand new BMW shocked me. 3 5
John killing a cat shocked me. 5
It shocked me John buying a brand new BMW. 1 1
It shocked me John killing a cat. 4 NS5: "when John killed" flows better
John’s buying a brand new BMW shocked me. 1 1
John’s killing a cat shocked me. 1
It shocked me John’s buying a brand new BMW. 1 1
It shocked me John’s killing a cat. 1
How they dealt with the problem shocked me. 5 5 5
[wh_CL] extraposed
It shocked me when he bought a brand new BMW. 5 5
It really shocked me when I won the first prize in the spelling bee. 5
It shocked me when John killed a cat. 5
29
surprise with clausal subject NS5 NS6 NS7 NS8 comments
That Stuttgart lost surprised me.
Appendix 12
1 5
That she turned up surprised me. 1
It surprised me that Stuttgart lost. 5 5
It surprised me that she turned up. 5
surprise
To win the first prize in the spelling bee really surprised me. 5 5
To drive to Istanbul in one week would surprise me. 1 5
To drive across the US in one week would surprise me. 1 5
To see the scorpion surprised me. 1 4 NS7: V-ing slightly better
To pass my exam surprised me. 4 NS5: prefer extraposed
To get to Istanbul in one week would surprise me. 5
[to_INF] extraposed
It really surprised me to win the first prize in the spelling bee. 5 1
It would surprise me to drive across the US in one week. 1
It would surprise me to see him outside at 6 o’clock in the morning. 5
It surprised me to see the scorpion. 1 5
It surprised me to see a scorpion. 1
It would surprise me to see a scorpion. 5
It surprised me to pass my exam. 5
For him to buy a brand new BMW surprised me. 5 1
For him to pass his exam surprised me. 1
It surprised me for him to buy a brand new BMW. 1 1

30
It surprised me for him to pass his exam. 5

surprise with clausal subject NS5 NS6 NS7 NS8 comments
Seeing the scorpion surprised me. 4 5 NS6: prefer following version
Seeing a scorpion in Germany would surprise me. 5
Passing my exam surprised me. 5
[V-ing] extraposed
It surprised me seeing the scorpion. 5 1
Appendix 12
It surprised me seeing my ex-boyfriend in London. 5

It surprised me passing my exam. 1
John buying a brand new BMW surprised me. 5 5
John passing his exam surprised me. 1
It surprised me John buying a brand new BMW. 1 1
It surprised me John passing his exam. 4 NS5: prefer wh-CL
John’s buying a brand new BMW surprised me. 1 1
John’s passing his exam surprised me. 1
It surprised me John’s buying a brand new BMW. 1 1
It surprised me John’s passing his exam. 1
How they dealt with the problem surprised me. 5 5 5
[wh_CL] extraposed
It really surprised me when I won the first prize in the spelling bee. 5 5
It surprised me when he bought a brand new BMW. 5
It surprised me when John passed his exam. 5
31
puzzle with clausal subject NS5 NS6 NS7 NS8 comments
That she failed her finals puzzled me.
Appendix 13
1 5 5
It puzzled me that she failed her finals. 5 5 1
To be singled out puzzled me a lot, and I declined comment. 5 5 5
puzzle
To fail her finals puzzled me. 1 1 1

[to_INF] extraposed
It puzzled me to be singled out, and I declined comment. 5 1 5 NS6: ok with surprise instead of puzzle
It puzzled me to see 20 clowns at the bus stop. 5
It puzzled me to fail her finals. 1 1 1
For her to say that really puzzled me. NS7: "don't know, guess that works; "for" at the
1 1 2 beginning is kind of weird. No.
For her to say that she loves me really puzzled me. 5
It really puzzled me for her to say that. 5 5 5
Seeing her name on the draft list really puzzled me. 5 5 5
[V-ing] extraposed
It puzzled me seeing a man Hansen’s age using so many cyber style abbreviations. 5 5 5
It puzzled me seeing the children not at school on Monday. 5
It puzzled me seeing the relatively low prices. NS6: "I think you can say that but it's better to use
5 3 5 confuse"
Peter failing his finals puzzled me a lot.
5 5 5
Him failing his finals puzzled me a lot. 1 1
32
It puzzled me a lot Peter failing his finals. 1 1 5 NS6: "needs a comma or a semicolon"
puzzle with clausal subject NS5 NS6 NS7 NS8 comments
It puzzled me a lot him failing his finals. 1 1
Peter’s failing his finals puzzled me a lot. 4 1 5
His failing his finals puzzled me a lot. 1 1
Appendix 13
It puzzled me a lot Peter’s failing his finals. 1 1 1

It puzzled me a lot his failing his finals. 1 1
When he failed his finals puzzled me a lot. 1 1 1
[wh_CL] extraposed
It puzzled me when he failed his finals. 5 5 5
33
Verb Modal Sentence Comment
element /
polarity
act will To come up the road in the bus with the cup and see all the fans will act as fuel for me. (newspapers)
act would To stay and gain promotion within a work enterprise would have acted as a brake on their aspirations to be
have independent of employment. (CBH 508)
act should To be confronted with quite such damning evidence of false film-making should act as a wake-up call to the whole
industry. (newsmerge)
act John Terry's year has been hell, so to finish it as captain has acted as the perfect boost to a player of immense
Appendix 14
potential. (newspapers)
account not To say that logic and arithmetic are contributed by us does not account for this. (academic)
account not To summarise the story does not account for its global mainstream appeal. (newspapers)
add would In India, to build more suitable housing would add only 2-4% to construction costs. (newspapers)
add would Mr Blacklidge said: "He wishes he could turn the clock back but for me to say any more would only add to the might be
pain and hurt that people already feel." (newspapers) [for_NP_to_INF]
modality
add would Bush argued his case on economic grounds, claiming that to deprive Beijing of its MFN classification would harm
the Chinese people, cost capitalist Hong Kong 20,000 jobs and $8.5 billion in exports of Chinese-made goods
processed in Hong Kong, and add 40% to the prices American consumers must pay for Chinese imports.
(newsmerge)
add would The select committee argues that to produce proposals which do not deal definitely with these problems would
add fresh uncertainty. (newsmerge)
add would To go for the Derby would be an unorthodox move, but would add tremendous interest to the race, even though
commercially it might not be the most sensible course of action for the Maktoum family. (newsmerge)
add would To bill for each transaction separately would add considerably to the cost of the transaction. (academic)
add might Admittedly, the same rain had previously saved him from equally certain defeat against Todd Martin but to come really subject?
so agonisingly close and be denied by the weather might well, you felt, add a disastrous extra layer of defeatism to
an already brittle sporting psyche. (newspapers)
add would To hesitate would add to suspicions that the Fed cares more about staying on good terms with the White House
than about price stability. (CR8 120)
add would On another occasion, a "senior BBC strategist" tells Born that the in-house analysts worked out that to broadcast a coordination
fourth episode of EastEnders every week would cost pounds 25 million a year and add one percentage point to
BBC1's audience share. (newspapers)
add would "To go down there with two points too would add to the importance of that game and hopefully we can oversee
a big improvement on last weekend's display." (newspapers)
add would "To take the scalp of a major southern hemisphere team would be huge and would add to the achievement of coordination
beating the likes of France and England here this year. (newspapers)
add would To allow the local authority itself, also, to sue in libel under the law applicable to actions by an ordinary individual
Appendix 14 Sentences with pre-verbal [to_INF] classified for
would add substantially to the restriction caused by that ordinary risk. (FBV 637)
add would not To impose a norm or constitutional requirement that all law be treated as if it were a binding contract would not
add to the government's options; it would eliminate one. (academic)
34
add might But to bypass the Russian government might add to dangerous centrifugal tendencies, and fuel nationalist
resentments about foreign intervention. (newsmerge)
add would The Government has been advised that to concede to farmers' opening demands would add £100m to the overall
cost. (newsmerge)
add may To know that he received injury and courted death for his pictures may add to their effect. (newspapers)
add would To chase sub-human prey across their sink estates would certainly add frisson and give the prey a sporting chance.
(newsmerge)
add will To then meet up with his England colleagues having won over the most demanding fans in the world will only
add to his stature. (newspapers)
add A source said: "Making a comeback is hard enough, but to be out on the same day as one of the biggest acts
around - and be related to them as well - just adds to the pressure. (newspapers)
add To have your private life plastered across the newspapers adds a terrible, public dimension to your humiliation
and my heart goes out to you. (newspapers)
Appendix 14
add To jump into bed with his arch-rival adds insult to injury. (britnews) subject: a designer;
insulted/injured: former
employer
add To buy a multinational company's shares in Frankfurt rather than London, for example, also involves changing coordination
clearing and settlement arrangements and adds to the overall level of charges. (britnews)
add To get the hundredth hundred for Worcestershire at New Road adds a bit to it. (newspapers) points in sports
add To have to face it when they come to school only adds to the pressure in their young lives and provides no
incentives for them to act better. (newsmerge)
add The sentiment was bad enough, but to hear it uttered in the purest estuary-speak added insult to injury.
(newspapers)
add The mavericks and pedlars of dreams should be controlled, but to impose arbitrary rules on the doctor adds insult
to injury, especially when those rules are based on statistics like these. (newspapers)
add To gain 53 unseen new minutes adds glory to its confirmed greatness. (newspapers)
add To then ask our members to accept a pay increase this year of between 0 and 1.5 per cent on the basis that they are
in secure employment adds insult to injury.’ (K5D 5163)
add But to follow through with a similar walloping from the unrated Americans themselves in a ``friendly'' on
Wednesday in Boston added insult after injury time. (newsmerge)
add To require, as well, that the owner permit another to exercise complete dominion literally adds insult to injury.
(academic)
add To go through court actually adds to the trauma." (newspapers)
add There are people whose only human contact all week may be that handshake, and to have it spurned only adds to
a sense of isolation. (newspapers)
add To have a sense of guilt, as the McCanns own, for having left her for a short time adds to the pain. (newspapers)
add To have won in court just adds so much more to our sense of victory,'' he said. (newsmerge)
add Tabor, who shares ownership of the unbeaten colt with John Magnier's wife, Sue, knows better than most just how
hard it is to beat the Americans in their own backyard, but to do it on dirt added another dimension to the scale of
the triumph. (newspapers)
add The fact that Boro turned up was good for a chuckle, but to put Clayton Blackmore on the team sheet added
hilarity. (newsmerge)
add To raise money only adds to my desire." (britnews) context checked
add Class in Britain: Working Class Channel 4 estelevision 4 Pages of TV and Radio THERE are few things more
35
rivetting than the story of a lost tribe, and to find that you once belonged to it adds an irresistible element.
(newspapers)
add To be dismissed in full view of your office colleagues adds to the anguish. (newspapers)
add To do what they've done with all the new faces that they have on board adds further to their impressive
achievements." (newspapers)
add To call it BABYLON, sometimes used as a synonym for corruption or exile, just adds to the chutzpah. (britnews)
add would And to have entered into the nature of diseases would only have added to his breaches of medical propriety.
have (fiction)
add To insult our intelligence adds insult to injury. (newspapers)
afford Certainly, to trust its agents with our personal details affords them less security than anything short of displaying context checked
them in lights on the Christmas tree in Trafalgar Square. (newspapers)
afford "Surely to fall out of a boat in the harbour, to strike one's head in falling, and to be saved by a woman from coordination of
drowning afford greater dramatic effect" (22), although such specifics do lend the serial's inset narrative a certain [to_INF]s; plural verb
Appendix 14
verisimilitude. (academic)
afford not As Ray Fitzgerald, NHC's proprietor, put it: "To remove a completed hair process does not afford the clinic an
opportunity to resolve whatever problem might have arisen." (newsmerge)
afford would not She had granted a stay because to have not done so would not have afforded Mr Forde an opportunity in late
have evening to attend the office of the Supreme Court for purposes of appealing her decision or seeking a stay on her
order. (newsmerge)
agree will The answer too is other than to try and work towards the two communities will agree on something and that's dubious
how your how you'll like it. (KGV 1)
allow It's great for an actor to get a big part in a long-running soap opera, but to play the villain always allows you to
stretch yourself that bit further. (newspapers)
allow To use these non-speed related accidents to justify speed-reducing measures allows only one conclusion, one that
the Government denies: it is using cameras as revenue-raising devices. (newspapers)
allow would To continue with trumps would allow East to clear a third round and there would be no chance of a diamond ruff,
even if East held DK. (newspapers)
allow To withdraw treatment merely allows the disease to do the killing. (newsmerge)
allow would To ignore these would allow ourselves to be controlled by the fast rolling wheels of industry and economic
progress. (newsmerge)
allow To be in the presence of an animal so customised for our destruction allows us, strangely, to draw closer to our
knowledge of what it means to be alive. (newsmerge)
allow "I had 40 in the last one-day game against Dorset and to get a 50 in the first innings of this one - and another 50 in
the second innings - allows me to feel a little more relaxed about my place." (newspapers)
allow would I felt that to have such people around me would allow me to do my job better, and would also allow the institution
to more easily achieve its mission. (newspapers)
allow would The deep trouble for Mr Gantt is that many black Democrats agree, however reluctantly, that the voters of North
Carolina are simply not ready to vote for a black man, and that to nominate one would merely allow Mr Helms to
extend his 24-year lease on the state's Senate seat. (newsmerge)
allow Perhaps you feel that to blame everyone allows the individuals who are most responsible to get off too easily.
(academic)
allow To clear them all out allows other more fragile and weaker one to germinate. (fiction)
allow would To revert to a system of three central defenders would allow him to use two wing backs and this would perhaps
suit the available players. (newspapers)
36
allow Lactic acid builds up in your leg muscles during the day, so to get your legs up allows that acid to flow back into
your body. (newspapers)
allow would Lucius Malfoy explained, "Lord Slytherin knew that to ally himself with Ravenclaw would allow him to influence
the education of Light wizarding children in addition to teaching the children Dark wizards sent to him. (fiction)
allow would British officials say privately that to allow Hong Kong to become a mere stocktaking exercise would allow
intransigent countries off the hook rather than making them face up to the realities of threatening a veto.
(britnews)
allow would To win CA would allow access to CK, while if he ducked the trick, declarer would lead another club and pass it
round to his ace. (newspapers)
allow would Hermione wasn't much better: She had taken over the bedside duties after dinner that night, as usual, but seemed
edgy, jumpy even, clutching Harry's paling hand as if to let go of it would allow him to fall into the abyss. (fiction)
allow would But to win the Triple Crown would allow us to say and allow other people to see that we have really achieved
something. (newspapers)
Appendix 14
allow would To delay the transfer so long would allow the cast to go stale, necessitate new rehearsals and rack up further costs.
(newsmerge)
allow would To be able to convert a skin cell into a nerve or heart cell by adding a cocktail of factors would allow doctors to
grow a patient's replacement tissues without cloned embryos, the Holy Grail of stem-cell research. (newspapers)
allow would not I know it's highly likely, but really, anything is possible, and to be perceived as a preordained loser wouldn't even
allow his campaign to ever have a chance. (fiction)
allow would To let her guard down would allow her religious faith to burst like a soap bubble fallen to the bathroom floor.
(fiction)
allow may These are difficult topics, and to see them presented slightly differently from piece to piece may allow the reader
to develop a better picture of the subject as a whole. (newsmerge)
allow should To qualify for the quarter-finals with two games to go has taken the pressure off and should allow the team to coordination
express ourselves a bit more when we go to Madrid on Tuesday. (newspapers)
allow would To withdraw now would allow the terrorists freedom of movement and risk a collapse of the new institutions of
government and security. (newspapers)
allow Of course, Harry had seen pictures of him, but to see him in real life allowed Harry to see the strong physical
resemblance. (fiction)
allow would To make a change for contraception would allow all these but not the means to prevent pregnancy for free.
(newsmerge)
allow To undermine such decisions allows criminal justice policy itself to waver. (newsmerge)
allow would To ruff in would allow declarer to discard, otherwise South would be able to score his fifth trump trick and ten in
all. (newspapers)
allow would That is why I have decided that to have a review by a committee of Privy Counsellors to report back within two
years on the whole of this measure would allow both Houses to comment retrospectively on its working and
inform any changes that seem sensible in the future. (newsmerge)
allow would But simply to persuade energy-squandering America to reach the levels of Western Europe or Japan would allow
a large cut in global output of carbon dioxide. (newsmerge)
allow would To ruff high or low would allow East's H10 to win, so he pitched an innocent D2. (newspapers)
allow would Yet to remove the captaincy would, at least, allow him to concentrate on his own game free of all the incessant
media activity. (newspapers)
allow To change his uncontrollable mental pain into a controllable physical one allowed him to feel in control. (fiction)
allow should Many of our boys are at some of the lesser lights but to have players holding their own in that division should
37
allow you to be at least competitive in the international arena. (newspapers)

allow would Senior Ulster Unionist Fred Cobain is backing Mr Trimble's approach and said the party should participate in the
Mitchell review without question as to do otherwise would only allow republicans off the hook. (newsmerge)
allow "To allow wholesaling allows a potential producer to increase their sales of processed goods, which theoretically
have a higher profit margin," said Cole. (newsmerge)
allow Not to be so moved allows the worst of modernity to triumph. (academic) context seems ok
annoy will He said: "Thousands of holidaymakers have spent days in misery, and to hear that staff are now being rewarded
will annoy them. (newspapers)
annoy IGNORED "To be so close after 65 minutes then turn around and look at the scoreboard and they've got 37 was a bit more likely an adjective
annoying. (newspapers)
attract will To see the great enjoyment on the face of the one-time welder from Govan in the winners' enclosure at Royal Ascot
will attract more would-be owners and racegoers than any amount of ghastly hype. (newspapers)
attract not To battle it out in the public arena doesn't attract them. (britnews)
Appendix 14
attract can "Nevertheless to take a man's life even in these circumstances is a grave offence and can only attract a sentence of a coordination
significant number of years. (newspapers)
attract might Labour sources dismissed the claim, pointing out that to take such drastic action would only create martyrs and
might even attract more MPs to the rebel cause. (newspapers)
attract would Congress works by building coalitions; to aim at just the ghetto poor - wholly urban and overwhelmingly black -
would attract too narrow a coalition. (newsmerge)
attract Merely to shout ethical advice at the referee from the touchline attracts no audience. (newsmerge)
attract could But to do so could attract severe penalties such as deduction of points and, more seriously, a ban from European
competitions. (newspapers)
attract would To abort this investment in worldbeating technology would cost Pounds 900 million in foreign exchange earnings coordination
alone, leave BNFL with 2,500 tonnes of spent fuel from Japan and Germany now waiting at Sellafield to be
processed, and attract potential compensation claims by clients. (newsmerge)
attract would > The committee, which decided on devaluations for the peseta and the escudo after a marathon weekend session,
felt that to hold a meeting today in the midst of currency turmoil would attract undue attention. (newsmerge)
attract can But to suggest that the confused should be grateful that ``Jenny Geddes is no longer with us'' can only attract scorn
to one equally confused. (newsmerge)
begin would That much I can prove with these documenpicions, but to assert it freely would begin to disarm them. (fiction)
begin not To say that this feels good doesn't even begin to describe it. (fiction)
begin would This philosophical and religious outspokenness is the cornerstone of our civilisation and democracy, and to
compromise it would begin to change the character of our culture. (newspapers)
begin To do so twice begins to look like carelessness.'' (newsmerge)
begin not Flying high-performance jets is a consummate art, and to be merely somewhere near the top of the food chain
doesn't begin to make it. (fiction)
begin Water is becoming an increasingly scarce and valuable resource, and to charge for it as if it were free is beginning catenative?
to look absurd. (CCX 1529)
begin not To say that Bush and Baker go way back only begins to describe their closeness. (newsmerge)
begin To seek the views of focus groups in policy formation begins to blur the distinction between selling cornflakes and
government. (newsmerge)
begin To lose one senior executive is understandable; to lose two begins to look careless. (newsmerge)
begin To say that about Dancing Brave is beginning to look like one of the great understatements. (newsmerge)
begin not To say we were physically exhausted does not begin to describe how we felt when we finally made it, and it was
38
only a small consolation to hear that we would not start until 9 am the following morning. (AHC 1330)
begin not To say they lag some way behind Arsene Wenger's collection of super-talented imports doesn't begin to describe
the gulf in class. (newspapers)
begin would There is, in royal circles, a superstitious terror of the word "abdication", as if even to hint at it would begin the
crumbling of the whole edifice. (newspapers)
begin TO ADORN a post-match interview with one jaw-dropping quote might be counted a misfortune, as Oscar Wilde
so nearly put it, but to adorn it with two begins to look like 24-carat imbecility. (newspapers)
begin would To be seen to be providing the facilities that have been so horrendously and shamefully neglected for donkeys'
years would begin to redress an overdue balance. (newspapers)
begin But to campaign for tax breaks even as it holds out its hand for more subsidies begins to look greedy.
(newspapers)
begin God, it seemed, had taken a hand after all, and to give up any of the territory so miraculously gained began to
seem a blasphemy. (newspapers)
Appendix 14
begin It was hard enough to take in the fact that his cousin could actually beat him, the hero, but to be able to perform
magic without a wand began to scare him. (fiction)
belong No word passed his lips; but "to hear with eyes belongs to love's rare wit," and the mother in the fulness of her
heart not only divined Fred's longing, but felt ready for any sacrifice in order to satisfy him. (fiction)
breed will To feed the paranoia of the fearful or intolerant by branding them racists at every turn will breed further self-
righteousness and resentment. (newsmerge)
breed To know God and yet nothing of our own wretched state breeds pride; to realize our misery and know nothing of
God is mere despair; but if we come to the knowledge of Jesus Christ we find our true equilibrium, for there we
find both human misery and God. (ARG 454)
bring To insist that Welsh sit alongside English on a Dyfed station or in a Cardiff parking ticket brings ridicule on a
lovely language. (newsmerge)
bring To stand close to a racehorse always brings a shock of delight, the more so when he is a proud, strong five-year-
old coming to peak fitness. (newsmerge)
bring would To shrink from this threat would bring a false sense of temporary peace, leading to a future in which millions live
or die at the discretion of a brutal dictator. (newspapers)
bring "So to hear something as sick as this could be happening right here at home brings a huge amount of distress to
me and I'm sure the rest of the family." (newspapers)
bring To try to outlaw something that's widely seen as acceptable behaviour brings the law itself into disrepute.
(britnews)
bring To shut myself off in my practice room brings a kind of peace, which I don't really find in anything else.
(newspapers)
bring could To develop technology through racing could bring really big steps forward in power and economy. (newspapers)
bring may On the other hand to be slower than other schools in developing schemes of quality assurance may bring credit for
prudence. (HPX 786)
bring And to attribute knowledge of Truth to the voice of conscience in this way, or to the religious and ethical criteria of
a particular form of life, inevitably brings Gandhi face to face with the problem of the relativity of truth and with
the question whether under the circumstances one is justified in talking about absolute Truth at all. (C9B 122)
bring would "To do so would bring the economy of the place to a halt and bring fisheries and fish merchants in the area down
with the company,'' says one fish merchant. (newspapers)
bring can It sometimes happens that a business is well disposed to the idea of partnership but it feels it has little to offer; just
to offer time may be very helpful and can bring dividends for both the partners. (B2T 1431)
39
bring would To report those attacks in detail would have brought more atrocities in a country where impeding oil production
have is punishable as treason. (newsmerge)
bring To die for your lord was noble, to betray or forsake him was base, while to outlive him in battle brought disgrace,
not only on you but on your kin. (HPT 521)
bring To have a concubine was evidence of wealth and brought a man respect and status in the community. (academic)
bring To see you standing on stage, singing your heart out in praise, at Ben and Clare's wedding, brought joy to my
heart and tears to my eyes. (fiction)
call can They are there because to have something distinctive to say can frequently call for a distinctive way of saying it-a call for
way that will make an author's words come fresh and vivid off the page. (EF8 1541)
call would To pump their reserves back up to the internally required 8% would call for huge injections of public funds, said call for
Merrill. (newspapers)
call will To keep rural England alive and active, and not simply a gigantic retirement home or urban recreation zone, will call for
call for more positive measures than we have in place today. (newspapers)
Appendix 14
call would To develop these educational issues at length would call for another paper as long as this one, a paper that would call for
be out of place here. (academic)
call will To alter this will call for more than merely tinkering with the machinery of science. (newsmerge) call for
call To see it gleaming so magnificently calls for a resounding cheer. (newspapers) call for
call will To stop the deficit from widening will call for either a steady improvement in competitiveness or a slower growth call for
of domestic demand than elsewhere in Europe. (newsmerge)
call But to say within hours of his death that his widow "is not a very strong person and has fallen apart" because she
has no one "to lean on" calls to mind what another great Labour politician, Clem Attlee, wrote to the garrulous
socialist intellectual, Harold Laski: "Thank you for your letter, contents of which have been noted. (newspapers)
call To achieve this called for dedication and stamina. (newspapers) call for
call To ensure that the young trees survived the depredations of man, deer and rabbits called for strong management, call for
imposed through savage penalties. (newsmerge)
call To take on a career with such hazards has always called for a combination of talent, passion, dedication and ego. call for
(newsmerge)
call To guide, unobtrusively but firmly, such an assembly called for no ordinary talent. (newsmerge) call for
call In a reserved judgment in the High Court in Belfast, Mr Justice Kerr said: "To foil a terrorist attack such as was call for
planned by the plaintiff and his companions and to apprehend heavily armed terrorists called for great courage
and commitment on the part of the police officers involved." (newsmerge)
call To make a concordance of a lengthy text by hand calls for months or years of tedious labour. (F98 74) call for
call IGNORED "To suggest otherwise is calling into question their integrity and value as rugby players and is a thoroughly slightly different
unprofessional thing to say. (newspapers) construction
call will You should not let a rift with a subordinate widen to such an extent; to do so will probably call your managerial
qualities into question. (B08 372)
call To put an end to it once and for all has called for a short, sharp solution. (academic) call for
call will To turn it into facts will call for an effort from the rich countries (for the Canadians too are involved, but they have call for
made much of the effort already) to see life through the eyes of poor ones; to realise, for instance, that Colombia is
not just a vast cocaine factory, but a nation of nearly 35m people - more than Canada has - eager for economic
growth. (newsmerge)
call To restore confidence in political action calls for a moral response too. (newsmerge) call for
call To achieve this transformation from the status of unwelcome stranger to that of fictive kinsman calls for great tact call for
and patience. (H10 860)
40
catch To go from that raw novice level to national captain in so short a time sometimes catches Robinson off guard.
(newspapers)
catch IGNORED To set income and corporation tax below levels that Margaret Thatcher dared to introduce was not so much [to_INF] really subject?
catching the Tories bathing and walking off with their clothes as a vital caesura in the reinvention of Labour as a
party serious about power. (newspapers)
cause might To promote Liverpool to the first group stage would have been to bend the old rules way too far, and to give them
have Everton's place might have caused riots on Merseyside. (newspapers)
cause would To abort these arrangements now would have caused serious disruption and required the FA to pay a large sum in
have compensation. (britnews)
cause To not give the penalty caused me such frustration. (newspapers)
cause would A more sophisticated version is that Sir Patrick's justification of the Chief Constable's volte-face - that to continue
have to frustrate the Orangemen's desire to march would have caused serious violence - sounds quite reasonable to the
general public in Britain and carries no risk of political odium. (newsmerge)
Appendix 14
cause To lose a wife causes a 40 per cent increase in risk for the surviving husband, compared to a third that figure for a
wife in the same position. (newspapers)
cause Headlined "Milk Suckers," the cards discouraged children from drinking milk - suggesting that to do so caused
health problems. (newspapers)
cause might The name might cause some to believe the solution causes lying, but instead it proves truth because to tell a lie
after taking a dropper full of this potion causes the user to blush bright red. (fiction)
cause The last year has been the most stretching and exciting of my life, and so to move on causes me great personal
pain. (newsmerge)
cause would Then, in a clear bid to defuse the row, he explained that Celia's name was on the Cardinal's invitation simply
have because it had appeared on invites to similar functions in the past, and to remove it would have caused
"controversy". (newspapers)
cause would He made sure to glare imposingly at every third student he passed to remind them that they would be in his coordination
classes soon enough, and to bring up this incident would be tantamount to disaster and cause for medieval-like
retribution. (fiction)
cause could It was very possible that Jeff could die without proper medical treatment, but to take him to a public place such as
a hospital could quite possibly cause them all to be discovered by the conspiracy. (fiction)
change would She held on because to give up would change things. (fiction)
change would To restore the features would change the statue's historical character, says Zawi Hawas, supervisor of the Great
Pyramids complex outside Cairo: ''We would have another Sphinx. (newsmerge)
change would To cast a pregnant woman as one of the daughters would change the meaning of the piece. (newspapers)
change I was always fortunate, but to have love at the centre of my life just changes everything. (newspapers)
change could To lose one all-time great is bad enough; to lose two could change Australia's dominant position in world cricket
virtually overnight. (newspapers)
change can And to insert it between the third and fourth word can change the meaning rather dramatically. (HGH 281)
change would Blackpool's appeal lies in its friendly, unassuming attitude and to introduce bigstake gambling would change it for
the worse. (newspapers)
change would "We have no Starbucks around here and to introduce something like that would completely change the
neighbourhood." (newspapers)
change To get a break early in the second set changed the momentum of the match. (newspapers)
change To suggest that Aborigines have been in Australia for more than 100,000 years really does change a lot of things.''
(newsmerge)
41
check would As a gift of valuable property this is theoretically taxable, but gifts of portable objects are not ordinarily scrutinized
and, as far as that goes, the tax courts have ruled that valuable gifts to, say, a lady friend, are not taxable; so to
argue would check sentiment. (academic)
come To be repaid like this comes as a shock. (newspapers) come as
come To hear he will not accept any excuses for drug dealers and hooligans comes as good news. (newspapers) come as
come To suggest that Mr Webber and his team can continue their work only if they register and train as National
Federation of Anglers coaches comes too late and is absurd. (newspapers)
come To say that risk-taking can materially improve a student's chance of a first comes very close to saying that the extra
quality is something that could be achieved by luck that bravado might carry you safely past all the pitfalls.
(newsmerge)
come can To fail to acknowledge the festive season can come across as peculiar - sitcoms aren't set in a notional "realtime" come across
like soaps, but we expect them not to get too out of step with our own lives. (newspapers)
come would And to learn 40 years later that a man had confessed to the murder of their daughter would have come as a
Appendix 14
have massive shock. (newspapers)

come could not To find trendy high street shops like Topshop are finally tapping into the maternity market couldn't have come at context checked
a better time." (newspapers)
come would And yet Royle chose not to dump on him from a great height when quite clearly to have so done would have come
have to represent a sparkling piece of public relations. (newsmerge)
come not To say the family are devastated doesn't come close. (britnews)
come To be offered the job on a temporary basis came as complete shock. (britnews)
come I have been forecasting this for years and sampling the benefits of good internet technology sporadically as I move
around the planet, but to have it on tap everywhere came as a bit of a shock. (newspapers)
commit IGNORED To do otherwise is committing suicide in the league tables and leave yourself open to yet more criticism by
OFSTED. (newsmerge)
commit To blame the lexicographers for recording common usage commits the irrational and primitive error of shooting
the messenger. (newsmerge)
commit IGNORED To change it would be committing suicide." (fiction)
concentrate would The problem is that there are 75 ridings a year and to give a wider berth would concentrate our low flying over
other parts of the countryside to the detriment of the inhabitants there. (HHV 16197)
concern To imagine the board believes a merger (or takeover) by French, German, Scandinavian or, latterly, Australian
interests can support a global vision concerns me greatly. (britnews)
confirm To have created such a response from something so self-centred as sailing around the world confirms that dreams
can be fulfilled. (newsmerge)
confirm To hear it from him confirmed all my own beliefs. (newsmerge)
confirm would I believe a place in the final itself is not beyond Arsenal, and to meet another of the English clubs would confirm
the Premiership as Europe's proving ground. (newspapers)
confirm "To accuse the police of betrayal is a symptom of paranoia and confirms my view that the author of that particular
article, Dominic Prince, is something of a twat," Linton was telling MPs when he was warned by Madam Deputy
Speaker to think carefully about the words he uses. (britnews)
confirm To be ushered back mid-race from Brazil to see a chap holding a tin of wallpaper paste confirmed all my
prejudices. (newsmerge)
confuse would To give him the impression now that we're in a relationship would confuse him. (fiction)
confuse not Which would raise the further question whether this way, as practised by Olson, and by Williams in Paterson ,
isn't so unlike the ways of poetry as we have known it that to call their works ‘poems’ doesn't merely confuse the
42
whole issue. (A1B 963)

confuse would One recalls that it was Taylor who had responded to those calling for the selection of Chris Waddle, one of the
very few really skilful players in the country, by saying he had established a pattern of play into which Waddle
would not fit, and from which England must not deviate because to do so would confuse the other players.
(newsmerge)
confuse To confuse the two confuses the issue in general. (CJ1 844)
confuse would To have attempted an analysis of coherence in the main body of this article would, however, have proved coordination
have unwieldy and would have confused parts of the discussion. (J89 276)
confuse would I infer from the reply that if the bins are not emptied, householders will have to wait until the following week,
because to change a rotation system would confuse householders. (newsmerge)
confuse can To isolate one stage, i.e., the catalogue consultation, without reference to searching at the shelves can mislead and coordination
confuse the means with the end. (H0S 123)
confuse For KPMG to say there was no ongoing estimating going on absolutely confuses me. (newsmerge)
Appendix 14
convince To face both ways convinces no one, in Britain nor the rest of Europe. (britnews)
convince would Just to read the 893 case histories of Pritikin's first patients reviewed by the Loma Linda University in 1978 would
convince anybody of that. (academic)
convince may Equally, to maintain the status quo now that there is strong evidence that sciences are harder may only convince
16-year-old waverers that they stand a better chance of good A-level grades by opting for the arts. (newsmerge)
cost would To buy something similar in London would cost ten times as much. (newspapers)
cost will But there are twenty eight stained glass windows here, and to restore every window will cost around a quarter of
a million pounds. (K23 1389)
cost would To insure against complete catastrophe on an average launch would thus cost about $4 million. (B7C 1911)
cost would He highlighted an Environment Agency report which was published last month and found that to build five
pipelines carrying 1,100 megalitres per day of water from the northern Pennines to London would cost up to
Pounds 15 billion. (newspapers)
cost To reprogramme every computer in the electricity industry has already cost a stunning pounds 776 million,
according to the Trade and Industry Select Committee. (newsmerge)
cost Normally, to take someone to tribunal costs L20,000. (newspapers)
cost will To hold a referendum will cost Bradford in the region of £500,000, money that can be spent on services this
Council deliver to you. (newsmerge)
count For Cruyff, to beat somebody in a one-on-one situation counts as the extra something. (newsmerge) comma suggests not a
[for_NP_to_INF]
count To be in form at this stage of the season evidently counts for as much as do reputations, so there was much for the
selectors to glean on Saturday. (newsmerge)
count would But to overturn Roma's 2-1 lead at Old Trafford with the thin resources at his disposal would count among
Ferguson's finest achievements. (newspapers)
count would The United manager has beaten better teams than Roma but to oversee this kind of display when his resources
appeared so stretched would count among his finest achievements, one which typified the English stranglehold on
the Champions League. (newspapers)
count would Unlike at Hickstead where a horse can stop and look without being penalised, to do so tomorrow would count as a
refusal. (newspapers)
count JFK didn't shatter it, despite his affairs - to be involved with Marilyn Monroe still counts as god-like. (newsmerge)
count would To do so would count as absconding and the police would be called. (newsmerge)
count not To win any other way didn't count in his book. (newsmerge)
43
create would The current euro-zone interest rate is 4.5%, compared with 5.25% in Britain, so to adopt the euro now would create
a housing boom. (britnews)
create Robert Scott's "Rhetoric is Epistemic: What Difference Does That Make" similarly updates his own 1967 "On
Viewing Rhetoric as Epistemic," insisting that "to claim that rhetoric does not simply make the Truth effective but
creates truth is to make a claim about human communication and to suggest that one should be bound by the
implications of that claim." (academic)
create would However, to reopen the PPP debate now would create just the political risk that makes companies unwilling to
do deals with government - particularly after this Government's handling of Railtrack. (newspapers)
create would It was argued on behalf of the Transport Secretary that the forthcoming White Paper covered the next 30 years,
and to consider Gatwick now would "create unnecessary blight and anxiety" in the area. (newspapers)
create can To tackle small problems can create big benefits." (britnews)
create would We have the oil but it would be difficult to produce more than 15m b/d, because to produce any more would
create a challenge to replace a much higher depletion rate," said Mr Husseini. (britnews)
Appendix 14
create would Labour sources dismissed the claim, pointing out that to take such drastic action would only create martyrs and
might even attract more MPs to the rebel cause. (newspapers)
create would I know some of my colleagues think it was a mistake to downgrade cannabis in the first place, though to chop and
change once more would only create even more confusion. (newspapers)
create would To have cancelled the conference would have created an equally bad impression. (AHN 1083)
have
create may To consider its use in a short normal child may create a problem where none existed. (newsmerge)
create To be able to do this creates a context in which effective bargaining can be conducted. (FA1 693)
create To foster a Wild West approach creates an unsafe environment. (newspapers)
create On the facts, their Lordships were abundantly satisfied that to do as the appellant did plainly created a threat of
injury to his son and the offence likewise created that danger. (newsmerge)
delay would To start shouting now would only delay what needs to be done in order to see him. (fiction)
delay would But to pursue this matter would have delayed for some years the opening of much needed services. (F86 272)
have
delay could To heighten confrontation with the United States could delay Chinese entry to the World Trade Organisation, a
fundamental goal of the reformers. (newspapers)
delay If he ruffed, dummy would handle the rest, and to discard just delayed the inevitable. (newspapers)
delay would Sam, without any hesitation had agreed knowing that to wait for the first available fireman would delay his train's
departure. (CE9 1373)
demand To use teacher assessments as a basis for comparing school performance demands a differently structured
curriculum from that assessed through formal, written tests. (newsmerge)
demand None of these lost women can feed herself and to feed them properly, to spoon in sufficient mince and mashed
carrot topped off with rhubarb and custard to keep them going, demands the personal attention of a helper, in
effect one helper per person. (newspapers)
demand Just to live, work, shop and take the children to school demands infinitely flexible transport. (newspapers)
demand To understand how the congruity between the two is achieved demands an investigation of marketing, designers
(as by Forty 1986) and other distributive agencies. (FAK 1157)
demand will To organize it will demand utter secrecy — utter. (A0N 1409)
demand To have any hope of resolving these difficulties demands that we communicate. (K5M 11796)
demand would To sustain a Labour government for that time would demand, among other things, an open, constructive and
supportive relationship between government and party. (newsmerge)
44
depend To enforce slavery depended on a constant willingness to use personal violence. (britnews)
depend To squeeze all the information for HDTV's vastly more detailed picture into the limited space on the airwaves
depends on software skills honed in the computer industry - along with lots of computer memory chips and
lightning quick microprocessors. (newsmerge)
depend To compare and classify such observations--in effect, to reason about the world--depends crucially on modeling
the nonlinear geometry of these low-dimensional manifolds. (academic)
depend To narrow the gap depends on putting in extra resources. (newsmerge)
depend To declare, as the Commission for Racial Equality does, that "most people in Britain today are either immigrants or
the descendants of immigrants" depends on how far back you are prepared to go. (newspapers)
depend may To say either that someone acts authoritatively or that someone is responsible for his actions may depend upon the
possibility of ascribing mental states or capacities but neither is merely a shorthand way of ascribing them. (ECV
1301)
determine One has not specified a game until one has specified the set of strategies; and since to specify an agent's strategy
Appendix 14
determines her path through the tree, the game itself remains a static object. (academic)
discourage IGNORED I put a lot of work into the year and to come up pretty empty for the first six months is discouraging. (newspapers) verb or adjective?
discourage would To establish the law in that sense would not benefit the average married couple and would discourage financial
institutions from making the advance. (newsmerge)
discourage IGNORED To get two injuries like that at the one time is discouraging. (newspapers) verb or adjective?
discourage will To prevaricate by delaying his schedule and even boarding his ship by force is inexcusable and will discourage
other ships from stopping for survivors. (newspapers)
do "To suggest otherwise does a grave injustice to police officers" he said. (newspapers)
do There will always be false allegations against the police, and the jury system is not infallible - but to turn a blind
eye to police brutality does a grave disservice to the majority of police officers who perform a difficult and
dangerous job without abusing their powers. (newsmerge)
do To fall back on such meaningless platitudes hardly does a professional athlete credit. (britnews)
do not To describe it as an elegant version of the Teletubbies house doesn't do justice to its appealing, warm lines,
wraparound outdoor terrace and built-in bench, where customers who opt for the takeaway service can eat their
food in woody luxury. (newspapers)
do can "To have the deputy secretary general criticise the United States in such a manner can only do grave harm to the
United Nations,'' he said. (newspapers)
do not To say that Harry felt sick really didn't do justice to the feeling that he was having. (fiction)
do would To split up the military powder business among several competing companies would do damage to the close co-
operation between du Pont and the government and thus jeopardize the security of the nation without any
corresponding benefit to the public. (academic)
do would And to die right now would do nothing to protect her. (fiction)
do will Just to be in with a shout of being involved will do for me right now." (newspapers)
do would To grant leave would do just that and would not be for the purpose of the liquidation. (newsmerge)
do would "To have a democratic bust-up would provide lots of colourful stories but would do nothing for the stock of tennis
in this country. (newspapers)
drive would But to try to offset losses entirely by higher fares would drive passengers off trains and that would benefit no one.''
(newsmerge)
drive would To be posing for glossy photographs would drive him berserk, so he simply continues to do what he loves doing
and what he does better than anyone else: riding winners. (newspapers)
drive will To be the only Scot doing it and to be the oldest entrant will drive me on. (newspapers)
45
drive would In sport, the imponderables are so numerous that to let them prey on the mind would drive an athlete insane.
(newspapers)
drive would You have already been pushed to the limits of endurance by your nightmares, and to add this on top would
probably drive you mad. (fiction)
drive would I cannot change it, and to wish that I could would merely frustrate me, or drive me mad. (fiction)
drive would People keep telling her how proud they are of her but she says she had no choice because to have stayed at home
have would have driven her mad. (newspapers)
drive To see the fight in him - and he's fighting a different battle - drives us on more. (britnews)
drive would To ban boxing would be illiberal and would also drive the sport underground where it would thrive without the
supervision at present exercised by the British Boxing Board of Control. (newsmerge)
drive will Under existing conventions, world heritage bodies adamantly oppose the purchase of stolen cultural objects,
insisting that to condone illicit trafficking will merely enrich the looters and drive up black market prices.
(newsmerge)
Appendix 14
drive will To ban the ICC will not only drive it underground, but could also make it more attractive. (newsmerge)
drive would To live in a show home like this would drive me crazy! (fiction)
earn would To leave his work, on the other hand, would earn him a clout across his ears from Davis and perhaps, even from
the smith as well. (C98 1678)
earn We've had two hard games over three days, so to come away with a 100 per cent record has earned the boys a day
off. (newspapers)
earn would To say that Mrs. Weasley had been shocked would have earned the award for Understatement of the Year.
have (fiction)
earn To betray his true feelings to the Dursleys had always earned him a punishment, so he had learned to shield his
eyes and keep them neutral even if inside he was seething. (fiction)
earn To sustain such excellence under the physical intimidation of rugby union, and under the simultaneous hostility of
the home nation and the euphoric confidence of the English supporters, has earned him admiration and respect
that will echo conversationally for decades. (newspapers)
earn would To be late would earn a reprimand and possibly a warning from those who stood above them. (CKE 2079)
earn would The recipient must have shown near-insane bravery when to do otherwise would have earned no rebuke.
have (newspapers)
ensure To play alongside the likes of Hall, Robinson, Egerton and Ojomoh ensures that you will be learning all the time.''
(newsmerge)
ensure To be the first to reach the top of the world's highest mountain ensured international celebrity and a place in
history, but the modesty of a slightly gauche New Zealand beekeeper never departed him. (newspapers)
ensure would To ruff high would ensure defeat, so Fantoni threw a spade. (newspapers)
ensure The front porch incorporates, inter alia, carvings of the four evangelists, Latin inscriptions, 17th-century bedposts
and lions donated by the Duke of Wellington (visitors soon learnt that to appear with gifts of carvings ensured a
welcome). (newspapers)
ensure To show it at all has merely reopened old wounds and ensured that Irish hostilities will continue well into the 21st
century. (newspapers)
ensure might To adopt the mantle of monarch might appease the restive commoners and ensure a thread of continuity by
passing power on, according to the hereditary principle, to his son Richard. (newspapers)
ensure To advertise as they have ensures that many potentially suitable families will simply not present themselves.
(newsmerge)
establish would "To refuse to allow the injunction to be continued,'' Ackner's judgment ran, "would have established a charter for
46
traitors to publish on the most massive scale in England whatever they have managed to publish abroad.
(newspapers)
establish would To rise with CK would establish three club winners for declarer (CA CQ CJ) and two diamond discards from
dummy. (newspapers)
establish could To disclose whether or not a warrant has been issued in a particular case could establish means whereby those
involved in serious crimes or espionage or subversion could learn the extent to which their activities had come to
notice or — perhaps more damaging — could in some cases confirm whether their activities had come to notice at
all. (ASB 993)
establish would To go now would establish the precedent of an England coach being ridiculed to oblivion by the media.
(newsmerge)
establish To give a gift establishes an immediate obligation first to receive and then to reciprocate. (newsmerge)
excite might However, the statement was not defamatory: to say that someone is seriously ill might excite pity, but not ridicule
or disrespect. (J78 600)
Appendix 14
excite To hear Nacho insist that he wants to strive for a higher level in every game excites me. (newspapers)
excite would To go deeper would only excite and frustrate her until sleep was an impossibility. (fiction)
excite would He looked a lot like something a farmer would use to scare birds with, and there was no doubt but that to go into
the pub in his present condition would excite comments of a raucous kind, and worse still, there would doubtless
be several people in there at the moment whom he knew, all of whom would be bound to bombard him with
questions which, at the moment, he felt ill-equipped to deal with. (fiction)
excuse not To say this does not excuse the racism of the Spaniards, or the racism that continues today in Latin America.
(fiction)
explain To postulate an inner being, or homunculus, located at a 'seat of consciousness' in the brain explains nothing.
(newsmerge)
explain not Freedom, tolerance, moderation are all good values in our culture (though not in our culture alone), but to identify
them does not in itself explain them, protect them or advance them. (newspapers)
fail To portray this as a "victory for Kiley" fails to understand both the nature of the deal and the fact that it involved
compromise on all sides to achieve. (newspapers)
fail To regard them as an example of a clear-cut binary opposition between good and evil, or rationality and
irrationality fails to engage with the kinds of investments which they actually entail. (FAY 1540)
fail But to interpret such differences in terms of revolutionary and counter-revolutionary European politics is entirely
misleading and fails to show the true dead-center nature of American two-party politics. (academic)
fail To be only a few kilometres from Rome and yet to be aloft in that tranquil fastness never fails to affect even a man
like this who has seen such sunsets almost every day of his life. (newsmerge)
fail will To criminalise such a failure in the BoxClever case will fail itself.'' (newspapers)
fail could not He added: ''To grant permanent right of abode and rights of property on Ascension Island would constitute a very
fundamental change in the nature of the territory, and could not fail to bring an unacceptable level of risk to the
UK. (newspapers)
fail To ask whether the net effect of technology is to "upskill" or "downskill" blue-collar work fails to capture the
multidimensional ways in which technology affects the content of work. (academic)
fail To isolate the prescription of drugs, pluck it from the range of doctors' skills and give it to another profession fails
to acknowledge that it's part of a far wider and more complex process. (newspapers)
fail But to treat children like little adults, ready for a full measure of independence and equality, fails to recognize the
immaturity of their developmental stage and so fails to provide what they need to mature to the next stage.
(academic)
47
fail To imply that companies are dragging their feet on disclosure fails to recognise the increasingly difficult pensions
environment, and ignores the very considerable steps companies have already taken to understand and disclose
their long-term pensions liabilities. (newsmerge)
fall An important statement about the general health of the country was editorialized in Dental Items of Interest (1942)
by its editor, Paul H. Belding, D.D.S.: "The state of health of the American people is something of which we
should all be ashamed, and to say that this or that condition is responsible for so many rejections falls in the same
category as the blind man's description of the elephant. (academic)
fall would To write a play about boxing in general would have fallen into any number of clichés, but my fascination with the
have 'cutman' took this story into interesting places and created a compelling character. (newsmerge)
fall would Employers should not make assumptions about a person's right to work or immigration status on the basis of their
colour, race, nationality or ethnic or national origins as to do so would be discriminatory and fall foul of the Race
Relations Act. (newspapers)
fall would This is because they have been advised that to differentiate between the sexes on grounds of age would fall foul of
Appendix 14
the Sex Discrimination Act 1975. (newsmerge)

fall could However, the building is Grade Two listed and to carry out the necessary work could fall foul of listed-building
regulations. (newspapers)
feel Her naked breasts I have clapped eyes on many a time, but to see her kitchen table feels far more revealing.
(newspapers)
feel To speak aloud feels like an act of insurrection. (britnews)
feel must So to ban him from the funeral must feel like another dagger in his heart. (newspapers)
feel To fill a lifetime with these things feels ordinary in an intensely pleasurable way. (newspapers)
feel will As long as the habit clings, to derive evaluations directly from ‘Be aware’ will feel like making an indefensible leap
to value from fact. (CB1 253)
feel To come off the bench and score a hat-trick of tries for Wales on my debut feels fantastic. (newsmerge)
feel "To play in other bands where everyone's got their part worked out beforehand almost feels like cheating," says
Taylor. (newspapers)
feel not You know, for us music is prayer, so to stop doesn't feel good.'' (newspapers)
feel But to win two feels surreal. (britnews)
feel must Sympathy for Best is limited, for to be handed your cards in such circumstances must feel like winning the Lottery.
(newsmerge)
feel Yet to blame league tables for their mishaps feels a bit like accusing the candlestick, not Colonel Mustard.
(newspapers)
feel would To have worked systematically through a pile of books would, on this view, have felt like Hell. (newsmerge)
have
feel To admit any of it felt like losing face. (fiction)
feel To prevail even when using his driver just once in 72 holes felt like Federer winning Wimbledon while serving
underarm. (newspapers)
feel I have won the Irish Open three times and to win the Ryder Cup here felt like another victory. (britnews)
feel "To get my first goal felt very good and it just carried on from there. (newspapers)
fill would To be the subject of a carnival parade would have filled him with horror and amusement. (newsmerge)
have
fill To be included alongside players like Ronaldo and Rivaldo fills him with pride. (newspapers)
fill We all love you very much and to see you go fills us with anxiety. (fiction)
fill can We took heart from holding Bohs last week and to do the same to St Pat's on their home patch can only fill us with
48
more confidence. (newspapers)

fill To become the first Argentinian to win the Premiership is a vindication and fills me with enormous pride.
(newspapers)
fill should To see two of the world's most powerful men so relaxed and friendly should fill a doubtful, wary world with
confidence. (newspapers)
fill To be able to turn those words back on Mrs Malcolm has filled many a reporter's heart with glee. (newsmerge)
fill would After little thought, and even less excitement, I realised that to go to Derby University with my friends would fill
up the next three years - what I should study was irrelevant. (fiction)
fill To look at him filled her with too many confusing feelings. (JXT 2764)
fit not "To produce such a film does not fit in with our corporate profile, which is in the document business," he said,
adding that development of such a film in the future by other firms was "feasible". (newsmerge)
fit not To represent members who nearly all earn in excess of the national average and then to talk about withdrawing
labour does not fit with public opinion. (newspapers)
Appendix 14
fit not But to propose that stock exchanges be nationalised does not fit the spirit of the times. (britnews)
fit not "If you did a film in, say, south Manchester, you could have Asians, but to put a black person in a programme
around here just doesn't fit in." (newspapers)
fit To begin a relationship with a newly married woman and sustain it over years with all the subterfuge that
involves - let alone him being a minister at the heart of public life - and then end up wrangling about whose
children she has borne hardly fits his sober political image. (newspapers)
follow would So to limit the interpretation of the word would follow the principle that words in a statute which have, or can
have, a general meaning may have to be given a specialised and narrower meaning in order to make sense of the
legislation and to avoid the conclusion that changes have been made to the existing law which cannot have been
intended by Parliament. (FE2 763)
force would In some cases, the writer may not wish to rely on truth as a defense, even though the alleged libelous statement is
true, because to do so would force him to reveal a confidential source. (academic)
force would Normally this indicates holding the Knave, but on this occasion, it would be necessary from DQ xx as to lead a low
card would force South into a winning position (after taking DJ with the King, he is bound to run the 10).
(newspapers)
force would For to do so would have forced you to reveal at least four other murders committed by you. (fiction)
have
force would No, Sir, as a resident, I do not favour myself over the dustman when to do so would force him into insecurity, low
wages, and no pension. (newsmerge)
force might There was an unwritten law among his immediate staff never to ask a question at these early morning sessions subject of force?
because to do so might get Hitler off on another subject and force them to remain for another hour. (academic)
force To do it by making the highest score of the game, after four wickets fell for 92 before lunch, forces one to admire subject of force?
their gameness. (newsmerge)
free To understand that had freed him. (fiction)
free IGNORED To find that he had, in a way, been correct all along was painful but freeing for her. (fiction) freeing: verb or
adjective?
frighten She is always so strong, so vital, and to see her face pale and weary frightens him more than he cares to admit.
(fiction)
frighten At eight, she thought Ahab was the strongest man in the world, and to see him weep frightened her. (fiction)
frighten I was very happy not to get pneumonia but to have those sort of symptoms is frightening." (britnews) frightening: verb or
adjective?
49
get not Just to ask them whether or not religion plays an important part in their life does not get us very far. (CM5 76)
get not He begins by examining Saddam Hussein's psychological make-up, arguing that merely to dismiss the Iraqi
dictator as ìnsane' does not get us far. (newsmerge)
get But to have the only thing that people ask you about - where you went to school - gets a bit wearing. (newspapers) dubious
get not But there's a whole range of behaviours which one can include in sexual harassment, going from fairly mundane
every day things which just grind people down and which grind people down because they happen on a constant
basis, to very serious once in a while sorts of behaviours, and to try and categorise them as major or minor doesn't
really get us very close to being what the issue is about. (KRL 1295)
get would To turn up for work drunk would get most of us the boot - so why should she be any different. (newspapers)
get would I am a firm believer in runs, good and bad, having a momentum of their own, and to put together a winning one
from now until the end of the season would surely get us back into Europe. (newsmerge)
get not To say we're being exploited doesn't get us anywhere . (britnews)
get will To demolish this building will get things going in the right direction.'' (newsmerge) get going
Appendix 14
get may (To admit this publicly may get libraries into trouble, but the practice of deaccession is a routine one that probably
will accelerate.) (academic)
get will To argue against it will get one nowhere because, for the average individual, there is no alternative. (academic)
get will To have won the prize will get it bought by a lot more people, some of whom will read it. (newsmerge) subject of get?
get can Organising a meeting of more than six people is technically illegal, and to set up a non-governmental organisation
with an innocuous motive can also get Cubans into trouble lest it be a cover for something else. (newspapers)
get would To get all bitter now would only get in the way of the biggest challenge of your life. (newspapers)
get will To do so will only get you lost in a maze of Old Testament history. (academic) subject of get?
get To put a stamp on the good old good ones gets harder as versions come and go, and Norma Winstone has trawled
outside the usual area: none of the three by Richard Rodgers, for instance, is favoured by most of her rivals.
(newsmerge)
get might There was an unwritten law among his immediate staff never to ask a question at these early morning sessions get sb. off on
because to do so might get Hitler off on another subject and force them to remain for another hour. (academic)
get would not To be aggressive about the desktop model just now wouldn't get us anywhere. (newsmerge)
get would Personally, I've got a fair idea, but to tell you would probably get me a lawyer's letter from Lirrel Roger.
(newspapers)
get would Katie knew that to have these two reneges found in her dwelling would get her and Jerry killed as well as them, subject of get?
and in her blossoming mother's mind, she thought of her unborn child. (fiction)
get not To call them pictures and so on doesn't quite get the matter. (newsmerge)
get not And yet to talk in an abstract way doesn't get to the heart of the matter. (newspapers)
get would And to have him and Beppe bounce off each other like they used to would really get it back on track.
(newspapers)
get would The real world, however, was a game without rules, and to tie oneself to a code of honor would get one killed subject of get?
sooner than anything would. (fiction)
get To say her name gets my breathing going again, but my heart is playing catch-up by throwing itself against my get going
ribs. (fiction)
get So just to come out and do my part well has got me right back where I need to be. (newspapers)
get would Simply to have sought unity for its own sake would have got him now here. (newspapers)
have
give He said: "I'm probably playing as well now as I've ever done but to climb to No1 on the provisional rankings has
given my confidence such a boost. (newspapers)
50
give To have been elected as an independent - even if he remains a Labour man at heart gives him added room to
manoeuvre. (britnews)
give To divide basic male earnings by basic male hours gives another. (newsmerge) previous sentence: To
divide total male
earnings by total male
hours gives one
meaningful figure.
give Just to think this bird made it into the 21st century gives me chills. (newspapers)
give To get 10pc at the first close gives quite a strong message." (newspapers)
give will But even to have risked such an influence will be giving Mr Blair (and Mr Campbell) the collywobbles.
(newspapers)
give would "We were so far behind earlier in the season that everyone had written us off and to come back from that situation
would give anyone a lot of satisfaction. (newspapers)
Appendix 14
give would By that time you were attracted to her, and to defer the session would give you more time to get to know her.
(HA7 1569)
give But just to have Henry back in the squad has given everyone at Arsenal a huge lift in what has become a difficult
season. (newspapers)
give To get a goal so quickly gave me a boost. (newspapers)
give It was a dry run, but to step up there with my team-mates as winners in the Olympic venue still gave me
goosebumps. (newspapers)
grieve To pay exorbitant prices for fizzy beer on top of an entrance fee grieved him. (fiction)
grieve To see Tullivers so neglected had grieved Thrush Green. (ASE 194)
guarantee To return in the manner that Shearer did guarantees devotion. (newspapers)
guarantee not But to be out-of-date does not guarantee extinction. (newsmerge)
guarantee not Today's criticism will reinforce Tory warnings that simply to pump more money into the health service does not
guarantee better patient care. (newspapers)
guarantee Tapes, CDs and musical instruments are burned, and to be found in the possession of them guarantees brutal
punishment. (newspapers)
guarantee To call a man political locates him among the lowest forms of life, and to call a venture party political guarantees
its place below the salt of public approval. (newsmerge)
guarantee To reveal it guarantees maximum respect and honour. (newspapers)
guarantee To start with two players who have not played for a long time virtually guarantees I will have to take them both
off at some stage. (newspapers)
guarantee not In a situation of contestation between home and host country, as was the case with Cuban exiles, to line up with
the power structures of their host country (as was the case for the Right) or with the elite in the home county (as
was the case for the Left) does not guarantee democratization for the community or for the home or host country.
(academic)
guarantee To tolerate users while leaving supply illegal guarantees greater criminal profits and lack of social controls.
(newsmerge)
guarantee would To commit to a stand against fighting the war would guarantee the relative absence of Democrats at the
Administration tables that will work on the future of Iraq. (newspapers)
guarantee To do so automatically guarantees an inefficient outcome. (academic)
guarantee not Being British does not guarantee good television, but to ape Americans guarantees bad. (newspapers) coordination mit [V-ing[
happen (never) To be bitten has never happened to me in my sporting life in Argentina or in Brazil. (newspapers) football player is no
51
native speaker - might be

translation; passive to-inf
happen will not To say we'll change things to suit the game in question won't happen. (newspapers)
happen (never) To make a public statement denouncing African atrocities will never happen. (newspapers)
happen not To be told you've got cancer is bad, but to be told that you had had the damned stuff for nine months already just coordination
shouldn't happen. (newspapers)
happen not To shape playing combinations, to dampen egos and blunt national rivalries does not happen easily. (newsmerge)
harm will To put heavy-handed anti-racism campaigns above catching criminals will only harm ethnic minorities even more.
(newspapers)
harm would Bush argued his case on economic grounds, claiming that to deprive Beijing of its MFN classification would harm
the Chinese people, cost capitalist Hong Kong 20,000 jobs and $8.5 billion in exports of Chinese-made goods
processed in Hong Kong, and add 40% to the prices American consumers must pay for Chinese imports.
(newsmerge)
Appendix 14
harm would To go into elections without the budget passed would harm Israel's credit rating, which has already been damaged
by the Palestinian uprising. (newspapers)
harm could But he was careful to balance this with a warning that to join without his five tests being met could harm stability
and risk a return to a stop-go economy. (newspapers)
harm would Some believed it was vital they were there for their children, convinced that to do anything else would harm them,
particularly in the early years. (newsmerge)
harm would It was held to be sufficiently foreseeable that to continue to place unreasonable demands on Mrs Jones would
harm her health. (newspapers)
harm would To ban all trade or to use sanctions to ban many products not directly connected with slave labor would harm
many innocent traders and consumers. (academic)
harm would John Spellar, the junior MoD minister, told Key last year that to do so would 'harm the frankness and candour of
internal reporting'. (newsmerge)
harm might To do otherwise might harm their life chances in a Brown cabinet. (newspapers)
harm would Yet to let him off would harm the rule of law. (newspapers)
harm would ''It is very clear,'' Deng argued, ''that to emotionally build up Mao's errors too much would only damage the image
of our party and our country, and harm the prestige of the party and the socialist system. (newsmerge)
have would Regulations for junior doctors are being phased in gradually as hospitals rely so heavily on this workforce - and to light verb construction?
slash hours from 100 to 48 a week would have an immense impact on the health service. (newspapers)
have could If any greater certainty could be given then it could be done only by an unacceptable narrowing of the duty to light verb construction?
restrict it to a part of the auditors responsibilities and we're also concerned that to do so could have potentially
wide ranging implications for the scope of auditor's functions more generally. (JSF 324)
have would The Commission said it prohibited (for the second year running) Orangemen from marching down the
predominantly Catholic Lower Ormeau Road next Wednesday because to allow it to go ahead would have a
detrimental effect on both communities and it was "aware of the very real possibility of public disorder or damage
to property." (newsmerge)
have would But to award the Games to China would have a quite different effect, handing over legitimacy in return for little light verb construction?
more than window-dressing in the streets of Peking. (newsmerge)
have would To even imply that they are moving towards some kind of merger would have cars set on fire in the gentrified what sort of
streets which stretch from Stamford Bridge into Boat Race land. (newspapers) construction?
have will To complain that Mr Blair has stolen their clothes will have little force: voters might prefer the newer model.
(newsmerge)
52
have would Ron enthusiastically, but Harry mechanically, as if eating were a particularly dull homework exercise, which he light verb construction?
carries out simply because not to do so would have unpleasant consequences. (fiction)
have would To include all the dyads from multilateral wars in this analysis would have the latter drive the results and do so what sort of
in a misleading fashion. (academic) construction?
have would To do otherwise would have serious consequences for Britain's future prosperity. (newspapers)
have can Mr Schroder said: "Psychologists would naturally say that to grow up fatherless can have damaging effects later light verb construction?
on. (newspapers)
have could (reading) This is an enormously important season in New York, and to make a false step could have severe
repercussions for years. (fiction)
have not To have people panicking about a piece of artwork or a recording deadline doesn't have the same intensity to me
as it did before. (newspapers)
have may To wait any longer than I have to may have dire consequences. (fiction)
have would For Mr Soysal to do so would have its ironies, given Turkey's irritation at western nagging about human rights.
Appendix 14
(newsmerge)
have can Jude disagrees with her, arguing that to trap a man into such a marriage can have serious consequences, especially
when it is unsuitable to both of them. (academic)
have To call for America both to keep out 'unfair' imports and to bring the troops home has an appearance of coordination of two in-
consistency. (newsmerge) order-to-infs in the actual
[to_INF]
have Monte Carlo is very complex and to win it has to be a team effort. (newspapers) have to; object of win or
subject of has?
have I don't mean I want to play for Chelsea but to play at that level has to be an ambition. (newspapers) have to
have To concede eight goals like that has to be a worry - but I expect that Diarmuid O'Sullivan will move into the edge have to
of the square from the start and switch with Mulcahy. (newspapers)
have But to combine them has no logic at all. (newsmerge)
have To sign an England goalkeeper at his peak for L3.5m has to be good business and full credit to Glenn. have to
(newspapers)
have To live in the knowledge that the same disease will strike your second child has to be more than anyone can bear. have to
(newspapers)
have 'To wash a porcelain cup and saucer once, in an average dishwasher,' avers the report, 'has a greater impact on the
water than the entire life cycle of a disposable cup.' (newsmerge)
have Not least because of that giveaway antonym "clean-shaven", it is clear that to be bearded has strong cultural
associations with slovenliness, laziness and youthful rebellion. (newsmerge)
have As for the media, to hear it pontificating on moral standards has me flat on the carpet and gasping for air.
(newsmerge)
have But for him to be sacked on health and safety grounds is ludicrous and has massive implications for the future of coordination
policing. (newspapers)
have would It was sound judicially because to have ceded to her request would have had profound consequences for existing
statutory rights (and they would not - feminists take note - be only those of men). (newspapers)
have To be on the outside of an all-encompassing order had social, economic, cultural, and possibly legal consequences.
(academic)
have To be alone with that kind of guilt had to be wearing away at him and she had no right to place more demands on have to
him. (fiction)
have Perhaps that is the point; to hear a Chancellor boasting about house price inflation "moderating" at least had
53
novelty value. (newspapers)

have He wanted to remember touching her, because to have been with her and forgotten the feel and taste of her skin have to
had to warrant at least ten years in Azkaban. (fiction)
have He Who Must Not Be Named knew they were preparing for him; to strike first, and viciously, had to be the only have to
way! (fiction)
have could To park in such a manner is thoughtless and could have had serious consequences as my father is in hospital, light verb construction?
having suffered a stroke, and my daughter's car was the only transport available to us. (newsmerge)
have To be up flying this early had to be wonderful. (fiction) had to
have To achieve this was a gift, and had little to do with how much he really knew. (EUU 1618) have to do with, with
coordination
have The manner of it, though, was such that to trail Davis Love at the end of the day had to be somewhat have to
disappointing. (newspapers)
have might not To have just lost and not been so dreadful might not have had the same impact. (CBG 3853)
Appendix 14
have To have so much thrown at you, while people yearned for the fame and money he had, had to be overwhelming. have to
(fiction)
have And to collaborate with great acting singers such as I have had the fortune to do, ones of such skill, such light verb construction?
fearlessness, such a marriage of astounding technique and passion, such ambition for the possibilities of this
unwieldy medium, has been one of the blessings of my professional life. (newspapers)
help would To keep everyone here and keep the same team next season would definitely help us. (newspapers) two coordinated
[to_INF], second one
without to
help To recall the different French and Spanish economic, political, and religious evolutions helps us understand the
decline of revolution and revolutionary ideologies in France. (academic)
help not As Christopher Martin, the headmaster, put it: "To tell a boy that he is an individual but that he has to play rugby
union all his life does not help." (newsmerge)
help will Murphy said: "It was a great experience, and to be involved in games like that will help prepare me for my debut. help with bare INF
(newspapers)
help To have that level of support behind me really helps. (newspapers)
help would To know would not help me. (GUD 1236)
help will To deny some people their naturally human discomfort with this rapid change will help no-one. (newsmerge)
help Obviously, to be rich helps, if you want to conduct an orchestra. (britnews)
help not To have an off-shore CMO who stands up and says everyone has got it wrong really doesn't help. (newsmerge)
help So to have his personal backing helped ease the pressure on me back home. (newsmerge) help with bare INF
help I stay in hotels for 30 weeks of the year, so to sleep in my own bed and be at home helps me feel comfortable and help with bare INF
relaxed, so that's a big advantage. (newspapers)
help will To get this kind of Royal backing for the game will help broaden the appeal of cricket and shed some of the help with bare INF
negative perceptions that are still associated with the game. (newspapers)
help not Nobody can claim to know how to cope with grief when it happens, and being British certainly doesn't help.
(britnews)
help To have a character like him come in has helped us a lot. (newspapers)
hit would Mr Blair had previously said that to delay would hit tourism by sending a signal that Britain was "closed for
business". (newspapers)
hit We saw each other every day and to lose both of them so soon has hit me pretty badly. (newspapers)
hit 'Just to take away child benefit for that age, with nothing proposed to replace it, hits the average person with
54
teenage children who decide to stay on in education.' (newsmerge)

hit can To ban advertising and sponsorship can only hit the company hard. (K55 2212)
hit could To deny fellow Muslims the right to pray is a serious crime and could hit the sect's fund-raising. (newsmerge) coordination with copula
hit would On the Continent, it was long ago widely accepted that most goods were transported by road, and therefore to
raise derv taxation would hit commodity prices. (newspapers)
hit would Unlike Britain, where the health budget is set by the government, the French welfare system is administered by
trade unions which have little incentive to cut back on spending; to do so would hit their members in the public
sector. (newsmerge)
hit To treat them as such not only degrades them as women but hits them at a profound level in their psyche. coordination
(newsmerge)
identify would To do so would identify them as Bosnian Muslims, expelled by police and soldiers of the self-styled Serb Republic
in Bosnia. (newsmerge)
identify would The man, from south London, cannot be named because he was convicted of incest with his daughter and to give
Appendix 14
his name would identify her. (newsmerge)

indicate will To do the same with different cells in one body will indicate where DNA made mistakes on the journey from
cradle to coffin and hint at where cancer is going to strike. (newspapers)
indicate would To use the name Sambo to me would indicate a highly intelligent, brave little boy. (newsmerge)
indicate To describe the Holocaust, the slaughterhouse of the Balkans, or the Rape of Nanking as "distasteful" indicates
how little even a fundamentally decent man such as David Miller seems to appreciate the dangers of nationalism.
(academic)
indicate To leave a soul unburied, or, worse, to leave it as carrion for wild animals, indicated not only disrespect for the
dead individual but, perhaps even worse, disregard for established religious traditions. (academic)
indicate To be able to speak fluent Klingon or repeat the script of Fiend Without A Face verbatim indicates a deeply
misspent youth. (newsmerge)
indicate To describe something as sacred is not an aesthetic response, but indicates something which is deeply precious coordination
and bound up with our whole understanding of life. (newsmerge)
indicate To assume such authority for change indicates a readiness for a challenge to the authority of scripture.
(newsmerge)
indicate Even to suggest such a possibility indicates that it is not only financially bankrupt but morally bankrupt too.
(newsmerge)
indicate should To be a protector domesticus at his age should indicate that his father was a general; three coevals from similar
backgrounds attained the purple. (academic)
indicate To be able to do that indicates a degree of evil on their part. (newsmerge)
indicate To see the American special forces openly protecting the Afghan leader indicates the lack of the most precious
commodity in the bodyguard situation -loyalty. (newspapers)
indicate To ride in a cab at night, with others, indicates that you will have a secret that you will endeavor to keep from
your friends. (academic)
indicate To investigate such a simple error as if it were a fraud indicates Barclays may be wasting resources. (newspapers)
indicate not For example, to argue that social movements flourish when POs are ripe does not indicate how mobilization is
actually accomplished. (academic)
influence will For example, to integrate a course across institutions will influence practical issues such as room scheduling and
curricula, but also how a course fits within the larger context of degree requirements. (academic)
introduce To ignore this fact introduces potentially significant error into impact estimates. (academic)
introduce To have such people advising the Secretary of State on the editorial aspect of newspapers introduces a regulatory
55
frame of mind that is completely alien to the concept of press freedom. (newspapers)
introduce would He was concerned that to include the large Asian countries in such a scheme would introduce problems that the
small nations could find difficult to resolve. (GVK 125)
introduce would Those with any experience of the machinery by which the Charity Commission operates, know that to pass the
funds in the manner suggested would simply introduce yet another layer of bureaucracy which would dissipate
the money. (newsmerge)
introduce would However, to test behaviour among subjects using an environment outside the laboratory would introduce many
more influences than is possible to predict or model. (academic)
introduce To deny a place for sybaritism in the order of things introduces casuistry which would turn into a very long
conversation. (newsmerge)
keep will To remember that will keep us on our toes. (britnews) Arsène Wenger is French
keep To make a plan of breathing and follow it keeps the mind steadily concentrated on the breathing, and gives the
rest of the brain, which has been working on other things, a chance to relax and find its own freedom and rest.
Appendix 14
(academic)
keep To be preoccupied with the institution of the presidency keeps you from thinking about the people who sent you
there and the problems they have. (newsmerge)
keep will To summon the very elements against Potter will certainly keep him busy and distracted from other, more
sensitive, plans... like the forging of a Demon Gate into the space between worlds. (fiction)
keep KATIMSKI: "To give away yourself keeps yourself still, And you must live, drawn by your own sweet skill."
(fiction)
keep will To be dubbed "a comic alchemist'' will keep an agent in white powder for weeks. (newspapers)
keep can To see a friendly face and hear their encouragement can really keep you going and sharpen your focus.
(newspapers)
keep would Not to have done more would have kept corporate America from its share of an invest-in-Vietnam binge. not to
have (newsmerge)
keep would Andrew Stavanger would never touch it — even when he needed a bank overdraft, and to use the deposit would
have have kept down interest charges, he preferred to keep it intact. (H0D 621)
land would He toyed with the idea of writing a book, but confessed that to do so would only land him in jail for the rest of his
natural days, and he concluded that the full story could only be told after his death. (newsmerge)
lead can But to ignore the evidence of differences in performance between gender or ethnic groups can lead to unjust
treatment of individuals. (CCV 1645)
lead To regard it as a picture of a given society leads in turn to history, politics or sociology. (H8V 45)
lead would In his book on the medical aspects of exercise, Dr Henry Solomon gives warning that to push oneself to greater
limits because one has no symptoms can lead to "unpredictable disasters". (newsmerge)
lead can Whilst the relevance of such information should not be denied, to present it divorced from the Latin American
context leads to a seriously distorted picture of Soviet-Latin American relations. (G1R 202)
lead can To hide something so big can lead to breakdown in the relationship between parent and child. (newspapers)
lead will We are certain that to rely on the amateurish way that most clubs operate will lead to nothing worthwhile (and
will still cost money). (newsmerge)
lead would To do that would cost an estimated $5 billion and lead to heavy delays and fewer flights. (newsmerge) coordination
lead may AA spokeswoman Rebecca Rees said: "The A406 and the A40 are two of west London's busiest routes, and to have
both roadworks at the same time may lead to the mother of all traffic jams, particularly if it continues towards the
Easter getaway. (britnews)
lead could To ignore it as a potential medium-term influence could lead into potentially tricky territory. (newspapers)
56
lead To treat fact as fiction leads into the nihilist wilderness of post-structuralist theory; to judge fiction as fact denies
human beings a uniquely effective means of comprehending the real world. (newsmerge)
lead Because to kill her and not kill you would lead the authorities to me. (fiction)
lead would However, to pursue this would lead on to criticisms of inductivism that I have reserved for the next chapter. (FBE
296)
lead To deny those cultures and religions a chance to express themselves leads down the path of separatist Islamic
schools. (newspapers)
lead would It had occurred to him that simply to refuse to discuss his movements would have led Erica inevitably to his real
have job. (HWA 2019)
lead To come together to help the unemployed has led many churches to take part in Unemployment Sunday. (CCH
14)
lead To attack an incumbent president over a war had always led to electoral disaster. (newspapers)
lead to reject Microsoft's takeover offer led to more grumbles from shareholders. (newspapers)
Appendix 14
leave To watch a really bad production leaves me depressed and let down. (britnews)
leave may To reach a semi-final in a year of shocks without playing to their full potential may leave question marks.
(newspapers)
leave To omit Atherton leaves Smith, Graeme Hick and Fairbrother with a great deal to prove. (newsmerge)
leave would To do so would leave Saddam immeasurably strengthened and send a green light to dictators all over the world
that the international community doesn't have the will to see things through and we are not prepared to do that.
(newspapers)
leave would But to hand over scientists regarded by many as national heroes would leave Gen Musharraf vulnerable to the
charge of betrayal by Islamic fundamentalists. (newspapers)
leave would To hold otherwise would leave municipalities the helpless victims of all those who choose to publish untrue
imputations which injure their reputations. (FBV 361)
leave To hear all that has happened in the world leaves me amazed that it had only been three years. (fiction)
leave would To reject final causes from the study of nature would apparently leave providence hanging. (EEM 586)
leave To lose because of that penalty leaves a funny taste. (britnews)
leave would The education secretary's aides said that to have abandoned this year's tests would have left high and dry those
have teachers who were prepared to defy their union leaders and conduct them. (newsmerge)
leave To describe a trek involving a 3,000ft ascent (supposedly in five hours), followed by a steep 5,000ft descent the
next day, with little time for recovery in between, as "gentle" left some of us feeling demoralised - although in
retrospect, those of us that managed it all felt a sense of achievement. (newspapers)
leave He'd become used to Harry calling him 'Draco', and to hear him revert back to the previous antagonistic phrasing
left him momentarily speechless. (fiction)
leave I had played ice hockey since I was a teenager, so to be told that I could no longer play the sport I love left me
devastated. (newspapers)
lend To focus on the heroism of allied forces and the villainy of Saddam Hussein lends the story line a moral clarity that
Vietnam utterly lacked. (newsmerge)
lend To conquer Europe lends them a wider appeal and legitimacy. (newspapers)
lend It is certainly trying to a man's dignity to reappear when he is not expected to do so: a first farewell has pathos in
it, but to come back for a second lends an opening to comedy, and it was possible even that there might be bitter
sneers afloat about Will's motives for lingering. (fiction)
lend Yet to argue that "some" sameness lends "each form" a "constant meaning" is premature and collides with the
thesis of continual innovation (4.16). (academic)
57
lend would In one sense to carry out my plan would lend me a rare opportunity to take us both away from the lives we lead.
(fiction)
let To break the silence effectively lets the buyer off the hook. (K94 804)
let would To change direction now would let all those people down. (ACK 1991) let down
let would To scrap it would let corporate capital into the market. (newsmerge)
let To buy one assuages our consumer guilt and lets us feel good about ourselves. (newspapers)
let would To walk away from his country now would let down all the decent people who want a troubled province to have let down
its share of happiness. (newspapers)
let would To return to the mezzanine landing and nip up the other stairs would let them see me. (J13 4103)
let would To ignore it because of taunts of racism would let the people of this constituency down. (newspapers) let down
let It is the project that Phillips has in mind when he talks about the political importance of describing himself as a typo: let's instead of lets
"British writer" rather than a Black or Caribbean writer because to do otherwise "let's people off the hook, because
they don't want to then reconsider, to reconfigure, Britain in their minds" (interview). (academic)
Appendix 14
let To woodenly continue the suit lets South home as he can capture the trick and play clubs safely. (newspapers) What is the subject?
[to_INF] or the suit?
let "To look at just the guns lets us off the hook from looking at what I think the real problem is," he says.
(newspapers)
let will But to take the cup back again will let people relive that moment. (newspapers)
lift would Under-21s coach Peter Taylor said: "No other country gets behind their Under-21 team the way the English do,
and to play in front of a record crowd at White Hart Lane would really lift the team." (newspapers)
lift would To extend the net to the World Trade Center would not only lift a burden from the world's insurance companies
but it would also be a statesmanlike act which is surely better than the years of litigation which otherwise threaten.
(newspapers)
lift could To have such a high-scoring British company in the list could easily lift the national spirits and compensate to
some extent for the patchy performance of the British Lions rugby team. (newspapers)
lift To be recognized for some achievement in life lifted Dad immensely; before Eva he had begun to see himself as a
failure and his life as a dismal thing. (C8E 1551)
lift will To come to work each day at a training centre of this quality will really lift the lads. (newspapers)
limit would To call it hope would limit it. (HTY 3917)
limit will To think of self-help in a more restricted way will limit your efforts to be a better person. (academic)
limit IGNORED It is certainly not about Esperanza, as most other chapters are, but to say that it is about Geraldo and Marin would verb or adjective?
be limiting. (academic)
limit would But Italian is not an international language of scholarly discourse, and to have published in that language would possibly Italians?
have have limited our readership and prevented us from sparking interest in processes that reached across national
boundaries. (academic)
limit To do otherwise would risk idea monopolization and severely limit the number of concepts that could be coordination
expressed without infringement. (academic)
limit may Assiduously to reach for the formal boundaries of a piece in one's listening may limit one's pleasure. (newsmerge)
limit To do otherwise limits future applications. (academic)
limit will To remain a tyre seller as opposed to being a "tyre service'' provider will limit his options - collaboration is a
platform for innovation. (newspapers)
limit may To fail to make a distinction between a disability and its handicapping effects at different times and in different
situations may limit expectations. (CRS 397)
look So to obtain 5% on a domestic corporate bond without taking any currency risk looks attractive. (newsmerge)
58
look To be hopelessly in love with two such reprobates looks like masochism. (newsmerge)
look To revive another so soon afterwards looks like foolishness. (newspapers)
look would To do otherwise would look churlish. (britnews)
look To pitch this young company into a battle of the pomegranates against the vastly bigger and more experienced subject?
POM Wonderful looks to be a pretty one-sided contest. (newspapers)
look To lose two looks like carelessness - or excessive autocracy. (newsmerge)
look To not notice a 12-year affair looks like you need eye surgery. (britnews)
look can Also, I've got used to the level of misinformation that surrounds the subject, and to correct misapprehensions by
trotting out mortality rates - half the men who get prostate cancer die from it - can look rather bad form.
(newspapers)
look To make up a deficit of 10 points is hard, but to close the 37-point chasm that separated them from Chelsea looks
insurmountable at the moment. (newspapers)
look Mr Clinton behaved badly, but to suggest that his conduct approached the level of"treason, bribery, or other high
Appendix 14
crimes and misdemeanours"laid out in the Constitution as grounds for impeachment now looks ridiculous.
(newspapers)
look To go out of one cup could be considered unfortunate; to go out of two in four days looks like carelessness.
(newspapers)
look would not But to lose his most-read columnist in a petty dispute over Scrooge-ian scrimping would not look very impressive.
(newsmerge)
look would To duplicate his schedule would look too suspicious. (fiction)
look To not notice your man is having a two-year affair looks like carelessness. (britnews)
look To do so twice looks like relegation. (newsmerge)
lose could To shake him from his thoughts could be deadly or at least lose your house a hundred points, that is, if you were coordination
in Gryffindor. (fiction)
lose To speak with the player without being sure that Arsenal and Barcelona agree something loses you time.
(britnews)
lose would To stage a royal celebration every year would cheapen the currency and lose its lustre. (britnews) coordination
lose In the age of Aids, to be young, free and single suddenly lost its charm. (newsmerge)
lose would It has always distanced itself equally from the Tories and Labour: to appear close to Labour would lose votes in
much of the south, and to appear close to the Tories would lose votes in the inner cities. (newsmerge)
lose may Many have been taught that in a relationship they have no right to make demands on a partner; to say clearly
what they want may lose his affection. (G0T 7)
lose might not To entice him in order to catch him in the act might not lose jury sympathy; to entice him in order to kill him
probably would. (academic)
lose To point out that this is now nothing to do with ministers loses the advantage. (newspapers)
maintain will To achieve this through the sale of the painting will maintain the rest of the art collection and much more.
(newspapers)
make would But to say this would make them sound like old-time long-haired socialists, thus defacing their self-image of
respectability. (academic)
make not To spend all this money on visitors who will never come again does not make much sense. (newspapers)
make Portugal proved in this tournament that we were a big team and to lose in the final makes the people very sad.
(newspapers)
make will To go to France (for the return leg) is hard at any time, but to have to go there to win will make it very tough.
(britnews)
59
make would To repeat Liverpool's feats of last season would make us very happy. (newspapers)
make To do so in the fiercely competitive drinks industry makes his achievement even more remarkable. (britnews)
make To win high-profile races makes such a difference to a small stable. (newsmerge)
make "To play like this in a major final and against someone of John's calibre makes victory so satisfying but I won't be
sitting back, there is always something to work on." (newspapers)
make might You might argue that the average gardener uses borders as a supply for the house anyway, but very often a border make sth do/be sth.
is a delicately balanced arrangement and to plunder it of its best flowers might make the house look better, but it
will make the garden look much worse. (newsmerge)
make would His Lordship there held that the receiver had no valid alternative, since to do otherwise would make the company,
which remained a taxable person and whose agent he was, liable for a criminal offence. (newsmerge)
make would To set him loose on the world would only make matters worse. (fiction)
make will To beat Germany 5-1 in their own backyard will make other countries sit up and take notice. (newspapers)
make To see and hear her cry made his heart sink. (fiction)
Appendix 14
make To come on and then score such a vital goal against Chelsea in the Champions League made all the pain
worthwhile. (newspapers)
make To look at her made Don want to go back to bed. (A0R 752)
make To combine forces made supreme sense to him, and the more absurd the reality seemed, the more deeply he
desired it. (CBN 1496)
make To be able to fly one around in a circuit made you one of the top flyers in the world. (CAY 893)
mark would To totter about the London Tates with a urinal on his back would now immediately mark a man as an old master,
and were he to put anything at all in a glass case, with or without formaldehyde, it would distinguish him as a
new one. (britnews)
mark To win a first-class degree marks her out as something very special. (britnews) mark out
mark Eighteen wins from 18 completed starts is an astounding record at any level, but to compile such a record against mark out
the very best around marks him out as one of the great twomile chasers of all time. (newspapers)
mark would To have taken the portrait down would have marked her flight, distinguishing its importance beyond the
have dignified acceptance of the Family. (H7H 1318)
mark "To distrust the judiciary," said Honore de Balzac, "marks the beginning of the end of society." (newspapers) non-native
mark would To destroy the boundary between healing and killing would mark a radical departure from longstanding legal and
medical traditions of our country, posing a threat of unforeseeable magnitude to vulnerable members of our
society. (academic)
mark will To do so will mark a break with tradition. (newsmerge)
mark might To protest about the global bedlam might mark you as a killjoy or worse, an ageist, and that would never do.
(newsmerge)
mean could have To talk openly could have meant death. (newspapers)
mean To be British meant that independent judges punished you, not politicians. (newspapers)
mean To garner 12 tricks meant much hard work. (newspapers)
mean would To bid would not only mean that you didn't know the Goldsmiths (you would have been asked as a guests
anyway if you did) but also that you were a cheapskate because these lots always fetch a tiny amount of their
market value. (newspapers)
mean would To remove the bunting under health and safety legislation would mean closing the road and using a platform.
(newspapers)
mean To slot into a top school means that the boys are expected to have full command of their faculties by the age of six,
so poor handwriting, reading skills or concentration basically knock them out of the running. (newspapers)
60
mean can The field has indeed grown so rapidly that to be a Professor of Rhetoric once again can mean a lot more than
director of Freshman Writing Programs. (academic)
mean To say nothing means to give one's consent. (fiction)
mean To obtain much higher densities generally means storing a fuel and supporting a chemical reaction to generate
energy. (academic)
meet To get out of the military training then given at boarding schools needed iron determination and met pressure coordination
from schoolmasters and unpopularity among boys. (A68 277)
move To talk openly of Zeena's attitude toward Mattie has suddenly moved Ethan and Mattie's relationship to a new
stage. (academic)
move IGNORED To speak to him is moving, inspiring and humbling. (newspapers) verb or adjective?
move IGNORED It is a record which suggests the Claret Jug should have been in his possession more often but he dodges that line move or copula sentence?
of inquiry by declaring that to dwell on his cluster of near misses would be moving into the taboo subject of
"negatives''. (newspapers)
Appendix 14
move IGNORED "The carnival started in the community, bringing a bit of celebration into peoples' lives, and to put it somewhere move or copula sentence?
else is moving too much towards the commercial aspect." (newspapers)
need would Sure, he could make small changes, year-on-year, but to thoroughly overhaul Hogwarts would need a new
Headmaster who didn't have an emotional investment in the existing traditions. (fiction)
need would To get to 50 per cent over the country as a whole would need a fantastic fertility rate. (newspapers)
need would We might be able to please the people of Nottingham, but to raise the perception of the English game would need
England winning, or at least doing very, very well, at the European championship. (newsmerge)
need would But to put, say, Network South-East into profit would need fare rises of 25-30%, and Mr Rifkind cannot risk
sanctioning such a vote-loser - let alone the road-pricing policy that would be needed to prevent higher rail fares
pushing train-commuters back to their motor cars. (newsmerge)
need will To put these failings right will need both carrots and sticks. (newsmerge)
need To do it successfully often needs years of observation and careful consideration. (academic)
need not To get back into, say, a favourite pair of jeans doesn't need a major exercise in deprivation - it needs an action plan.
(newspapers)
need will To set up a wireless network will need wireless network adapter cards for each computer. (newspapers)
need To impose sanctions under the authority of the United Nations needs the co-operation of Japan, a country always
slow to take clear-cut international action and now with an unusually weak government. (newsmerge)
need IGNORED To restore conditions of normality step by step need not be a process of appeasement. (newsmerge) need as modal verb?
need To do so needs another 35 staff at a cost of pounds 1.5m - or pounds 42,000 each - but don't expect wholesale
changes in a hurry. (newspapers)
need To hold these things in balance in performance needs a tactful and sensitive hand. (newspapers)
occur can It would make no sense for a landlord to raise rents to force tenants out when to change the use of an industrial
site can only occur with planning permission. (newspapers)
occur not He liked music, and I think handed on a good ear to many of his children, but to teach us our notes, organise coordination without to
piano lessons, or even sing along with us occasionally did not occur to him. (newsmerge)
occur would not To compete to 5S would not occur to everyone, but the contract has excellent prospects given that North is liable to context checked
be short in hearts. (newspapers)
occur would (no But to complain that its effect was therefore paralysingly glum would no more have occurred to her as fair than to
more) complain that it made her feel fat. (FSP 773)
offend would It seems that the law's answer is that notwithstanding the general rule about the jus tertii P's claim may be barred
by public policy if to assist in recovery of the property would offend the court's conscience. (FSS 841)
61
offend would And to leave before both cups had been drained would only offend her. (CJF 2416)
offend will A Church of England spokesman said: ''To ascribe these failings to God will upset and offend people.'' coordinated verbs
(newsmerge)
offend To imagine itself as belonging to the end game as a new kind of comprehensive metanarrative offends us by the correct?
sheer banality of this game and this assertion in the last two centuries. (academic)
offend would Pakistan's supreme court has ruled that male doctors may not perform autopsies on female corpses, claiming that
to do so would offend Islamic respect for the dead. (newsmerge)
offend To place these values and practices off-limits for public discussion offends against this country's traditions of free
speech and rational inquiry. (newspapers)
offend To borrow an American baseball term offends his regard for cricket's traditions. (newsmerge)
offend would For a gorilla to tell a story about ancestors takes as long as it took for those ancestors to come into existence; to
leave anything out would offend the story. (academic)
offend would To follow the Brussels line would seriously offend Mr Bush and his aides and could sour Mr Blair's visit early next
Appendix 14
month to the President's Texas ranch. (newspapers)

offend would "To do otherwise", he said, "would not only offend the rule of law and violate this country's constitutional
tradition, but would also be a betrayal of this nation's commitment to the separation of powers." (newspapers)
offer not They are a workmanlike side at the best of times and to be done over by a team of grinding efficiency does not
offer much comfort. (newsmerge)
offer Moreover, as interpreters of animal behaviour we have our own convenience to consider; to dissolve species (and
human societies too, as in classical economics) into uniformly egoistic atoms offers much the best prospect of
finding simple laws to apply to them. (CB1 517)
offer To enter the world of contemporary drama too often offers a sharply contrasting experience, however: grimy
characters huddled over a stove, making terse observations over how long it is taking for the kettle to boil.
(britnews)
offer You need to erase the inner thought that you kick, unless to pass offers an instant advantage.' (newsmerge)
offer would To alter that story would offer a discrepancy to the bureaucratic mind, making him a liar in the past and a suspect
now. (EDA 1550)
offer To achieve crosswind landing exactly on the spot without using the engine and in a strange machine offers a
strong challenge even to the most experienced pilot. (A0H 1636)
owe To talk of policy in matters of care except in the context of available resources and timescales for action owes more
to theology than to the purposeful delivery of a caring service. (G20 958)
pass not To suggest that such an exchange signalled a momentous shift in American policy simply doesn't pass the laugh
test. (newspapers)
pass would His clasp on his arm was barely a fingertip brush, as though to touch a werewolf any way other than peripherally
would pass the dread infection on to him. (fiction)
pass To represent Althusser's work purely as a ‘structural Marxism’ therefore passes over the fact that there were
distinct intellectual traditions in France whose difference was particularly pronounced in their respective
philosophies of history. (CTY 767)
pay not So to say they are a bad team does not pay them the respect they deserve. (newspapers)
pay To suggest that the board was cowering timorously before the Government is ludicrous and pays no tribute or coordination with copula
attention to its good work and to the robust way in which it represents its interests and those of the industry.
(HHX 1775)
pay The fatal contradiction at the heart of southern immigration efforts was the employers' "cry ... on the one hand, for dubious
only the highest type of immigrant, and on the other, to secure him at the scale of wages paid the Negro."
62
(academic)
place would For to remain as a directly managed unit would place a question mark on it's future. (J9G 214)
place To talk instead about our responsibility towards sentient creatures places the moral imperative where it belongs,
namely in ourselves, and also allows scope for negotiating some reasonable balance of responsibilities between
one group and another. (newsmerge)
place would It is contrary to the public interest because to admit such actions would place an undesirable fetter on freedom of
the press. (newsmerge)
place would If however, to do so would place the lives of British servicemen and women at risk, we shall not do so until after it
has taken place. (newspapers)
place Because the "problem is legal rather than conceptual," he concedes that current state "laws can, with effort and
strain, be construed as prohibiting more than just partial-birth abortions; and to prohibit too many abortions
places an 'undue burden' on the supposed right to an abortion, which is the test the Supreme Court established in
its 1992 decision in Casey v. Planned Parenthood." (academic)
Appendix 14
place could The spokesman added that, while it was able to release the total number "known to be'' on the sex offenders'
register, the ministry was not prepared to discuss individual cases "as to do so could place those individuals at
risk''. (newspapers)
place might However, he thought that to attempt to do so at low level might place the aircraft in a more hazardous situation.
(newspapers)
place would After careful review, it is my opinion that the defendant, by virtue of what I can only call his "Chrisness," has a
vital impact upon the life of Cicely, and to summarily remove him would place an undue hardship on the town
exceeding the caliber of his own offense. (fiction)
place would Mr Peter Lloyd, the Home Office junior minister, agreed that more powers for local authority inspectors were
necessary, but to compel licensing of all breeders would place unnecessary restrictions on pet owners wanting to
sell a litter. (AAL 969)
place would To let the case fold would place the judicial system on trial, but pushing it too hard could complicate the country's
tentative moves toward national reconciliation. (newsmerge)
place To be able to speak most of the languages of Europe, as an educated woman from that center of culture could, had
placed huge demands on her time. (fiction)
place would But to do so would again place an unhealthy burden on Stan Collymore, who has proved himself singularly ill
equipped to handle responsibility since he swapped the corner shop of Nottingham Forest for the superstore of
Liverpool. (newsmerge)
place might To continue our friendship might place you in danger, as well, and I cannot have that. (fiction)
please To think that the man who now appeared to be his biological father might approve of something he could do, strange comma?
inexplicably pleased him. (fiction)
please may Mr Yeo said to Mr Brown: "To say, as you regularly do, that the situation is under control may please the Prime
Minister as he sits pondering his election timetable, but it is in stark contrast to the facts on the ground."
(newspapers)
please "Miss Kingsley, it is a pleasure to finally make your acquaintance," He paused and brushed a strand of hair from
his eyes, "to finally have a student whose skills in potions are not merely satisfactory pleases me." (fiction)
please IGNORED To come out and play as well as we did in the second half was pleasing because it looked like we were facing a adjective?
hammering. (newspapers)
please would not To prevaricate now would not please Hussain, who confirmed he will carry on as captain only if he feels he is
contributing with the bat and that the team are better with him at the helm. (newspapers)
present For PwC, to create a viable business out of what is left presents a huge challenge. (britnews) [for_NP] separated with
comma
63
present Leontes's suspicion of his wife's adultery works - but to have her coming back to life after portraying 16 years of
comedy presents a credibility challenge to both writer and director. (britnews)
present Another girl writes: To associate with a group where boys were present presented no real problem for I felt
perfectly at ease with them. (academic)
present could After a long pause, the witness said in view of the imminence of criminal proceedings against him by the Criminal
Assets Bureau, he felt that to go further in this could present difficulties for him and for the tribunal. (newsmerge)
present would He had reached a friendly arrangement with Christie's, in everyone's interest, but the court had misunderstood it,
and to chair the board from his new address would present problems of corporate governance. (newspapers)
present To suggest that costs have doubled from the bid book presents a grossly misleading picture for the public.
(newspapers)
present To multiply human cells in tissue culture on the scale necessary presented considerable difficulties, but enough
material has been made for a variety of clinical trials against many different viral diseases and certain cancers.
Appendix 14
(academic)
present will To have a mixed membership will present the MCC in a much more favourable light in the public eye, which is
important if the MCC is to maintain the respect it is accorded as custodian of the game throughout the world.
(newsmerge)
preserve might To restrict visitors might preserve the atmosphere, but it would also limit the right of access. (newsmerge)
prevent would They refused to sign the bond, arguing that to do so would prevent them from making any public protests. (AD2
313)
prevent would To deny his instincts would prevent him from winning--and possibly suriviving--future battles. (fiction)
prevent But Italian is not an international language of scholarly discourse, and to have published in that language would possibly non-natives
have limited our readership and prevented us from sparking interest in processes that reached across national
boundaries. (academic)
prevent may To jump too quickly on the problems raised early in the counselling process may even prevent the real reasons
coming to the surface. (CE1 353)
prevent It is easy to stop squabbles and arguments in the interests of peace and harmony, yet to do so often prevents us
from observing significant behaviour which can give the counsellor invaluable insight into how older people think
and feel about themselves, other people and their situation. (CE1 562)
prevent would Consequently, to delete the protocol would prevent this happening. (K5C 403)
prevent could All these writers brought dramatic evidence (some of which has since been more critically appraised (Pinneau,
1950; Ainsworth, 1963), that babies and young children need mothering — not only the mother's presence, but the
rocking, cuddling and lap play which had been so expressly forbidden — and that to deprive the baby of the
natural expression of maternal warmth could prevent normal development of social relationships and
permanently mar his personality. (EEK 510)
prevent will We are not suggesting that to adopt all the practices evident among Bangladeshis in Cardiff, or Hong Kong
residents, will prevent sudden infant deaths. (CNA 484)
prevent To attempt to divide ancient language into political and theological components prevents us from adequately
understanding the ancient world. (academic)
prevent will In practice to have vague objectives will prevent one from doing much and yet not generate positive action. (H0E
1083)
promise To gorge on the uncooked cake mixture promises nausea, but worse, the unwelcome jolt of a concealed nut.
(newspapers)
promise To dream of zinc ore promises the approach of eventful success. (academic) correct?
64
protect not Freedom, tolerance, moderation are all good values in our culture (though not in our culture alone), but to identify coordination
them does not in itself explain them, protect them or advance them. (newspapers)
protect The loosened soil makes room for the seed, which thus can grow in abundance, while to cover the sowing with
scattered earth or to press it into the ground protects it from the ravages of birds or insects. (academic)
prove To produce a man-of-the-match performance in a cauldron of antagonism only proved he is still one of the world's
bravest and most effective midfield players. (newspapers)
prove To make his way from death's door to the finishing line of the London Marathon proves he has a heart as big as a
boxing ring. (newspapers)
prove not To assert that all normal human behaviour is culturally moulded does not necessarily prove that it is also
culturally determined. (CJ1 232)
prove would To do so would incur the wrath of existing employers and prove detrimental to a new career. (newsmerge)
prove could Not to do so could prove even more painful. (britnews)
prove might He agrees that as most people live in older buildings and rooms in London, they probably blank out thoughts
Appendix 14
about all the human activity which must have gone on in these spaces in the past; to dwell on it might prove too
disturbing. (newsmerge)
prove To get past 100 policemen dressed in that bizarre way just proves how lax security was and Aaron Barschak
highlighted this. (newspapers)
push It was enough hearing this implication from Severus, but to hear it from James as well pushed me right over the
edge. (fiction)
push might All the while, the Financial Services Agency, a regulator, has remained strangely silent, probably fearing that to
delve too deeply into the problems might push the politically sensitive bank over the brink. (newspapers)
push would Anyway, to be first minister in Northern Ireland would push the comparisons with Faulkner - and his political
demise was swift. (newsmerge)
push could But to abandon the guidelines without making sure doctors' fees are clear from the outset could push prices up
further ... competition on pricing will only work to the policyholders' benefit if they can shop around on fees.
(newsmerge)
push must To cope with that AND the accusations against them must push them to breaking point. (newspapers)
push Manufacturers argue that to use naturally reared meat pushes up prices, but do not weep too much over this sad
tale. (newspapers)
push will To make local government workers work longer for a smaller payout will push them into an early grave.
(britnews)
put could To do so could put a child off reading for life. (FSW 711) put N off N
put would My view that big (anything more than Pounds 2billion) tax increases are unnecessary is partly based on the fact
that big rises are already in place, and that to add to them would put at risk what continues to be a fragile
recovery. (newsmerge)
put would I balked at giving it to you then - I felt that to do so would put you in danger, and it would be making promises I
didn't know if I would be able to keep. (fiction)
put would To have carried out an exercise under realistic conditions would have put the participants at risk of their lives, he
have explained. (newsmerge)
put To go outside the NHS for primary care (which is to say, general practice) puts you beyond the ideological pale.
(newspapers)
put To be in someone's living room twice a week for six months put me in a different league. (newspapers)
put To do so puts its position at risk. (academic)
put Then, to get selected for the Lions Test side put the cap on an amazing year. (newsmerge)
65
raise But to fully achieve this potential for client server into the future across the enterprise raises for us some really
quite difficult new challenges and demands for the software environment. (HEP 215)
raise To be out for the third time in 13 days against opposition like Dublin obviously raises questions. (newspapers)
raise not To receive the offer from Churchill did not raise it in Ramsey's estimation. (A68 1848)
raise would To say anything would raise suspicion and there is no need for that. (fiction)
raise Yet to forbid discrimination on those grounds raises any number of problems, both moral and practical, quite
apart from straightforwardly violating rights of sovereignty and association. (academic)
raise While the evidence for surface erosion by water at some past period is undeniable, to postulate that the water then
went underground raises more questions than it answers. (newspapers)
raise may Moreover, to consider the complex combinations of emotional, cognitive and physical factors which form different
experiences of anxiety may also raise a range of analytical issues which are indispensable for investigating the
prevalence and character of anxiety in contemporary societies. (academic)
reduce However, it is generally acknowledged that to reduce the consumption of fat in our daily diet will almost certainly reduce in [to_INF] and in
Appendix 14
reduce the risk of heart disease along with other medical conditions. (BN5 123) matrix clause
reduce may To use the term more widely may reduce the likelihood that the pupil will be encouraged to use any vision,
however slight it may be. (CJG 526)
reduce would To do so would reduce them to little more than brood mares, but the argument is that they have not earned
respect in the way that someone like Princess Anne has done. (newsmerge)
reduce But he also knows that to cut rates when the markets are expecting him to do so considerably reduces the risk.
(newsmerge)
reduce would The Victorian Society will argue that Sherborne has an important collection of 19th-century stained glass windows,
and to remove any one would reduce the significance of those remaining. (newsmerge)
reduce would To lose that second sense of work's importance would reduce Shukhov to the level of Fetiukov, who works only as
much as he must and maintains no dignity or self-respect. (academic)
reduce To limit Tamraz to a contribution or expenditure of $1,000 clearly reduces his ability to speak, but it does not
render him mute. (academic)
reduce will Further to distance the police service from the leadership of local government will reduce the opportunities for interessting place for
effective collaboration. (newsmerge) further
reduce would It might have been possible for Britain to enforce Anglo-American nuclear collaboration by withholding ore
have stocks, but to have done so would have reduced American production of fissile material to the Soviets' advantage.
(ABA 470)
reflect would not To do so would not have accurately reflected the horror felt by the people of Dunblane. (newsmerge)
have
reflect would Because to continue to be unpleasant about her would reflect poorly upon myself and achieve nothing. (fiction)
reflect To have an organisation called the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade is odd, and reflects American coordination with copula
unwillingness to allow the establishment of a stronger post-war institution, on a par with the International
Monetary Fund and World Bank. (newsmerge)
reflect not To suggest we have been unhelpful to Ms Palmer doesn't reflect the true facts. (newspapers)
reflect would To have snubbed the sinner would hardly have reflected the Pope's enduring message of love and forgiveness.
have (newspapers)
reflect To grumble reflects badly on your country. (newsmerge)
reflect To bounce back from the Twickenham mauling with such an emphatic victory reflects huge strength of character.
(newsmerge)
reflect This is best explained, not by suggesting that they do not have interests in common or that they are satisfied with coordination with copula
66
things as they are, but by attending to the crushing significance of those ideas in society which preach that to be
poor is an individual's own fault and reflects his or her lack of preparedness to study and train, to work hard, to
postpone having a family, or what have you. (G3L 802)
reflect would To cast aspersions on the process would reflect a lack of faith in both the independent non-executive directors and
the professionalism of the recruitment firm." (newspapers)
reflect To use a sexual relationship as the excuse for belatedly punishing those failings reflects the FA's slimy calibre.
(newspapers)
remain To take the country into not one but two recessions in which millions lost their jobs was unforgivable and remains coordination with copula
so. (newspapers)
remain To champion the sovereignty of weakness was - and remains - a profound challenge to the human agenda. coordination with copula
(newsmerge)
remind would To abandon the nominee would also reinforce Mr Clinton's image as a weak leader and remind America how he coordination
earlier jettisoned Zoe Baird, Kimba Wood and Lani Guinier the moment their nominations encountered resistance.
Appendix 14
(newsmerge)
remind would To speak of those things would remind Sirius that they did happen, and Remus senses Sirius is trying to pretend,
if not forget, just for a moment. (fiction)
remind Even to pose such questions reminds us that there was a large element of chance in the emergence of Mrs
Thatcher. (A6F 960)
remind To see it with the sunlight gleaming off its surfaces reminded me of a beautifully-cut diamond. (newspapers)
remind To see a guy like Roy Keane training alongside you reminds you of where you are. (newspapers)
remind would To stretch it any further would remind us that the suffering of the German people, however intense, was not
comparable to the slaughter committed in their name. (newspapers)
remind could To bury the bones could remind people that Boris Yeltsin, standing for re-election this year, was the impious
Communist boss who oversaw the bulldozing of the Ipatiev House in 1977. (newsmerge)
remind To have such fascination in a bike is lovely and reminds me of being a child, when things are just simple, before coordination with copula
the baffling, confusing flood of adulthood. (newspapers)
remind What I have attempted to argue in this chapter is that to consider our own experience against an international
background reminds us of three linked points: (B28 190)
remove To abolish all grammar schools removes an option for the children who are more academically inclined at these
ages, thereby making a blanket 'selection' for everyone. (newsmerge)
remove To use a strike indicator, which is simply pulled under the surface, removes the element of skill from the whole
process. (newsmerge)
remove would To embark on another reform of CAP would handicap the EU in these negotiations and remove the motive for coordination
other big food producers to move towards reform of their agricultural sectors. (britnews)
remove would Sir William, who was expressing a personal view because of internal differences over the reorganisation, said that
to split the NCC into three would remove a strategic overview in formulating national policies. (A8K 675)
remove would To sit back and do nothing would be irresponsible, damaging to the environment and would also remove the right coordination with copula
of children to live in the area in which they grow up. (newspapers)
represent To have a guide for four people at L32 represents value for money. (newspapers)
represent would But there really is no choice, because to stop until we can declare a 'victory' would represent an intolerable
humiliation for the West. (britnews)
represent "To change the make-up of an authority and to reduce its size in the way proposed represents an unacceptable [to_INF] conjoint
shift of power towards the centre," he said. (newsmerge)
represent would Stewart's credentials escaped the Surrey committee for years, and to reappoint Gatting would represent an
67
alarming descent into the moral mire after his alleged flirtations with the barmaid and the fine gold of South
Africa. (newsmerge)
represent To speak of them in those terms that he did represents a scurrilous attack on their dedication and professionalism
and I condemn it utterly. (newspapers)
represent "To be bedridden for three months represents a serious limitation," a spokesman for the European Space Agency
said yesterday. (newspapers)
represent would To so do would represent a gamble, but if it would give Everton a second tactical option then he should push
ahead. (newsmerge)
represent SIR - To read Les Sharp (letter, July 27) complaining of the age of Central Office staff with no experience in
anything practical represents ageism at its worst. (newspapers)
represent But to blame others consistently for personal failure represents a failure to take responsibility, to have sufficient
self-insight, to have realistic expectations. (newspapers)
require It follows, therefore, that to have an in-depth grasp of an area requires knowledge about both the content of the
Appendix 14
subject and the broader structural organization of the subject. (academic)

require It faces no fundamental barriers, but to do it well requires a skilled and motivated team. (academic)
require would To do any more would require mobilisation of reserves - a sure vote-loser for the prime minister, Ariel Sharon,
with the general election three weeks away. (newspapers)
require "We believe that to meet the needs of the disadvantaged requires the involvement of large (pharmaceuticals
companies) approved by their equity investors and backed by debt investors in capital markets," SecurePharma's
Mr Brown said. (britnews)
require would To counter the Tories' election-spiking inheritance tax master-stroke would require something more dramatic than
this cash-strapped government can stretch to. (newspapers)
require To make all this happen requires single-minded commitment. (newsmerge)
require would To send a complete instruction set on how to remove Jim Kirk and rebuild him on an alien moon would require
knowledge of details (the "quantum state" specified by the wave fuction) of all of his atoms. (newspapers)
require To acquire match-fitness now requires more than completing a few laps and a few push-ups, but Gascoigne
refused to see it. (newsmerge)
result might 5) may well lead them to conclude that to have Mass in Latin might result in an increase in church attendance.
(newspapers)
result To create in bad faith inevitably resulted in inconsistent pictures which failed to grip broad audiences. (academic) complete?
result could To opt for some sort of garden could result in the loss to the diocese of London not just of the income from an
appeal but of the regular endowment of at least Pounds 20,000 per year. (newsmerge)
result would The well-spoken mouthpieces of the regime would almost certainly defect if to do so would not automatically
result in the annihilation of their families. (newspapers)
result can To maintain that the Ultimate can be fully expressed in finite particulars can only result in what Tillich calls the
demonization of the Holy. (C9B 74)
result would To pay more would result in a loss. (academic)
result would Surgical removal of a single metastasis such as this from the liver can improve survival, though to attempt such an
have operation in this case would almost inevitably have resulted in a catastrophic haemorrhage because of the
tumour's proximity to a major vein. (newsmerge)
result could To be able to move to a small terraced house in a more desirable area could result in winning a job when the
opportunity arose. (FAF 1356)
reveal would They give Lewis the chance to admit he has taken the wrong file, but to do so would reveal his first mistake, so off
they go, chasing each other around the place. (newspapers)
68
reveal But Rabelais, for all his humanism, populism, Platonism, evangelism, and any number of other things, did not
argue for one or several of these at the expense of the others; to rank their importance merely reveals how the
insights of philosophical critics entail blindnesses to which they cling as tenaciously as historians cling to their
"facts." (academic)
reveal To question that conclusion only reveals one's ignorance of the code. (newspapers)
reveal To ignore the Gaelic language in this way reveals a certain mindset at the heart of Government. (newspapers)
reveal can To examine an individual's thinking within the context of literate action can reveal the underlying logic of literate
performance. (academic)
reveal Why does no one tell important people that to nominate My Way reveals a sadly flawed character? (newspapers)
reveal Yet for this Government - which incessantly trumpets its commitment to a multi-cultural, multi-ethnic, multi-faith
society - to ignore such an impressively diverse coalition reveals the hollowness and hypocrisy of that
commitment. (newspapers)
reveal Indeed, there are those who would say that to read anything sinister into these attractive pictures of a beautiful
Appendix 14
young woman reveals more about that viewer than it does about the picture. (newsmerge)
reveal would Sir Vernon Kell, the head of the security service, persuaded Sir Arthur Bodkin, the Director of Public Prosecutions,
not to prosecute Sempill because to do so would reveal that MI5 was intercepting diplomatic mail to and from the
Japanese embassy. (newspapers)
reveal But to use the Dirty Little Man as its instrument of persuasion reveals a fundamental contempt for the electorate
which should on its own be enough to disqualify those responsible from ever holding public office again.
(newsmerge)
reveal can Hence, to examine the disposition of styles which are described in terms of cultural difference can reveal the
structural relations between those groups in society. (academic)
rob might But to nail down the detail might rob potential audiences of their one solid chance of laughter. (newsmerge)
rob would To hold otherwise would rob both provocation and revenge of their respective meanings. (newsmerge)
rob would In this context, not to interpret the right to earn a living as a positive right would rob it of meaning for millions of
Americans. (academic)
satisfy We may be fulfilled at various levels, but to do a useful job of work satisfies a very basic necessity. (newsmerge)
satisfy will To reassure him that while mother is bearing and rearing babies father must be providing for the family will complex structure
satisfy the child and will not be a dishonest answer. (academic)
satisfy would not To learn of such leisurely legislative habits is a relief in this age of manic activity, but would not have satisfied coordination
have those Conservatives who earlier complained about aircraft noise. (newspapers)
satisfy To see sincerity and charity satisfied him like a meal. (academic)
satisfy To see a beautiful ocean and enjoy the rays and warmth of summer months satisfies our discontented moans.
(newsmerge)
save will To have a whole semi-detached house double-glazed by a professional firm will cost Pounds 2, 150 but will save coordination
just Pounds 30 a year. (newsmerge)
save They still have to deal with two regulators, but to issue just one document does save them time and expense.
(britnews)
save might To see himself truthfully reflected in just one pair of eyes a day might save him. (academic) dubious
save would To run up to the billiard-room, as he was passing, would save time. (fiction)
save To turn it around and make three birdies in a row saves the day. (newspapers)
save would To be able to type in your destination and dates of travel and then receive a list of available flights and fares would
save a lot of shopping around. (newsmerge)
save would Paul Tully, the general secretary of the Society for the Protection of the Unborn Child, said that to reduce the 24-
69
week limit to 22 would save hardly any lives. (newspapers)

save would not To have identified him as the killer earlier would not have saved the lives of the Soham schoolgirls. (newspapers)
have
say I'm embarrassed for Barnard, for two years in a row his team have been in last place, there's been no improvement
and to get rid of a guy who was playing well says it all. (newspapers)
say To get over that when they came back to 3-3 says something about us. (britnews)
say To go to a tough place like Neilston and win despite playing with 10 men for 85 minutes says a lot for them.
(newspapers)
say not To allege that a distinction between rulers and ruled always exists in large and complex societies does not really
say very much beyond the fact (which is not disputed, except by certain anarchists) that such societies cannot be
run by everyone simultaneously. (CS3 130)
say Darren is one of my good friends and to see him actually get picked to play says a lot about what Woosie thinks of
Darren as a player. (newspapers)
Appendix 14
say To quote statistics demonstrating that, during the current crisis, BBC News has greater mass appeal than its rivals complicated structure
says nothing in support of its quality, but may suggest that it actually lacks it. (newspapers)
say But to confuse a vigorous press with a press that is calling the shots says more about the weakness of the
government than the strength of the newspapers. (newsmerge)
say To go to the extent of having Henrik tattooed on your back says what exactly? (newspapers)
say It's been hectic since the OVD Cup final with all the hype and to win three semis and two finals says a lot for the
boys. (newspapers)
say It doesn't matter how young he is, to have already won a Champions League winner's medal says it all.
(newspapers)
say To take four off a Premier League side away from home says a lot. (newspapers)
say To make the commitment he has to the team with the distances involved in travelling says a lot and his motivation
drove us on last Sunday. (newspapers)
say To be beaten by four tries to one and lose by just nine points says a lot about the sort of side they are. [to_INF] conjoint without
(newspapers) second to
say To come in and play centre in that kind of game says wonders for the guy. (newspapers)
sell would not After all, to write a book today without talking about England would not sell very many copies! (newspapers) dubious
send A carpeting by the Chief Constable would have been over the top in this case, but to treat a police officer in this send out
manner sends out a clear message to all. (newsmerge)
send In the nursery you always have a tablecloth and to break the pattern sent him into a frenzy. (newspapers)
send To see her cooing over their godson sent Ron into his most treasured vision. (fiction)
send would In the core business of lending to corporations, the market is still topsy-turvy: the weakest credits pay a lower rate
of interest than stronger ones, partly because the maturity of such loans is shorter, but largely because to demand
more would send many weak companies to the wall. (newsmerge)
send To treat them in the community sends a message that what they have done is not very serious. (britnews)
send would British officials gave a cautious welcome to the Chinese move but warned that to make explicit the possibility that
''peaceful explosions'' could be allowed in future would send the wrong signal. (newsmerge)
send would We have no alternative but to finish the job because not to do so would send the wrong message to like minded
nations and the world would be a more dangerous place as a result. (newsmerge)
send To suggest that their crime was not a grave one sends an alarmingly wrong message. (newsmerge)
send would "To open the door to the possibility of a lax attitude towards the drugs menace in our society would send the
wrong signals to young people," he wrote. (newsmerge)
70
send would To have lifted Zimbabwe's suspension would have sent a signal that the Commonwealth was not serious.
have (newspapers)
serve To confine the Test-match audience in this way serves only to marginalise cricket further, especially among the
young. (newspapers)
serve might To know that they were witness to 40 per cent of the finest strikes in Premiership history might serve as small
comfort to the remaining half-dozen Wimbledon fans as they prepare to welcome Second Division football to
Milton Keynes. (newspapers)
serve To see them annihilate all-comers in the Scottish League only serves to confirm our prejudices about the infirmity
of their national football. (CEP 1972)
serve will To only play an hour-and-a-half instead of four will serve me well. (newspapers)
serve To present it in this way serves to perpetuate a false and unhelpful dichotomy that denies the evidence, suggesting
that inadequate benefit levels could undermine your Government's own priorities of education and paid
employment as the mechanisms for tackling social exclusion. (newsmerge)
Appendix 14
serve To postulate a hypostatic union at the outset serves to underline the temporal dimensions of any inquiry into the
question of Coleridge's apostasy. (academic)
serve But to spend any time in the city is a bonus and serves to give a fascinating insight into the sheer magnitude of the coordination with copula
place. (fiction)
serve could To go further and demand complete standardisation of assumptions could serve to disguise rather than reveal the
differing nature of those obligations. (britnews)
set would Yet both men know that to bring the Olympic Games back to London after 64 years would set the seal on this
Government and fire the imagination of the whole country. (britnews)
set To fail once is forgivable, but to fail twice sets the minds a-thinking and the tongues a-wagging. (newspapers)
set would To use the Parliament Act to overrule the House of Lords would be unwise and would set a dangerous political coordination with copula
precedent. (newspapers)
set To buy their endeavours so far (volumes seven and eight of the whole enterprise) has set me back the equivalent set back
of a meal for four in an averagely smart London restaurant - about pounds 130. (newspapers)
set would To reveal who he really was would even at this date set the country ablaze. (newsmerge)
set would The hard-up Second Division club had wanted to switch the game to Anfield but were refused permission by the
Football Association, which said that to do so would set an unwanted and unnecessary precedent. (newsmerge)
set would Yet to assume that a formal system or notation already is a theory or an explanation would set linguistics outside
mainstream science, where theories must be testable (cf. 2.82; 7.86; 912; 11.6, 75, 99, 101f; 13.14, 19, 49, 57, 61).
(academic)
set would The Bord Pleanala inspector added: `Ì would comment that to permit the irreversible loss of irreplaceable
architectural heritage would set an undesirable precedent for similar schemes in the future. (newsmerge)
set To go from initial concept sketches to the wastepaper bin in such a short period has set a new benchmark for our
less efficient competitors. (newspapers)
set will To have your portrait painted by him will set you back somewhere upwards of Pounds 10,000; according to one set back
critic, for the same money you could have your portrait painted by a prize-winning artist of "three times Mee's
calibre". (newsmerge)
set would To run the Silverstone race without any points available would create a spectacle but would be degrading and double coordination
would set an unwanted modern precedent, even if it ensured that all involved were still able to generate capital
and provide the feed for the television paymasters. (newspapers)
set To see a functioning family sets a good example and the kids are a reminder of Jesus's words that you must
become like the little children to enter the Kingdom of God. (newspapers)
71
set would And for McLeish, of course, it's about destiny - because to lose the tie would surely set him on the road to losing [for_NP] separated with
his job. (newspapers) comma
settle To score settled me right down and I've been waiting for that moment since I came here. (newspapers) settle down
settle To go straight down the other end to score settled us down. (newspapers) settle down
settle But to get a goal right on half-time obviously settled our nerves and I think the second-half was fairly comfortable.
(newspapers)
shock He said: "They are my fave band and to hear they've been stringing us along for so long has shocked me to the
core." (britnews)
shock will To suggest that 40 per cent of the 'generic carers' responsible for hands-on patient care will be support workers
will shock patients and nurses. (newsmerge)
show To own a toy dog shows a gregarious nature; the owners like to mediate between friends. (newsmerge)
show Don't you see that to look at things the way you're doing shows you're not very well? (newspapers)
show Beijing is always the big picture -- the maximum haul of medals there is our ultimate aim -- but to see so many
Appendix 14
youngsters come and do well shows we are well down that path. (newspapers)
show To complain about a lack of debate when the Government implements a directive into UK law shows a lack of
understanding as to how the directives operate. (newsmerge)
show He said: "To go through what she has gone through just shows the resilience of a child." (britnews)
show Annie and James Millton founded their vineyard and winery at Gisborne on the north island in 1984, and to have
come so far so fast shows what a first-class wine-making country this is. (newsmerge)
show To beat the Vauxhall Corsa to this award shows just how big an impact the 500 has made on the European car
market. (newspapers)
show To treat them with disrespect or as a disposable piece of garden design shows a complete lack of sense of what
that design is all about. (newsmerge)
show To say that Josephine Butler and Millicent Fawcett were ‘diametrically opposed’ on this issue shows a worrying
ignorance of 19th-century British history. (AHG 87)
show To brush aside these events as though they were a minor administrative hiccup shows contempt for the electorate.
(newspapers)
show would To call it Hear-Say (hyphenated) would show embarrassing ignorance of popular culture. (newspapers)
show To win in such a fast time against a good field shows that I'm on the right track. (newspapers)
show To come down to a club of this stature and score at key times after withstanding a barrage shows our quality - but
I felt we could have done better. (newspapers)
signal would However, those closer to Mr Noonan, insist that to support the legislation without extracting concessions from the
Government would signal political weakness. (newsmerge)
signal might To put a Japanese executive into Mr Ghosn's chief-executive shoes immediately might have signalled a return to
have the old days of consensual dithering and blind respect for seniority. (newspapers)
signal would We could also do with acknowledgement that Sir Clive Woodward is in someone's frame at the RFU, because he is
and because to say so would signal intent. (newspapers)
signal To cut interest rates by a full point after the pound had fallen ten pfennigs in a week on the foreign exchanges
signalled that the government was no longer going to allow its interest-rate decisions to be governed by the
behaviour of foreign exchange markets. (newsmerge)
signal would Drastically to reduce its status would signal that Britain has lost its pride, belief in its future and is in irreversible
economic decline. (newsmerge)
signal would They cannot leave them alone - to do so would signal that violent men can commit crimes with impunity so long
as they make sufficiently violent threats. (newsmerge)
72
smell would It was better to walk all the way and be one's own Prometheus: to stop strangers and ask them for a light would be
embarrassing and smell of real vagrancy. (academic)
smell And to feel that it is acceptable to replace it with your own culture smells to me of cultural imperialism.
(newsmerge)
smell would The Bank cannot pull the issue, as to do so would smell of panic. (newsmerge)
sound To start paying sounds like a big step backwards. (newsmerge)
sound But to be able to pop a pill that prevents our bodies getting overweight in the first place sounds like nothing short
of a miracle. (newspapers)
sound not To get to 37.5% or a bit more doesn't sound impossible. (newspapers)
sound But to describe their state as one of missing their mothers sounds suspiciously like hyperbole designed to wring
illicit sympathy from the reader. (CM8 1408)
sound not To sue our own league doesn't sound right but whether to sue for damages is under consideration by half-a-
dozen clubs. (newspapers)
Appendix 14
sound But to suggest - as Lord Turner's report will do when it is formally published on Wednesday - that this could
partly be paid for by raising the retirement age to 67 sounded to Mr Brown like political suicide. (newspapers)
sound To win an Olympic 10,000m and the marathon sounds like an unattainable human feat in this modern era, when
both events are so competitive. (newspapers)
sound To just automatically switch from one day to the next to an inclusive community sounds great. (academic)
sound "To say that he (Mr Galloway) had never met with any intelligence agents sounds like balderdash to me," said Mr
White. (newspapers)
sound will To write this in the middle of a Test match will sound like heresy, but the numbers aren't wrong. (newspapers)
sound might To say that the destitute, the homeless, the totally fucked, are the most generous and honest people he's ever
known might sound like sentimental slop, but it is plain fact. (newsmerge)
spell To ignore culture in the 21st century spells electoral suicide. (newspapers)
spell would He had been moaning like a busted toilet for a chance, and to run away at the first opportunity of some field action
have would have spelled the end of his marriage. (fiction)
spell will Yet we imagine that to step outside armed with anything less than a troika and a balalaika will spell instant death.
(newspapers)
spell They know that they can't save their parents because the Ministry has announced that anyone with the Dark Mark
will be executed, no matter what, and to even try spells certain death. (fiction)
spell would To attempt to feed hens under any of the popular systems in such a henhouse would spell ruin for the
poultryman. (academic)
spell could To pick up one drink - and I was never remotely interested in just one drink, anyway: I wanted half a dozen at the
very least - could quickly spell the end of everything I have recently, and belatedly, learnt to hold most dear.
(newspapers)
spell would But at the same time, we both know that to succumb to that knowledge would only spell disaster for both of us.
(fiction)
spell will The rest of us do not know, and we live in needless fear, imagining that to offer our innermost selves to God will
spell ruin for all we think is most precious in us. (newsmerge)
spell would Bulgaria's prime minister, Sergei Stanishev, studied in Moscow; past Romanian leaders did so too, but to admit it
now would spell political doom. (newspapers)
spell would I exit the room without looking back because I know that to look back now would spell disaster. (fiction)
spell Not to wear Versace at the Oscars has spelled sartorial death in Tinseltown. (newsmerge)
stretch To represent that as not wishing for an independent inquiry stretches truth to its extreme limits. (newspapers)
73
stretch To get the goal that we did in the last minute stretched our lead a little bit - but we'll be taking it as another 0-0
game. (britnews)
stretch would Not to extend his duty in this way would stretch the pro-creditor bias of receivership to ridiculous lengths. (GVG
940)
stretch would I think it’s probably impossible to have a gauge that counts up to the completed book as to define a novel purely coordination
by its length would either cut out big chunks, or stretch it so the plot is way too thin, depending on how much
work you put into it. (fiction)
stretch We may stand in some preordained corner of a room and jiggle up and down a bit, but to call what we do dancing
stretches both the language and credibility. (newsmerge)
stretch To think of the BNP realistically contributing to any debate other than that of immigration stretches the
imagination. (newspapers)
stretch would To describe Gwyn or his office would stretch the talents of a far more gifted storyteller than myself, but
nevertheless I’ll have a go. (fiction)
Appendix 14
stretch To row in this race stretches heart and sinew to their limits; yet, happily, we know of no medical research dolefully
to suggest that it may shorten a man's life. (newspapers)
stretch would After all, to reach two finals and still go down would stretch the Wildean definition of carelessness beyond
credulity. (newsmerge)
stretch must have To start a tour with a Test match was strange enough in itself but then to go a week without a fixture must have
stretched the imagination of even the 17, at the last count, off-the-field workers on this trip, with regard to how to
fill the training sessions and, just as important, the time between the training sessions. (newsmerge)
stretch It is, as he says, possible to be Scottish and British, or Cornish and British, because Scotland and Cornwall are part
of the United Kingdom, but to suggest that Pakistan is also part of the Union rather stretches credibility.
(newspapers)
strike Automatically to blame the Bedouin strikes me as not just an injustice, but also insane. (newspapers) interesting modifier
strike would Of course, he won't do that because to do so would strike at the heart of the powerful alcohol lobby. (newspapers)
strike To write a play exploring all this strikes me as entirely legitimate. (newspapers)
strike Would, would, would would, but, I mean I'm quite in favour of people having their genitals mutilated as adults,
once they're over eighteen, they go to hospital and sign a consent form and have it done as long as they pay for it
themselves, but to do it to newborn children strikes me as outrageous. (HUJ 96)
strike would To use other men's masterpieces as vehicles for the expression of his own personality would strike him as
preposterous. (newsmerge)
strike Of course we might just have run out of physical steam, but to have all that talent at our fingertips strikes me as
sheer waste. (fiction)
strike But to not think it for that reason strikes me as infantile. (britnews)
strike To give a small glass of wine to a child strikes me as irresponsible. (newspapers)
strike To charge rather than let it go by with a caution strikes me as rather odd. (newspapers)
strike would To acquit Mr Simpson, he said, would therefore strike a blow for "freedom and ideas and justice for all".
(newsmerge)
strike To expect audiences to brave the many inconveniences of the West End and fork out pounds 37.50 for a top-price
ticket for an evening offering only a marginal improvement on the production values and wit of a student revue
strikes me as sheer lunacy. (newspapers)
strike But to ban people from public employment merely because you don't like what they believe strikes me as both
profoundly undemocratic and ineffably stupid. (newspapers)
strike "To quit medicine to become a writer struck most people like quitting the Supreme Court to become a bail
74
bondsman," he wrote. (newsmerge)

strike Dana wasn't a woman who begged, and to hear her reduced to that state struck Skinner to his core. (fiction)
strike would ''This initiative could probably have been carried out in confidence,'' allows Kerkstroter, ''but to have done so
have would have struck at the heart of what it is about. (newsmerge)
suit may not To contract everyone back in willy nilly may not suit everyone's needs. (britnews)
suit would not For ordinary people in undernourished Bucharest to regard the trinkets of capitalism as the symbols of liberty as might be analysed as
have well as the rewards of prosperity is understandable, but to have the wealth of twenty-three million Romanians to [for_NP_to_INF] due to
squander at one's will and to choose to watch Kojak or to sit on the sort of lumpish gilt furniture that Western coordination
department stores export to their Arab allies would not have suited Caligula. (CCK 282)
suit Also, to render "por toda parte" as "everywhere" or "in every place" wouldn't suit; so I coined the Phrase "fame all-
embracing" and used the Adverb "afield" to get the idea across (I first had "aloft" but found it too likely to form a
cliché). (academic)
suit not To be a fringe player does not suit him; if he can establish himself at the heart of the Wigan team, a massive further
Appendix 14
improvement is on the cards. (newsmerge)

suit He insists that he is not the hard man of repute, though he admits that to have that name suits him well enough.
(newsmerge)
suit might To have enjoying oneself as the sole purpose of life might suit children and teenagers, but it is not an activity for
grown-ups. (newspapers)
support will To do otherwise will merely support conservative South Africans in their belief that the country has already
changed enough to gain international respectability. (CB3 60)
surprise So to be second in the table right now has surprised a few people. (newspapers)
surprise To suddenly find that questioned did surprise me. (newsmerge)
surprise But to be out there so calm surprised me. (newspapers)
surprise will To omit him will surprise no one more than the Arsenal trio of Thierry Henry, Patrick Vieira and Robert Pires, all
of whom voted for him as player of the year. (newspapers)
surprise would Mrs Bennett, who lives in London with her husband, Philip, and their young daughter, said that to win tonight
would surprise her, adding: "I was amazed to win the regional heat." (newspapers)
surprise To have his thoughts vocalized by someone else down to the T surprised him. (fiction)
surprise But to beat it by so much surprised us. (newspapers)
surprise may not To claim that ''anybody standing in the pentagon is under the control of the devil'' may not surprise critics of US
foreign policy but is nonsensical in this context. (newsmerge)
surprise To hear such conformist sentiments issuing forth from her maverick associate surprised Scully. (fiction)
take may To rectify such mistakes may take extensive exposure to different usage from other speakers around them, before
children find out that they have a real case of no difference in meaning (Clark, 1987,1988). (EF8 434)
take must have To be so selfless after hearing she had cancer must have taken tremendous courage. (newspapers)
take To be able to close your eyes like that at the bottom of a hole takes faith. (fiction)
take will General Musharraf's proposal is promising, but to mould it into a solution acceptable to both sides will probably
take years not months. (newspapers)
take To kill a man takes a little bit more. (newspapers)
take To win on either of the first two ballots takes a two-thirds majority: 883 votes. (newsmerge)
take To forsake a long run and lift-off for a virtual leap into space takes experience and supreme confidence. (britnews)
take will Westbury finance director John Bennett warned, however: "To get rid of the shortfall will take a number of years."
(britnews)
take To produce and spread the same amount of fertilizers (112 lbs of nitrogen, 31 lbs of phosphorus, and 60 lbs of
75
potassium) takes, including spreading, 1,451,425 kcal/acre. (academic)

take would To do so would, presumably, take the heat out of a row before it escalated into something that might threaten the
game's global future. (newspapers)
take To turn it into information takes different receptors, arranged in more complicated structures - eyes. (newsmerge)
take Insp Gareth Woods of Cheshire Police said after the hearing: "There are some pretty stupid criminals around but
to leave your own name at the scene of the crime takes the biscuit." (britnews)
take would If the x coins of year a were made, for example, a hundred years before the 2x coins of year b , it would be unwise
to conclude that twice as many coins were made in year b , since to do so would take no account of the gradual
wastage or erosion of coins of year a from circulation (by accidental loss, hoarding, export of coinage, melting
down, etc.). (ADH 772)
take would To kill someone in such violent circumstances and then dismember the body would probably take more than one
person. (newspapers)
take People talk about the difficulty in getting the right chemistry between screen couples, but to get three actors firing
Appendix 14
off each other as Willis, Blanchett and Thornton do here (if my calculations are correct, that presents six different
ways in which the casting might have backfired) takes the whole matter closer to astrophysics. (newspapers)
take will To do so will take strong leadership and a disciplined approach. (newspapers)
take But to stay on top takes something almost supernatural. (britnews)
take But to beat them five times in six Tests, home and away, this year - and by a big margin on each occasion - still take some doing
takes some doing. (newspapers)
take I'd be lying if I said it had the racing buzz - but to go a whole lap at Knockhill keeping your foot pressed hard on take doing
the accelerator takes some doing. (newspapers)
take To go through security takes about two minutes. (newspapers)
take would To use public transport would take almost equivalent to two working weeks. (newspapers)
take It is bad enough to have an immigration chief being investigated for allegedly handing out passports in exchange
for sexual favours - but to find that he is an illegal immigrant as well just takes the biscuit. (newspapers)
take For a choreographer to be artistic director of any repertory dance company is a straining against their nature, but might be analysed as
to have had to rescue Britain's oldest company from almost certain death - which was what he was briefed to do in [for_NP_to_INF] due to
1994 - takes heroic courage. (newspapers) coordination
take To do the latter takes the heart out of the community. (newsmerge)
take To produce passing of such quality against the Boks' blitz defence took courage as well as skill, and D'Arcy had
both in abundance. (newspapers)
take To take a last-minute penalty, after Ian Harte had missed, took real guts. (newspapers)
take To draw with them took an awful lot of effort but I genuinely believe the impetus is with us now. (newspapers)
take "Hamlet was the first Shakespeare play that I discovered and studied in depth at school and to see Ken's Hamlet
took my breath away," she said. (newspapers)
teach There was a lot of pressure, day after day, and to have put so much into it and still come away beaten taught me a
lot about myself. (newsmerge)
tell not To say they mash post punk with electro, hip-hop and soul-jazz doesn't tell half the story. (newspapers)
tell As it happens, I suspect that Lord Irvine was merely foolish and thoughtless, and an apology, not dismissal,
would have sufficed; but to dismiss such criticism so high-handedly tells us all we need to know about Labour's
gut reaction to any view other than its own. (newspapers)
tell not But to say of a particular consequence that it would not obtain if that class were not hegemonal does not tell us
much. (CMN 944)
tell To be so close to winning the Bundesliga tells me what a good team we will be facing and I am aware of the threat
76
they will pose. (newspapers)

tell To put Bush or Blair in the same category as Saddam tells me that the Iraqi propaganda machine is alive and well.
(newsmerge)
tell To separate from a spouse tells the world you're a failure. (newsmerge)
tell Firstly, to contrast old and new terminology tells us little, for in a case-based system we are stuck with the old
terminology whether or not we adopt the new. (academic)
tell I thought at one stage it was game-on but to finish second playing with the Open champion in the last round tells
me that I can't be doing all that badly. (newspapers)
tell To still be as bright and creative as he is at 39 tells you everything you need to know. (newspapers)
tell To do otherwise "tells the patient that a normal reaction to a life-threatening event is not normal, not acceptable."
(academic)
tell would To snap the amulet would tell Potter he was in trouble and he knew the boy would respond. (fiction)
tell would To retreat now would "tell our allies that at the very moment of action, at the very moment when they need our
Appendix 14
determination, that Britain faltered". (newspapers)

tell not To understand the one does not tell us anything about the millions of others. (academic)
tell To concede a record number of points to England at Murrayfield and yet be talking in such favourable terms tells
you all you need to know about the relative difference in fortunes. (newspapers)
tell "To begin with a 17.61 metres jump told me I hadn't suffered too much from the loss of training," he said.
(newspapers)
tell will have To settle down as he did in his first US Open and to keep his game together on the last afternoon will have told
him everything he needs to know about whether he can win one of the big four. (newspapers)
tell To see Peter Richards giving Gregan the verbals during his brief cameo told you all you needed to know about the
England mood. (newspapers)
tell His Lordship said that merely to point to the fact that resources were finite told one nothing about the wisdom or
the legality of a decision. (newsmerge)
threaten just to watch her walk threatened to break your heart. (CCW 225)
threaten could Another 30 ``pillars of the business community'' have been indicted in connection with the slush fund allegedly
accumulated by Roh Tae Woo, who was president for five years from 1988, but prosecutors have declined to press
charges, concerned, it is assumed, that to do so could threaten disruption of the booming economy. (newsmerge)
threaten would To graft a Goldman or a Lehman on to a commercial-bank culture would threaten chaos. (newspapers)
threaten must To be included the group must threaten US nationals or its national security. (newspapers)
threaten would To do otherwise would inappropriately penalize hospices and would threaten the trust that dying patients need to coordination
have in those who care for them. (academic)
threaten To acknowledge that possibility threatened her basic belief in the good of humanity more than the Consortium or
a secret government conspiracy. (fiction)
threaten would They find him guilty mostly because they feel that to take the word of a black man over two whites would
threaten the system they live under, the system of segregation. (academic)
threaten not But to go to the other extreme and elevate people suffering from such abnormalities into a norm for society not
only threatens society but is dangerous to the individuals themselves, since it excludes them from the
consideration of help and treatment. (CRU 552)
threaten would Buddhism is an essential part of the Burmese identity, and to physically attack monks would threaten both a
popular uprising and their own immortal souls - Burmese are highly superstitious and the generals are no
exception. (newspapers)
threaten The best hope is that he knows that to push the nuclear crisis too far threatens his own survival. (newspapers)
77
threaten would To hold an inquiry now, she said, would threaten the morale of British troops in southern Iraq and distract the
government from its efforts to help the Iraqis achieve a stable democracy. (newspapers)
threaten could To express concern now could threaten to undermine the confidence in the political will among many member catenative?
states. (newsmerge)
touch could not To say that Ron was beaming couldn't touch the fact that his face had a permanent smile attached to it. (fiction) dubious
touch To meet the Pope touched me deeply. (newspapers) Name: Emmanuel
Filiberto -> might be non-
native
trouble should not To see a promising young fighter tempted into Aladdin's cave should not trouble us non-combatants.
(newspapers)
trouble would To lose such a distinguished record in your first match would trouble even the most experienced manager.
(newspapers)
turn "And to think that somebody took advantage of that trust to kill him turns my stomach." (newspapers)
Appendix 14
turn would But to lose a trio of players with that sort of experience would have turned a slip down a division into free-fall and
have the very real threat of financial oblivion for a club already Pounds 23million in the red. (newspapers)
turn would Liberal groups are baying for more litmus tests to be imposed; conservatives bark back that to do so would turn
the confirmation, in the words of Clint Bolick of the Institute for Justice, into 'a judicial Armageddon.' (newsmerge)
turn must To sit down and read about yourself must turn your head eventually. (newsmerge)
turn When girls can't get boys to dance with them, they dance around their handbags, so perhaps boys believe that to
dance with a girl turns them into a handbag. (newsmerge)
turn would To recognise such people as a class would turn the ideology of the last 50 years on its head. (newspapers)
turn would They already have more than they want, and to be forced to sell them would neatly turn the flak onto the
government. (newspapers)
turn To suggest that it is turns people into victims. (newsmerge)
turn To do so turns the book into a sort of time-lapse oral history of America's preceding fifty years; a history of
decaying marriages, of strangers in town, of kids learning to lie. (newsmerge)
turn can To have no line of communication to your own kind available can turn a tolerable solitude into a state of
intolerable isolation; and yet thousands of elderly people, who live on their own and are too frail to go out, are in
this position. (C8Y 457)
turn And to meet an attractive child semi-nude in the middle of the night did turn out to be a temptation I didn't think I turn out
was going to resist.' (newsmerge)
turn would To lose this one after Pressley's walkout would have turned everything against Romanov. (newspapers)
have
turn would Just to shake his hand would turn my face 800 shades of red. (newspapers)
turn would To do this would turn a chapter into a book. (academic)
turn To urge Arabs to rise up and kill British troops in Iraq was despicable and turned him into one of the most hated coordination with copula
men in British politics. (newspapers)
turn may To be truly historicist, for instance, may turn out to require more modern theory rather than less, as in the versions turn out
of historicism we find in Greek studies influenced by Paris School structuralism and by Foucault. (academic)
turn A court jester in the Edwardian period is pretty improbable in the first place; but to bring him on as a muscular
baritone transvestite in a shimmering dress and sheer black stockings turns his spiritual relationship with the King
into a fancy-dress romp. (newsmerge)
turn To drop Gower from the winter tour after he saved last summer's series not only prompted MCC's Christmas coordination
pantomime, with its cast of a thousand bowler hats, but also turned the country against the England team,
78
unhealthily so. (newsmerge)

turn would To perform such searches as would be necessary would turn Hogwarts into a virtual police state. (fiction)
turn may To compare us with other species may therefore turn out to be invidious because we evolved at a different time in turn out
a different place. (newsmerge)
turn would The victory of Gothic architecture showed that Nonconformity had kept pace with the spirit of the times; to have
have done otherwise would have turned them back into hole-and-corner chapels appealing, like the Quakers with their
simple meeting-houses, to ‘men and women of a certain temper’. (AE6 627)
unite would To attempt to suppress the Party in Danzig would probably have united the Danzigers against the League. (BN2
have 1284)
unite would To do so would divide Labour, but unite the country. (newspapers)
warn should To walk out the way he did and at the time he did should have warned off plenty of chairmen. (newspapers) warn off
have
warn would To give the dream words would warn his pursuers. (FRJ 681)
Appendix 14
wash not To be asked to pay pounds 25 or pounds 30 or even pounds 35 to see a modestly successful production when you wash C in VDE
can buy a hardback book or a CD for half the price, or go to the cinema for a third, just doesn't wash. (newspapers)
wash will not To say it wasn't their money just won't wash with me. (newspapers) wash C in VDE
wash not A former chief risk officer at one of Britain's biggest banks says that Northern Rock's operating model was very wash C in VDE
risky: "To say that nobody could have envisaged what happened doesn't wash at all." (newspapers)
win would Louis Philippe agreed; to identify himself with such a move would win the hearts of the French people. (academic)
work To see "the popular culture and theatre that Britain lost with the music halls" (Bryden) as the play's subject works
to preserve the audience's distance from the spectacle of lower-class life, a freedom that the play marks as the sign
of class power. (academic)
work will not Thus to reorganise central government, say, without taking into account the many different functions that the
individual departments perform will not work. (GVN 310)
work not To be able to make a prediction on what I'll win doesn't really work for me because I can't control what other
competitors do. (newspapers)
work will It may be suggested that to limit compensation in the way proposed will work unfairly in certain cases. (J16 903)
work not Less than two weeks ago Lachlan Murdoch, deputy chief operating officer, said: "To try to cherry pick aspects of
Australian corporate governance and put it into an American company just doesn't work and will be to the
detriment of what we're trying to do - become an American company." (newspapers)
work not To try to lead a normal life didn't work at all. (ART 1995)
work not Repeating a year has never been a core tenet of our education system, yet to expect all children to fit academically
into their birth year does not work. (newspapers)
work may To simply dismiss the alternative possibilities not only shows a closed mind but may also work against the coordination
interests of viewers and broadcasters. (britnews)
work not I'm sorry but to call Peter even vaguely intellectual just doesn't work at all. (KP4 3910)
work not But in a film, to focus on a group of people for so long and suddenly have news from abroad just doesn't work
emotionally. (newsmerge)
work To give appalling behaviour by drivers the spurious respectability of a syndrome works against the interests of
motorists. (newsmerge)
worry It's why I play, but to go into a game with the sole intent of injuring somebody genuinely worries me. (britnews)
worry To then imply that judicial oversight of poorly reasoned decisions or the blanket refusal to intervene that so often
characterised regulatory behaviour in the past represents a kind of unwarranted intervention worries me even
further. (britnews)
79
Appendix 15 80
Appendix 15 Corpus evidence for passive clauses
1. Such a distinction is not accepted by all commentators, as we shall show, but where evaluating the
intended curriculum is accepted, there are clearly a variety of ways of analysing it. (FAM 786) – ok
2. Despite Dr Draper's study, current evidence does not prove that living by high-voltage lines should
be added to this list. (newspapers) – ok
3. But teaching them, in addition, about what drugs they could take to reduce that risk may be added to
the syllabus in the future. (newspapers) – no
4. And in a city where getting 97 cents back for every dollar invested is advertised as a good return,
you're going to want willing-suspension-of-disbelief by the truckload. (newsmerge) – ok
5. To concentrate too much on that aspect of his work would be ill advised. (newspapers) – no [probably
no passive]
6. Officially, lifting the embargo has been agreed in principle, but "now is not the time''. (newspapers) –
ok
7. Removing all trade tariffs would be the first step in Mr Brown's revolution and has already been
agreed by the UK and the U.S. for high tech goods like computers. (newspapers) – ok
8. To issue the film on the eve of the anniversary of the London bombings was aimed at insulting the
victims and their relatives, and causing fear and uncertainty. (newspapers) – ok [second native
speaker prefers [V-ing]]
9. A scathing commentary on the list, published last month by a Shanghai newspaper and republished
by the party's main mouthpiece, People's Daily, said that promoting the idea of "public intellectuals"
was really aimed at "driving a wedge between intellectuals and the party." (newspapers) – ok
10. Diplomats and analysts say that acquiring a nuclear weapon is aimed at shoring up support and
protecting himself from any external threat - such as regime change orchestrated by America.
(newspapers) – no [“lexical muddle”, should be ‘intended to store up’]
11. Casting on stitches for the ease in working cables must be allowed for when you are designing
garments with many cable strips across (CA2 365) – ok
12. After a long argument she convinced the guard we were n't tourists and that climbing was still
allowed in the area . (CL7 824) – ok
13. To take on a contractor before you even know you have the commission shouldn't be allowed.
(newspapers) – no [“taking”]
14. The EU can give Turkey "favoured trading'' status, but to allow 70 million or more Turks the right to
work and reside in Britain must never be allowed. (newspapers) – no [prefer V-ing]
15. A sitting at Le Caprice or The Ivy is like a carefully choreographed ballet: to seat an actor or director
on a table next to a critic who has delivered a savage review cannot be allowed to happen. (britnews)
– no [“seating… at” – two [to_INF]s]
16. Sir Philip said there was no problem with Mr Cameron sometimes meeting donors in his office, but to
advertise for funds in return for meetings was not allowed. (newspapers) – [prefer V-ing]
17. However, according to the rules, adding 10 seconds to the elapsed race time can be applied only if the
race is within 12 laps of the finish, and that was not the case. (newsmerge) – ok
18. He says that contracting out has so far been applied to what have been called the `èasy areas'', such
as refuse collection, affecting members of manual unions. (newsmerge) –ok
19. To carry out participant observation into the minutiae of police practice might be theoretically
approved in any statement made for general consumption, but in the cold light of institutional reality
it will most likely be thwarted or subverted even as it is being agreed. (A0K 57) – no
20. Although castrating young boys and training them for singing was never approved by the church, the
authorities tolerated it. (newspapers) – ok
21. Appointing educational supervisors and introducing a structured educational programme were
approved theoretically. (EA1 1086) – ok
22. Banging on the piano was approved of, as long as it was thought that you were interested in the
sounds, and not just looking for attention. (newspapers) – ok
23. He said: ``Most of us ... do not believe that validating homosexual practice can be argued from the
New Testament.' (newsmerge) – ok
24. That a switch from tax to debt finance may affect the rate of capital formation has been argued by
Modigliani (1961) in the context of a simple life-cycle model. (H9J 742) – ok
25. That these preferences do have significance for an analysis of the syntactic structure of sentences has
been argued by Kuno & Kaburaki (1977). (F9V 1403) – ok
26. To arrange for an officer to come to my house for a security check was no problem and could easily be
arranged through them to be carried out at a time and date that suited me. (newspapers) – ok
27. "In Farnham, staying over with a friend would probably be arranged two weeks in advance and only
occasionally," says Polly. (newspapers) – ok
Appendix 15 81
28. To get one is no longer much assumed to be difficult, and therefore although the possession of a
degree is not necessarily the mark of anyone being a success, the absence of one very much indicates
failure. (newspapers) – ok but clumsy
29. And to learn that New York City set a 100 R examination limit on fluoroscopy in the New York
hospitals should not be assumed to mean that all was well elsewhere. (academic) – ok
30. Discovering "truth" was assumed by the members to be more important than being polite to each
other. (academic) – ok
31. This has the technical snag that sending troops to Macedonia is assumed to require recognising
Macedonia's existence, and Greece still says the European Community cannot recognise it under its
present name. (newsmerge) – ok
32. Since doing well is assumed to be due to brains and not effort, there isn't much need to work hard.
(academic) – ok
33. Until recently, uttering the words 'Tony Blair' was assumed to give the speaker a 15-love start in
continental politics. – ok
34. Mr Ridley's ‘mindedness’ to allow Foxley Wood depended on his view that it was a sounder way of
ensuring Hampshire's share of new housing in the South-east than the county's own thinking, which
assumed finding dozens of smaller sites. (A2P 376) – ok [active counter-example]
35. Taking up to five days to clear a cheque, and electronic transactions taking the same sort of time, were
bitterly attacked. – ok
36. To go on to suggest that policy must be adapted to punish the few guilty even if it hurts the needy
innocent is outrageous, and was rightly attacked by the Archbishop of Canterbury on Monday.
(newsmerge) – ok [but –ing more common]
37. He orders Darnay to swap clothing with him; Darnay does it quickly and without questions, but he
tells him that to try to escape is madness and cannot be attempted. (academic) – ok
38. To epitomise Baxter would be impossible-it was attempted for one of his works by Edmund Calamy:
almost equally impossible is it to characterise in brief an author so stupendously prolific. (academic) –
no [dubious example]
39. Drawing together the disparite threads of four countries into one business entity has never been
attempted. (newsmerge) – ok [‘apart from typo’]
40. Protecting the tongue should not be attempted because teeth may be damaged. (academic) – ok
41. Making three at once has never previously been attempted. (newspapers) – ok
42. To foretell the evolution of diseases without a comprehension of real cause is attended with delusions
– mental mirages. (academic) – no [Beware! from 1921]
43. Posting mothers' names where they can be easily seen by anyone entering the unit should be avoided,
and a policy developed specifying who is authorised to transfer babies between mothers' rooms and
the nursery. (EE8 43) – ok
44. That this form of shareholder-value driven capitalism could itself be a driver of inequality and social
polarisation is neglected and avoided. (newsmerge) – no
45. Setting off pyrotechnics is barred between 11pm and 7am apart from special dates, including Bonfire
Night and New Year. (newspapers) – ok
46. That Kumar became angry enough to retaliate was based on a list of grievances, a computation of a
complex sort, drawing ultimately, as we shall see, on his knowledge of a change of state and his
consequent reformulation of principles of justice. (academic) – poor English
47. For the women interviewed, deciding whether or not to play was based on what the women feel their
mission is. (academic) – poor English
48. "For instance, having to gather a plant under the first new moon of summer may sound merely
superstitious but is based on fact because the chemical composition alters throughout the year," says
Palmer. (newspapers) – ok
49. Teaching in Freudian classrooms should, as often as possible, be based on the interests of children.
(academic) – ok
50. To go brambling on a lovely autumn day cannot be beaten and then the pleasure of washing them
and out with the jelly pan. (newspapers) – no
51. That this was the real explanation of Marlborough's dark and complicated plots was, as we have seen,
firmly believed by some of the most zealous Jacobites, and is in the highest degree probable.
(academic) – ok
52. Finding Soho Square for the FA at an annual rent of almost Pounds 2m a year is believed to have
netted Churston Heard Pounds 200,000 in commission. (newspapers) – ok
53. Lowering total dietary fat while increasing the percentage of polyunsaturated fat is believed to
beneficially influence blood pressures via linoleic acid which is increased by such dietary
manipulation. (B0X 159) – ok
54. SIR - I would be prepared to place a bet with any Tory politician that waiting lists in 2010 will be at
least as long as they are today. Promising reduced spending (report, June 24) is traditional
Conservatism, so is believable up to a point. Promising the unattainable will not be believed.
(newspapers) – ok [without to]
Appendix 15 82
55. That the central confrontation came between Germany and Poland was bound to stir up memories.
(newspapers) – ok
56. To show a person in the act of suicide is bound to be distressing to family and friends. (newspapers) –
poor English
57. Tax credits are the finest of the Chancellor's attempts at social engineering, and turning the Revenue
into an arm of social security was bound to end in tears. (newspapers) – ok
58. Riding a bike is often blamed for producing thunder thighs. (newsmerge) – ok
59. Overtaking and taking right turns off single lane carriageways are blamed for most of the road
carnage by Anthony Martin, the accident and emergency casualty specialist at University College
Galway Hospital. (newsmerge) – ok
60. That a decision may turn out to have this ultimate effect can hardly be blamed on the decider, who is
unable to see that far ahead. (H0E 402) – ok
61. That this has been so severe was blamed on three things. (newspapers) – ok
62. Solving the problem can be broken into the application of a succession of constraints with associated
hypotheses. (academic) – no
63. Maintaining the impetus for change is brought about by nothing less than dogged determination.
(AND 397) – ok [bring about]
64. Sleeping with the guy's wife would have been brought up and I would have got a couple of years for
that alone. (newspapers) – ok [bring up]
65. In this situation adopting a policy for unbundling the local loop should be brought forward to
stimulate the provision of DSL services and to spur the cable companies to increase the roll out of
cable modem services. – poor English [bring forward]
66. That the North had won the title for a record fifth time was only brought home when television lights
cut through the gloom at foggy Beeston to highlight Paul Johnson accepting the trophy and, moments
later, when one heard Johnson's team burst into a rather bedraggled version of On Ilkley Moor
Baht'at. (newsmerge) – poor English
67. That the UK should play a crucial role in trying to mend the WTO process was brought home to me
by some figures from an aerospace consultancy called Ascend. (newspapers) – ok
68. That is, attempting to provide an account of what a person is talking about is always built on an
assumption that we know why that person says what he says. (F9V 1327) – ok [but jargon]
69. Watching those girls shriek and wail and cover their eyes, which is what you can do to people if you
make a scary movie, is still burned into my mind 31 years later. (newsmerge) – no passive
70. Rourke's hostility had unnerved her, and working with his girlfriend was not calculated to make her
feel remotely cheerful. (HA6 2583) – ok [but jargon]
71. While Mr Straw was stopping short of declaring the treaty dead, shelving the referendum was
calculated to embolden other countries that want to move on. (newspapers) – ok [sense D]
72. The instructor should encourage the pilot to talk through his thoughts aloud to find out whether not
using the airbrakes is caused by failing to realise the glider is too high or by not being quick enough to
decide and act. (A0H 1240) – ok
73. POST-NATAL DEPRESSION: Feeling low after childbirth is caused by stress, role changes and lack of
sleep rather than hormones. (newspapers) – ok
74. He added that securing the posts had not been completed before Gary was fatally injured the
following day. (K2W 260) – ok
75. Moreover, discovering a land is often conceived in most languages, I daresay, as a process. (academic)
– no
76. Although influences 2 and 3 can be recognised in the common law, the courts extend minimum rights
to employees in the interests of justice where to do so is conceived to be compatible with the
enhanced efficiency of the enterprise. (academic) – yes [“only academic”]
77. That this perception might not be strictly rational could be concluded from the finding that the
beautiful are seen as better than the rest of us in such apparently unrelated tasks as piloting an
aircraft. (britnews) – poor English
78. That Spender's activities in these realms were tireless is confirmed by a new book, Stephen Spender:
The Authorised Biography by John Sutherland (Viking), which tracks his trajectory for 600 pages.
(newspapers) – ok
79. That he never wrote a truer word is now confirmed by a survey into driver behaviour by Frank
McKenna, a psychology professor at Reading University. (newsmerge) – ok [and many more – show
that non-extraposed is possible]
80. In this sense, treating the United States-USSR rivalry as the centerpiece of postwar relations is
confirmed here. (academic) – poor English
81. Perhaps rounding up our soccer morons and using them as a peacekeeping force in Iraq should be
considered. (newspapers) – ok [sense A]
82. Commissioning a film script of a new idea is often considered to be more risky. (newsmerge) – ok
[sense B]
83. In Japan that is the main job of a bengoshi (barrister); and to bring him to a business meeting would
be considered an act of hostility. (newsmerge) – ok [sense B]
Appendix 15 83
84. To have inflicted upon them a guest displaying anti-social and eccentric behaviour could not have
been considered. (CES 991) – meaningless to me
85. That such a catastrophe could be caused by the action of man was never considered seriously. – ok
[sense A]
86. That Radcliffe is considering the marathon in Athens at all is considered a brave move by some. –
poor English
87. Success is part of the oxygen we expect to breathe now, and to be without it is counted as a kind of
death. (newspapers) – poor English [‘regarded’]
88. Selling drugs near a school will also be counted as an "aggravating factor", attracting tougher
penalties. (newspapers) – see above
89. Paying that tax will be counted as yet another taxable income benefit for the employee, and therefore
taxable as well, on top of the tax on the original hotel costs. (newspapers) – see above
90. That a legal owner of property could obtain an injunction, on the ground of private nuisance, to
restrain persistent harassment by unwanted telephone calls to his home was decided by the Appellate
Division of the Alberta Supreme Court in Motherwell v Motherwell ((1976) 73 DLR (3d) 62).
(newsmerge) – ok (legal)
91. Sacking a manager like Reid, who had been at the club for seven years, was decided by the panic
button being pressed after the thought of Sunderland losing their Premiership status. (newspapers) –
poor English, clumsy
92. Officials said there had been no change in the Government's position that joining the single currency
would be decided on economic grounds. (newspapers) – ok
93. Stuart Hyde, the assistant chief constable, said that placing officers at polling stations would be
decided case by case. (newspapers) – ok
94. Creating a "harmonious society" was officially declared a top party priority in September last year.
(newspapers) – ok
95. To pray in the lodge in the name of Christ is declared by the highest Masonic authority, to be a
violation of the fundamental principles of Masonry. (academic) – ok [Beware! from 1893]
96. Not automatically switching customers into the best account is defended as ''freedom of choice''.
(newsmerge) – ok
97. Removing the mangled insects from one's windscreen was often delayed until one had had a chance
to impress a few friends with the collection. (newspapers) – ok
98. That it was mere opportunism may be denied. (EF4 739) – ok
99. To criticise a Corkman's use of language could be described as feckless. (newspapers) – no
100. To have been through all this would not, in my mind, be described as a character weakness.
(newspapers) – no [NS2: accept both, but prefer V-ing]
101. To lose one aide might be described as unfortunate. (newspapers) – no [NS2: ok in literary style;
humourous device]
102. Finding the right production company is finally determined by choosing people you trust.
(newspapers) – ok
103. One suggestion is that playing with words may be genetically determined and that recasting or
deviating from established patterns is a natural and normal `biological' reflex of the human mind
which cognitive linguists are in any case increasingly inclined to regard as figuratively predisposed.
(academic) – ok
104. Finding your ideal home is determined just as much by how you want to live your life as whether
you want an Aga and exposed beams. (newspapers) – ok
105. That these, and other materials, are taken as data in research projects is determined not only, or even
mainly, by the subject matter of the research, but also by the theoretical presuppositions informing the
study. (HPU 274) – ok
106. That cancer cells often rely on glycolysis was discovered by Otto Warburg in 1930. (newspapers) – ok
107. That it was the wrong remedy was discovered later when he was given a higher potency which
helped the eczema but made the asthma worse. (C9V 457) – ok
108. Mitigating the helpless and hopeless attitude is discussed at greater length in Chapter 17. (academic)
– ok
109. Increasing that quota to reflect the higher volumes of oil already being produced will be discussed
when oil ministers meet this weekend and early next week. (britnews) – ok
110. To patch or not to patch was discussed in a paper presented earlier this month to the meeting in
Tokyo of the world's seven biggest industrial countries, the G7. (newsmerge) – ok
111. That these great systems of "mind" and "state" may emanate from a common human nature has been
discussed many times heretofore. (academic) – ok
112. It was also discussed that nine thirty wasn't early enough. (FYB 174) – no
113. For larger problems, however, many trials are generally required to find local minima, and finding
the global minimum cannot be ensured. (academic) – ok
114. That the brain is electrically active was established a century ago. (CMH 1005) – ok
115. Using log diaries to record experience before taking membership or fellowship examinations is well
established in some disciplines and could be used by senior house officers. (FT5 109) – ok [adjective?]
Appendix 15 84
116. Recognizing the cellular origin of cancers was a natural development from the cell theory of bodily
structure and was established by the great labours of the nineteenth-century descriptive pathologists.
(ARF 758) – ok [coordination]
117. Even having ways of characterizing that thing and having intellectual controls on it is not really so
well established. (academic) – ok
118. Donating a kidney is now well established in the UK. (newspapers) – ok
119. Making the Mullingar-to-Sligo line safe is estimated at £22m. (newsmerge) – ok
120. Sorting out its problems is estimated to cost $1.42 billion. (newsmerge) – ok
121. That the worst schools should tend to have the highest truancy may be expected. (newsmerge) – no,
poor English
122. To have been in the region and missing for a week after contact with loved ones would have been
expected. (newspapers) – no
123. To adapt all of the world's mainframe computers is expected to cost $600 billion. (newsmerge) – no
[complement of expect?]
124. To move the event would be a sad blow to the women's game and would be expected to face stern
opposition within the association - but finances have thrown a bid question mark over current
arrangements. (newspapers) – no [complement of expect?]
125. At Celtic, playing that way was expected. (newspapers) – ok
126. And though the overwhelming majority decline, flirting with the customer is expected and there is a
grey area over what is acceptable. (newspapers) – ok
127. Bending the rules was not only acceptable, but expected. (newspapers) – ok
128. The Woolwich expects to announce an increase of ‘up to 1 per cent’ next week. (A55 533) – ok [active
counter-example]
129. Every year he expects to lose around 10 per cent of his lambs. (A7D 695) – ok [active counter-
example]
130. Losing to Dave Harold in the quarter- finals of the Grand Prix last year and to John Parrott in the
semi-finals of the Thailand Classic ten days ago can, however, be explained only by lack of
motivation. (newsmerge) – ok
131. Putting notices in the paper, selecting the form of service, and claiming state benefits are also
explained. (newsmerge) – no
132. It's easy enough to slip off for a swift eyelash tint without exciting comment, but waddling back in
flip-flops with cherry-red toenails after a 90-minute absence is less easily explained away.
(newspapers) – ok
133. To lose one member can possibly be explained, but to lose three, plus a newly acquired mongrel of no
mean intelligence, speaks of carelessness bordering on criminality. (newspapers) – no
134. That such an uncertain practice persists at all in the United States and that it appears to be spreading
can only be explained by the great need of these depleted soils for fresh supplies of organic matter.
(academic) – ok
135. That it did not can be explained by two things: the Herculean labours of Pakistan's army, and
outsiders' generosity. (newspapers) – ok
136. That they have not done so before now is explained by Clapham, when he describes him as a 'class
act'. (newsmerge) – no
137. Whereas to invade a pitch when a goal is disallowed may be felt magically as a way of reversing the
referee's decision. (G1H 551) – no
138. And in the most final sense of all, to be arrested while fighting opposing supporters may be felt as a
way of conveying to the management by means of some psychic process the nature of the ‘really
genuine supporter’, and the character of his identification. (G1H 552) – no, poor English
139. Travelling by car to the Alps was generally felt to be expensive and tiring especially so with heavy
rain on the autoroutes and snow on the road up to the resort. (newsmerge) – ok
140. But, unless possibly you are a Tim Henman, hitting a ball is not felt to be at the core of your being; it
is not akin to your personality, your values and your world view. (newsmerge) – ok
141. Retreating before the job is done would be felt for generations. (newspapers) (G.W.Bush) – ok
142. Replacing oestrogen and other hormones as women move through the menopause has been found to
reduce the ill-effects of the menopause itself and protect against the thin bone disease osteoporosis
and possibly heart disease. (newsmerge) – ok, only passive [complement of find?]
143. Sweating all night without relief is found in many complaints. (B1R 2100) – ok [V-ing?]
144. Unfortunately, adding these vitamins into the diet in the form of high-dose supplements has
subsequently been found to have little or no impact on these diseases - indeed, in some studies, they
actually make matters worse. (newspapers) – ok [complement of find?]
145. To grow the right kind in the right way is found in practice to be the most important factor in the
control and elimination of the pests of the sugar-cane. (academic) – ok [complement of find?
interesting because of in practice]
146. To support Muggles (non-magical people) and come from an "elite" group, such as the purebloods,
was found disgraceful by the opposing force. (fiction) – no
Appendix 15 85
147. But to ascertain the direction of many burrows was found too difficult and troublesome. (academic) –
no
148. To show emotions is forbidden. (newspapers) – ok
149. To speak out against the regime was strictly forbidden. (newspapers) – ok
150. To explain to the public that the main tangible benefits of tighter fiscal policy will be lower interest
rates is strictly forbidden. (newsmerge) – ok
151. Pope John Paul II has enjoined "conscientious objection", but to go beyond civil disobedience is
forbidden to Catholics. (newspapers) – ok
152. That he initiated the boy into the awe-inspiring rituals is forgotten. (academic) – ok
153. That they would not have had a sniff of these four prizes without Ballack's exceptional contributions
was conveniently forgotten. (newspapers) – ok
154. Setting alarms, shutting windows and locking doors are often forgotten in the turmoil of Christmas
shopping. (newsmerge) – ok
155. In a rallying cry to Britain's sporting establishment at UK Sport's major events conference in London,
Coe said building a great Olympic stadium or transforming the capital's transport infrastructure
would quickly be forgotten if the nation's athletes flopped. (newspapers) – ok
156. Pushing Europe into the Croatia and Bosnia disasters for German ambition is not forgotten either.
(newsmerge) – ok
157. Knocking two small reception rooms into one is virtually guaranteed to create value, as is enlarging a
family kitchen so they can eat in it. (newspapers) - ok
158. But, establishing a connection in the PTN is not guaranteed. (academic) – do not understand this
159. You could argue for the strong voice, the clear production, the powerful sound but mashing it all
together over 13 songs is guaranteed to have you pining for a croft in the Outer Hebrides.
(newspapers) – ok
160. Few people can be surprised by the ONS's conclusions, since throwing money at unreformed public
services is surely guaranteed to lead to waste; the ONS analysis provides the closest we have to
objective proof. (newspapers) – ok
161. But even to raise the question of what comes after Downing Street is guaranteed to halt conversation
in mid-track with any of Blair's advisers. (newspapers) – no [should be [V-ing]]
162. Hearts might well have found Tannadice a tricky venue on Tuesday night - under their new manager,
Craig Brewster, Dundee United have been a spirited side - but to travel to such a fixture in the
knowledge that the club's absentee owner had taken control of team selection was guaranteed to
dislocate Rix's players, who scrambled a 1-1 draw. (newspapers) – ok
163. That it will happen is all but guaranteed by the outlook for Granada's media business. (newsmerge) –
ok
164. That the believers' understanding of Christianity is truly what God wills it to be is guaranteed by the
Holy Spirit, as, again, Jesus promised explicitly. (newspapers) – ok
165. That we are to take note of this territorial emphasis is guaranteed by the importance of the spring in
the Nicandrian version, to which Ovid clearly alludes and from which he then departs at [End Page
145] the opening of the Bk. (academic) – ok
166. This will not, however, guarantee beating the Wallabies, since few of Wednesday's more experienced
players looked much better. (A33 297) – no [possible counter-example]
167. Whatever the circumstances, we guarantee sending a full response within 20 working days of
receiving your letter. (AYX 380) – no [possible counter-example]
168. But there is no doubt that selling an Iraqi campaign to Americans would be helped by such reports,
particularly if military casualties followed, as they might well do. (newsmerge) – ok
169. Thinking about these matters isn't helped by having culture split across several government
departments, including the Home Office, which regulates broadcasting. (newsmerge) – ok
170. In America, funding the deficit has been helped by huge bank purchases of Treasury bonds.
(newsmerge) – ok
171. Had diplomacy not prevailed at Old Trafford the other night, I'm sure Aigner would have pointed out
that attempting to combat pitch invasions is not helped when the England centre-half joins in the goal
celebrations with them. (newspapers) – ok
172. That he was nearly always available as mentor was considerably helped by the fact that unlike many
scientists of his intellectual seniority, he spent most of his time on the home ground of his department
rather than traveling worldwide to this or that "important" symposium. – ok
173. That she failed to qualify for this afternoon's final - as was the fact her best effort was some 56
centimetres (the best part of two feet in non-metric parlance) beneath American Stacey Dragila's
world mark - was breezily ignored by the stadium announcer, who insisted the clearly embarrassed
lass perform a private bow before taking her leave of the championships. (newspapers) – ok
174. That it comes under a smokescreen of populist rhetoric is simply the normal language of politics, and
should be ignored. (newspapers) – ok [complex]
175. No one can prepare you for something so terrible - to lose a loved one in such a way cannot ever be
imagined and we would not wish what we are going through on anyone. (newspapers) – no [should
be V-ing]
Appendix 15 86
176. Tackling these vicious gangs should be included as a part of the day-to-day operations of Gardai.
(newspapers) – ok
177. Selling a minority stake was included at the last minute at the Treasury's insistence. (newsmerge) – ok
178. Evaluating the pituitary gland and sella turcica with CT or MRI is indicated to rule out calcifications
and neoplasia. (academic) – ok
179. That it was something new is further indicated by Sidonius's extraordinary description of Syagrius as
"a new Solon of the Burgundians in interpreting law" , implying that a Roman aristocrat had devoted
himself to drafting edicts for Chilperic and his Burgundians. (HY0 207) – ok
180. That they are operating against their own commercial interest is indicated by the UK box-office
figures for the weekend of December 3-5. (newsmerge) – ok
181. Buying a house should not be influenced by the existence of mortgage tax relief, and scrapping it
would raise pounds 2,800 million a year at the last estimate. (newsmerge) – ok
182. Doing nothing was influenced very much by the off-farm jobs. (ALC 489) – ok
183. Of course, deciding how to deal with a painful, discouraging experience is strongly influenced by
whether you potentially have 50-60 or 2-5 years to live. (academic) – ok
184. But is the change because people have sufficient imagination anyway, or because television has
trained our imaginations to the point where listening to events is informed by past experience of
watching them? (newsmerge) – ok
185. Doing this film has definitely been informed by the fact that I was born in Israel and raised in the
States. (newspapers) – ok
186. Making appropriate choices requires attention to a range of considerations and perspectives and can
be informed by economic and historical analysis. (academic) – ok
187. That he needed to assign a small army of hacks - under the ever-imaginative reporter Andrew Pierce -
to get even was clearly intended as a compliment. (newspapers) – ok
188. To dwell so long on Henman is not intended as a slight to Greg Rusedski, Britain's other quarter-
finalist, but his situation appears less complex. (newsmerge) – no [should be [V-ing]]
189. Selling the French magazine assets is intended to help Vivendi Universal boss Jean-Marie Messier
finance the $2.2 billion (L1.52 billion) purchase of U S educational publisher Houghton Mifflin as part
of his strategy of refocusing on book publishing. (newspapers) – ok
190. Firing six missiles was intended as a provocative show of strength, probably timed to compete with
the launch of the US space shuttle Discovery on Independence Day. – ok
191. They needed a boss who was whiter than anything Dulux could deliver, and pulling him aside for a
friendly warning was judged not to have been enough. (newspapers) – ok
192. Breaching Commons security and flour-bombing the Prime Minister will be judged even by many
supporters of Fathers 4 Justice to be a protest too far. (newspapers) – ok
193. Turning to the left was judged less emotional. (newspapers) – no [NS2: ok in the context]
194. To improve her skills with the needle is judged more suitable to her economic standing: ‘…who must
feed you when your Father's dead?’ (AN4 2518) – ok
195. However, to interchange them (’powerful tea ’ &’strong car ’) would undoubtedly be judged
anomalous by most English speakers. (EES 1669) – ok
196. To focus on labour in poetry must be judged an assertion of value. (AN4 2816) – what does it man?
197. That this is no flash in the pan can be judged from how the Scottish Labour conference in Oban last
weekend was dominated by big beasts of the Cabinet, from the Prime Minister downwards, warning
the assembled multitude that waste, devastation and quite probably complete apocalypse would
follow for Scotland if it elected the SNP. (newspapers) – ok
198. That this same reputation sticks close to her even now may be judged from the fact that the
passengers who have committed their fortunes to her are few in the extreme, and only amount in all
to some 10 per cent. (newsmerge) – ok
199. Hearing and speaking a language is usually learned at a faster pace than reading is. (academic) – ok
200. Drinking too much alcohol has been linked to about 3% of cancers, specially those of the mouth,
voice-box, gullet and liver. (EDB 24) – ok
201. It backs up a report by the Institute of Cancer Research earlier this year which concluded that using a
mobile phone is not linked to an increased risk of brain tumours. (newspapers) – ok
202. We can all be successful for five minutes but to be successful over 25 years is linked with quality.
(newspapers) – ok
203. That Restrevor, 40 miles south of Belfast, is abroad is linked to the main issue which dominated the
six-week campaign. (newsmerge) – no idea what that means
204. To be seen in the same pair over two days is really looked down upon. (britnews) – no [should be [V-
ing]]
205. I don't think we are the new race of philistines that some fear, but we do live in a time when to be
serious about a non-profit-making venture is looked on as madness - and our consumer society
would have us believe that the arts and spirituality have less to communicate than a mobile phone.
(newspapers) – ok
Appendix 15 87
206. He knew he had only a few minutes before the beginning of the Order meeting, and to be late would
not be looked upon kindly, but Harry brought his left foot forward and placed it on the first step.
(fiction) – ok
207. The inference is that meeting the needs of the bookmaking industry will be looked at differently.
(newspapers) – ok
208. Ordering replenishment and display may be looked after by the publisher and this can lift a lot of the
administrative burden of stock control from the shop, although they are normally offered only where
sales justify it. (GWK 694) – ok
209. That he is less often at them than some other poets need not be denied; that he has access to them
must be maintained. (academic) – meaning??
210. Expressing a thought is maintained to be a matter of intentionally imposing the conditions of
satisfaction of the thought to be expressed from the thought to the utterance-act. (academic) – poor
English
211. Linking up with peers abroad is made dramatically easier using the Internet. (newsmerge) – ok
[pattern of x]
212. Research by Runzheimer International, a Wisconsin-based consultancy, shows that, apart from the
inevitable impact on flight costs, eating out will be made more expensive by the high cost of fuel used
to make food deliveries. (britnews) – ok [pattern of x]
213. To change the formula is made to sound like blasphemy. (newspapers) – no [should be [V-ing]]
214. That Pine is still conscious that he is addressing two discrete constituencies was made clear by his
repeated attempts, at this packed Barbican Hall concert, to win over aficionados (his term) to his side
concerning his decision to add two DJs Pogo and Sparky by name to his otherwise conventional jazz
line-up of saxes, guitar, piano, bass and drums. (newsmerge) – ok
215. That this is no longer the case is made evident by her switching to Ivy Peters as her personal lawyer.
(academic) – ok
216. That a single legion could protect all north Africa from the marauding tribes of the interior was made
possible by a network of roads, military in purpose but commercial in result, binding Carthage with
the Atlantic, and the Sahara with the Mediterranean. (academic) – ok
217. That the example of individual freedom among the Indians of the Americas inspired writers from
Thomas More to Locke to Shakespeare to Voltaire is seldom mentioned these days. (fiction) – ok
218. That he studied in Rome in the mid-1940s is scarcely mentioned, nor that he holds two doctorates.
(newsmerge) – ok
219. Shivering through a winter downpour in Putney isn't mentioned, but despite Britain's cold, wet
climate, motorised two-wheelers are proving more and more popular. (newspapers) – ok
220. Relieving the housing crisis was not mentioned. (newsmerge) – ok
221. Wanting to go home wasn't mentioned by one single person. (newspapers) – ok
222. Sometimes it is a matter of saying no to faculty members who insist that waiving them is needed to
gain industry support. (academic) – ok
223. But dropping the veto altogether could be needed to safeguard the Bill. (newspapers) – ok
224. Rural areas strive to expand employment and increase economic development, and providing up-to-
date communications is imperative for high-technology jobs and is needed to attract business to rural
areas. (academic) – ok
225. We were warned by the Governor and senior officers of Government not to be extravagant, but to say
what we thought would be needed to do an efficient job. (CDC 1054) – ok
226. The politics of last seasons playergate scandal have drained energy out of everyone and to celebrate a
football win was badly needed. (newspapers) – no [active ok]
227. To start like that and to show that kind of character is needed at Arsenal football club because you are
always under pressure. (newspapers) – ok
228. That this was not always acquired in genial fashion can be noticed already in a mantra time text, at
atharvaveda 3.29.1, which describes the other world as one where one has to give up *just* one
sixteenth [126] as tribute. (academic) – ok
229. It's when you go to Falkirk or Kilmarnock and the crowd isn't as big and chasing back 30 yards isn't
noticed as much. (newspapers) – ok
230. “To leave office before my term is completed is opposed to every instinct in my body,” he accurately
informed the nation. (newsmerge) – no [should be [V-ing]]
231. To consider children worthy of reverence was opposed to the Puritan view of them as born in sin, and
to consider that man as such is assisted by an inward intellectual light "perpetually beaming forth
from the great fountain of all light" ran counter to the common sense of the day. (academic) – ok [NS:
adjective]
232. Turning to more nuclear power will be furiously opposed. (newspapers) – ok
233. Doubling the price of petrol is opposed by 94 per cent of drivers (although clearly many would pay
up); charging pounds 5 to drive into local town or city centres is opposed by 72 per cent, and
introducing road tolls is opposed by 68 per cent. (newsmerge) – ok
234. But firing him or forcing him to resign will be opposed by many Democrats in Congress. (newsmerge)
– ok
Appendix 15 88
235. Some time ago, I heard the distinguished African/American actor, Morgan Freeman, state in an
interview that Afro/Americans had found that constantly playing the race-card had been proven to
be counter-productive. (newsmerge) – ok
236. Tackling the drug use that can lead to crime has been proven to work. (britnews) – ok
237. That this is a correct reading of Romans 2 is practically proven by Paul's rhetorical question at the
beginning of 3. (academic) – ok
238. That he has never been away is surely proven by the appearance of at least six biographies since 1957
(three of them since 1979) and by the fact that A Shropshire Lad has never been out of print.
(newsmerge) – ok
239. That they hit their target was proven by that ill-fated Sky interview. (newsmerge) – ok
240. Bringing it back is read as an admission that today's deficits are going to be with us for some time.
(newsmerge) – ok
241. The Chancellor will have to decide whether a joint assessment should receive one or two personal
allowances, but granting two could be read as a signal that the Government wants to encourage
married women to stay at home - quite unlike its policy for lone parents. (newsmerge) – ok
242. That the movie seems likely to get at least a sprinkling of Oscars next weekend could be read as not
much more than one of Hollywood's periodic outbursts of patriotism, and of the Academy's weakness
for golden-toned period spectacle. (newspapers) – ok
243. However, to criticise the Government's approach to pension planning should not be read as a
glorification of its predecessor's efforts. (newsmerge) – ok
244. To be drunk will be recognized as a symptom not of manliness but of extreme unhappiness, and since
only on rare occasion do we want to broadcast the fact of our unhappiness to the world, the lager lout,
the whisky soak, the sherry drunk will become a rarer and rarer phenomenon, until finally withering
away. (HGJ 608) – ok [prefer “he/she withers”]
245. To make an artificial increase, with immense profits, would be recognised as speculative instead of
legitimate, and the oil interests would suffer accordingly. (academic) – ok
246. That the rules be obeyed is recognised as so important that sport always provides a referee.
(newsmerge) – ok [clumsy English]
247. That the novel is in some sense about lesbianism has certainly been recognized, though until recently
the recognition has most often taken the form, as Judith Fetterley has demonstrated, of homophobic
and misogynistic misprision. (academic) – ok
248. Giving these drugs to prevent blood clots after surgery is recognised good practice but was not
routine in all of the hospitals. (newsmerge) [adjective]
249. Wearing a correctly fitting bra is now widely recognised as one of the best things a woman can do for
her breasts - and it is all thanks to fashion. (newsmerge) – ok
250. This can easily be achieved if teaching by example is recognised as a valuable way of passing on
expertise. (B33 507) – ok
251. To say that the welfare state, as it is currently constituted, tends to do the latter is no longer regarded
as a party political point. (newsmerge) – ok
252. To be a single mother in Pakistan is regarded as a disgrace. (newsmerge) – ok
253. That the Taoiseach should criticise Mr McCreevy in such a manner was regarded as highly unusual
by those Fianna Fáil backbenchers who attended the dinner. (newsmerge) – ok
254. That the present Queen came so close to topping the poll could be regarded as a substantial
achievement. (newsmerge) – ok
255. Among Buddhists, sparing the lives of living beings is regarded as meritorious - and in Bodh Gaya,
pilgrims approaching the Mahabodhi Temple, where the Buddha is said to have attained
enlightenment 2,500 years ago, are greeted by boys carrying live fish in plastic bags, like trophies from
a funfair. (newspapers) – ok
256. Blowing up the Provos' store of the plastic explosive, Semtex, is regarded as a possibility.
(newsmerge) – ok
257. That the moral imperative was not a sufficient condition has already been remarked upon. (CS7 1331)
– ok [only passive]
258. Having no US broadcaster has been remarked upon, particularly as Athens was swamped by 3,500
US media representatives during the Olympics. (newspapers) – ok [only passive]
259. Over Sunday dinner Clementine remarked upon Winston's coughing during the broadcast, and
predicted that the morning's post would bring bottles of syrup. (academic) – ok [active counter-
example]
260. But people will usually accept advice and acknowledge that leaving a dog in a car on a hot day, for
example, should not be repeated. (newspapers) – ok
261. Placing an inside piece of banana skin on the verruca is also reported to help. (newspapers) – ok [only
passive]
262. The guideline development group has made this recommendation based on evidence that this type of
approach is effective, and providing incentives to encourage treatment is reported to be effective in
other fields. (newspapers) – ok [only passive]
Appendix 15 89
263. Representing her interests was reported to have cost pounds 100,000 in legal aid. (newspapers) – ok
[only passive]
264. To get a result against England is still seen by many nations as a highlight of their football history.
(newspapers) – ok
265. To be embraced by America is now seen as a kiss of death. (newspapers) – ok
266. To do otherwise would be seen as pandering, and worse, as a lack of respect for the audiences they
seek to win over. (newsmerge) – ok
267. That his stock has tumbled dramatically is shown by the fact that he is not even favourite among the
12 acceptors for a race which marks the first significant encounter between the three-year-olds and
their elders. (newsmerge) – ok
268. That this is important was shown by one of the authors in two studies analysing sentences in the
London courts in 1983. (FBJ 78) – ok
269. That most of the accusations of horrid food habits were not based on any real evidence is probably
supported by the fact that when the pagans were not the prime target of propaganda anymore, the
same accusations of filthy eating and sexual habits were hurled by Christians at other Christians with
whom they had doctrinal differences. (academic) – ok
270. That the above calculation is within reason is supported by the statements of Count Zeppelin himself,
who has declared that his airships are useless at a height exceeding 5,000 feet. (academic) – ok
271. That the secret ingredient to a longer life might be self-esteem is supported by other research
confirming that heart disease and cancer are more likely in those suffering from depression.
(newspapers) – ok
272. That this is a likely interpretation is supported by the negative evidence of another variant:[II]The
door discreetly shut with a click. (EWA 1448) – ok
273. Mac Harris, a local councillor, said: "Mrs Carter had heart problems and to walk her dog was
supposed to be relaxing. (newspapers) – no [should be [V-ing]]
274. To live with a view to the regime should not be supposed to be slavery, but preservation. (academic)
– meaning? [translation of Aristotle…]
275. That some members of the legislature received direct bribes was with good reason suspected, but
could not be proved. (academic) – ok
276. That spring has been arriving earlier has long been suspected - ornithologists have been observing
nesting behaviour earlier almost every year. (newsmerge) – ok
277. “It has traditionally been taboo in Germany to express any opinion against the EC because being in
favour of Europe was always taken as a true sign that you were not an old Nazi,” he said.
(newsmerge) – ok
278. Replying to an SPR may be taken to suggest that the problem has not yet been resolved. (HWF 14308)
– ok
279. However, Government sources insisted that awarding the Pounds 30million now should not be taken
as an assurance that the rebuild would definitely be given the green light. (newspapers) – ok
280. To leave it to a free vote of the House might be taken as an indication that the Government had not
made up its mind and would be an invitation to the House of Lords to delete from the Bill the clause
abolishing the death penalty. (EEC 587) – ok
281. To say nothing, a female trait, is often taken as a sign of no knowledge, and as such is considered a
failure. (academic) – ok
282. To say that [18a]and [18b]are simply alternative ways of communicating the same message might be
taken to suggest that the decision whether to make the assumption about house-warming parties
explicit conveys nothing at all. (J7X 124) – ok
283. That they will spread their operations to other districts in due course may be taken for granted.
(britnews) – ok
284. That the bible is deeply patriarchal may be taken as read. (EF0 1433) – ok
285. That a small proportion of people could experience mild allergies was taken into account when it was
licensed, according to the FSA. (newspapers) – ok
286. To have a break has been talked about in this country and the clubs would have more chance of
winning the Champions League or UEFA Cup with a break. (newspapers) – no [should be [V-ing]]
287. People seem to think that going through something as awful as cancer or any serious disease
shouldn't be talked about. (newspapers) – no
288. Conducting a disciplinary hearing or interviewing potential employees is best taught face-to-face
because they rely on human contact. (britnews) – ok
289. The forum proposed that dealing with death and grief should be taught in schools to counter the "fear
and taboo" associated with the subject, backed by a national organisation to safeguard the interests of
the bereaved. (newspapers) – ok
290. Developing a state of ``thoughtless consciousness'' through repetition of a simple sound can be taught
over a few weeks, and researchers in Norway have just completed a trial that compared rifle
competitors who had been taught the technique with a control group who had not. (newsmerge) – ok
291. Yet, focusing on the "felt sense" can be taught rather easily, and, unlike therapy, it feels good.
(academic) – ok
Appendix 15 90
292. Having a better address was voted as the most reliable indicator of "having progressed". (newspapers)
– no [should be “as being”]
293. "To see an influx of more Britons coming to live in and around Boulogne would certainly be
welcomed by the locals," says Nick Stevens, spokesman for the town. (newspapers) – poor English
294. That the two were assassinated is the favoured conspiracy theory and has been written and broadcast
so often that a recent survey found 27 per cent of the British population had been persuaded that this
was the case. (newspapers) – ok [coordination]
Appendix 16 91
Appendix 16 Sentences with extraposed [that_CL] classified

according to position of [that_CL]
The key to the classification scheme can be found at the end of the table on page 108.
BP7:232 It had been no coincidence that she had been called to the phone in the weighing room. 1
A1A:1095 (It may be objected that I am taking far too earnest a view of a wonderfully comic 1
fictional character.
B14:1412 It is therefore important that the nurse should know about these habits and use the 1
knowledge to devise an individualised plan of nursing.
J1F:1029 It seems odd that we could get hammered in one game, just win the other and still be 1
better rewarded than with 2 draws.
ABA:1175 It was no coincidence that the largest CND march from Aldermaston to Trafalgar 1
Square took place that Easter.
HAJ:1914 The directory will be widely distributed to advice centres and tenants groups and it is 1
hoped that other agencies such as local police stations will be interested in obtaining copies.
ARS:1298 If it is to be baled or carted it is most important that it is well and evenly dried. 1
CRF:120 Looking at the effects of inheritance in a broader perspective, it is apparent that the laws 1
and customs associated with it in any society have the effect of shaping kin relationships in ways
other than the transmission of economic resources.
K4G:62 Leelo Ross, a large woman who claims Lancastrian origins (although it seemed highly 1
unlikely that black pudding could be blamed on her proportions) gave the audience an insight
into among other things the &bquo;Modern Jewish Woman&equo; including driving Jewish style;
and the laconic Dembina delved deep to prove that even the most serious of subjects could be a
source of humour.
ECB:365 When she wasn't explaining that she and the libbers were on the same side really, Mrs 1
Travers took pains to point out that FAMILY had no quarrel with the poor or socially inadequate;
it was just that she wanted to pay tribute to the unsung millions of women (and men) who lived
normal lives, did not swap roles, get divorces or abortions, become homeless or batter their
children (or their wives); people who faced misfortune with re&rehy;sourcefulness and courage
and without recourse to public funds.
A79:828 It is unfortunate that the space enclosed by the 1862 building, together with its 1922 1
extension, was too small or too lacking in services provision to offer a convenient corner for
installation of the new bathroom and WC.
CBY:402 Had it been, Bingham says, &bquo;it seems likely that all concerned would have 1
embarked on a group restructuring programme with a much fuller investigation and
understanding of the malpractice which had existed in the past and of the level of support
required, or that the bank would have been closed or would have collapsed there and then&equo;.
K4N:134 When the paper introduced direct input in 1986 it was clear that articles created 1
electronically could be stored the same way.
FA8:149 It is unlikely that there is a way to build on the positive features without overcoming the 1
negative features.
ASR:341 It's quite clear that the eruption was totally unexpected. 1
K5D:6705 &bquo;It is noticeable that the rise in seasonally-adjusted unemployment in Scotland 1
last month was the lowest since March.
H91:39 It is true that formal tariffs have in most sectors and between most member countries now 1
been removed.
CBR:1123 And so it seems self-evident that the subject of language should also draw on a cognate 1
disciplinary source even though it happens in this case to have the different name of linguistics.
FDG:296 It is accepted procedure that an imprisoned contemnor can apply to the first instance 1
court to purge his contempt and be released from prison.
CNJ:58 It is anticipated that the systems could be useful for a variety of applications including 1
fleet management, customer credit control, plant loading, targeting direct mail campaigns, fraud
detection, retail and materials analysis.
FP4:593 However, since new additions comprise under one per cent of the total stock each year, 1
they will have only a trivial effect on the distribution of housing types in the near future (it should
be noted that conversions of dwellings are not included in the figures given above).
CHT:1249 Conversely, it is thought that some employers will leap at the chance of employing 1
enrolled nurses knowing or believing them to be a cheaper alternative in terms of pay.
FR4:526 On the other hand, it is more than likely that those who do not qualify for unemployment 1
benefit are disproportionately from the ranks of unskilled manual workers.
AR8:913 From this it is clear that the idea of breaking up L Detachment had been floated at 1
headquarters, using the excuse of a shortage of manpower.
Appendix 16 92
BNT:342 It is a known and established fact that political parties do not pick up in the polls once an 1
election is under way.
HPV:139 It was (as I have written elsewhere)" ironic that the war of which this slaughter was part 1
had been initiated, allegedly, to save Spain from the"" barbarity"" of the"" atheistic hordes"" which
were supposedly about to invade Spain from eastern Europe".
FRB:690 The central role of the Treasury dates from a minute of 1860. when it was decided that all 1
funds for the government should be released by the Treasury to the various ministries.
FBE:921 It was argued that the logical situation permits the establishment of the falsity but not of 1
the truth of theories in the light of available observation statements.
HHV:10373 In view of the excellence of British beef, why is it that major British restaurant chains, 1
which, incidentally make generous donations to the Conservative party, are unable, on the
grounds of quantity, quality and consistency, to use a single ounce of British beef in their
restaurants, when at the same time 1 million tonnes is rotting in intervention?
EBM:901 It is certainly essential that the grounds on which the discretion to refuse relief can be 1
exercised should be spelled out as clearly as possible, and that those grounds should be
supportable by rational argument.
EF3:422 Treaties void ab initio are stated to be &bquo;of no legal effect&equo; or 1
&bquo;void&equo; but without any reference to procedures to give effect to the voidness, while
for voidable treaties it is specified that the State affected by the defect may raise the defect to
invalidate its consent.
CG8:123 Moreover it is the UNIX philosophy that tools should not be monolithic, but instead that 1
several tools should naturally work together — perhaps in a pipe — on the same source file.
KA5:314 It was also noted that a new higher grade 1 structure may come into existence 1
GV1:418 It is important that these edges be level in the horizontal plane so that water is 1
distributed evenly throughout each basin.
EFW:1289 It made little difference that these needles had been for injections and not for some 1
sinister Chinese purpose.
HXD:298 The fact that the machines made by Amstrad had other legitimate uses, such as making 1
copies of the purchasers' own music or of works not protected by copyright, was important, even
though it was obvious that the largest use would involve copyright infringement.
K8W:177 It does appear that many large pension funds do carry out such a policy, with many of 1
them attempting to replicate the FTSE 100 Index with their core portfolios so that the returns will
match the market.
CM2:102 It is notable that he does not see himself abandoning epistemology, but as continuing it, 1
doing it better than it previously had been done.
H9M:359 In a world of uncertainty it may be assumed that equation (3.37) becomes: 1
A05:277 A piece of oral history may be meant to do without a presiding historian in much the 1
same way in which an analytic session may be meant to do without a presiding analyst;
theoretical presuppositions are subject in each case to a show of suspension, though it is clear that
the theories of Freud and others will be present in the consulting-room, and that oral historians
may be sympathetic to socialism and to the methods of Marxist historiography.
EC7:1238 Because persuading people to be unpaid referees is difficult it could be argued that 1
editors have to pass the comments on.
CLS:768 It is now generally appreciated that Warner Bros had been particularly badly hit by the 1
depression, largely because of the furious rate at which they had acquired movie-houses in the
1920s.
ALV:1888 However, it is already apparent that resistance can be induced in insects relatively 1
rapidly when they are exposed to toxin that has been expressed in plants or other organisms.
ANR:296 By 1852 the Court was established in the form which it was to retain until 1870, and 1
from its inception it became clear that this was not only a new Court but a new type of court.
CK2:665 It has to be remembered that India and many countries of the Far East had appalling 1
economic and social problems, not the least of which was providing food for their expanding
populations.
HW9:1742 Reliability in supplies: It is likely that a firm has greater control over reliability of 1
supplies if it makes a component rather than buying it in from another firm.
HNW:440 However, it was apparent that the staff needed much more guidance from advisers in 1
terms of practically implementing such recommendations.
A6X:148 Thankfully, it seems that the charming Claudio Zampolli, who, two years ago, brought 1
the first prototype Cizeta to Geneva, is dreaming no longer.
CTR:171 Increasingly through last year it became apparent that what CSRG wanted was 1
&bquo;basically the same thing as BSDI:&equo; an unencumbered commercial system.
CMS:876 It was arranged that the husband would telephone Lawyer D, after discussing the matter 1
with his wife, so that Lawyer D could explain what was involved.
Appendix 16 93
HW9:1448 It is argued that such variations could distort costing of products and also require 1
complex systems to reflect these seasonal variations.
HAJ:2042 Whilst welcoming the recommendation that the defence has an enforceable right of 1
access to forensic material held by the prosecution, the Law Society is concerned and surprised
that it is not proposed that this will extend to unused material generally.
KAJ:21 It was clearly felt that PAF should be regarded entirely as an automatic fee in recognition 1
of a teacher qualified and belonging to a professional Society.
BNS:113 So it is that my magazine is being put into a state of hibernation. 1
HXW:1746 Can it possibly be that, while there is the situation in such a case, it is otherwise if the 1
lessee has failed to get rid of the subterm until after a notice is served?
ASB:898 It is surprising that such major intrusions by the state into the private lives of the people 1
should take place without any clear legal authority.
CEF:541 It's clear that behaviour style needs to be appropriate to assertiveness. 1
AE8:1627 Sometimes it would happen that during a lecture — at that time the secret police were 1
very active — there would be a knock at the door and two men would enter.
EG0:2066 Only when it was discovered that some men, formerly working on the surface, were 1
working in canteens on the lowest male rate — higher than the female rate — did the union begin
to campaign for equal pay for the women.
EC8:788 It seems clear that Rider Haggard intended Ayesha in part to embody a moral distinction 1
between physical and ideal love.
AB4:1007 &bquo;It is curious that he is dying as picturesquely as he lived,&equo; wrote Mr Gosse. 1
HHW:1711 It is perfectly true that some of the things that I am saying today I have said before; 1
that is because they are true.
AAC:91 It is understood that Lloyds was chosen to withhold its co-operation when 10 banks 1
agreed in November to participate in preparations for the scheme's introduction next autumn.
J0P:996 But it may also be that in the bourgeois family the essential inegalitarianism on which 1
capitalism rested found a necessary expression.
HHY:529 It is therefore important that the procedure used to produce a sample of visitors is not 1
biased by size of group.
FB5:778 It was suggested that increasing &bquo;affluence&equo; and the growth of the 1
&bquo;middle class&equo; meant the decomposition of the social base of the Labour Party (e.g.
Abrams and Rose, 1960).
B1X:2094 &bquo;It could be that the girl has a vocation. 1
CD3:1295 Where they do not exist it can be presumed that either the genuine silver-gilt coronet 1
was used at the funeral and then put back into the strongroom after the funeral, or they have
disintegrated.
HX8:1810 There will be a Raffle as on previous such occasions and to raise funds for this it was 1
suggested that we hold a &bquo;Bring and Buy&equo; home produce and cake sale at the October
Q.T. Day.
GV5:656 In the United States that is not so; it is acknowledged that the multitude of pressures 1
(some real, some imagined) that converge on a member from his constituents and from vested
interests may make the call of the party electorally disastrous.
F9U:727 Her will makes no mention of Minton, but it is likely that her death released the trust 1
which her late husband had set up on behalf of the Minton children and of which John now
remained the sole heir.
FBJ:439 Finally, it can be argued that by focussing on pecuniary compensation, other victim issues 1
are ignored by the &bquo;Son-of-Sam&equo; model.
HLG:1721 At the trial, it was established that Nelson had joined the UDA in 1972, and offered his 1
services to military intelligence in 1983.
B2M:174 After detailed examination of the information fields, it was felt that it would be possible 1
to categorise them by type as a basis for selecting areas for further study.
EVX:451 (Lewis, 1973, p. 33; Stalnaker, 1975, p. 173) It is said that this proves the failure of 1
transitivity — the three statements are Unexceptionable and the third does not follow from the
first two.
J6R:807 However, it has been judicially observed that the objection to a rent representing a 1
percentage of the tenant's turnover is that, if the price of a commodity rises at a faster rate than the
cost of living, pressure is likely to develop on dealers in that commodity to reduce their margin of
profit or rate of commission (Naylor v Uttoxeter UDC (1974) 231 EG 619 per Brightman J).
HLB:4521 It was expected that the harvest reaching the shops would be only half that of 1990. 1
K55:7444 But during consultations between Darlington Council, Durham County Council and the 1
emergency services it was agreed that the system should work.
HJM:426 It may be that few people in Japan have yet made this connection, or realise the sheer 1
scale of the catastrophe in Africa.
Appendix 16 94
A0R:1986 The yellow steps rose in steep flights but now it was clear that when she reached the top 1
she would also be at the bottom, starting out.
EF4:562 &bquo;It was&equo;, he would read, &bquo;inevitable that the Solidarity revolution was 1
sparked off by the Gdansk shipyard workers.
CBR:300 Hence we might find instances of accuracy in the production of such formulas as fixed 1
phrases but it does not follow that the learner can transfer the accurate production of forms to a
wider range of constructions and contexts.
C8F:551 It therefore follows that if car speeds cannot be reduced, large residential areas can make 1
gains in both their environmental traffic qualities and in their safety only by the dilution of the
shared-space ideal by the provision of footpaths as pedestrian refuges.
CRJ:872 The earliest known map calls the group &bquo;S.Kilda&equo;, and in the old Norse 1
language the name &bquo;Kelda&equo; means &bquo;spring&equo; or &bquo;well&equo;, so it
seems possible that the islands, which do have a number of freshwater springs, were used as a
watering-place by the Vikings when they were involved in their warlike raiding and invasions of
the northern parts of Britain.
G31:874 Following the success of the first Alumni Teachers' Meeting at the University's Schools' 1
Open Day, it is intended that such meetings will become a regular event.
J18:61 It has been suggested that pioneers are able to tolerate high rates of herbivory because of 1
their &bquo;cheaper&equo; leaves and faster growth rates.
A6T:164 It is easy to assume that with so limited a population and tourists numbering a fraction of 1
those who head for the sun, protection of the countryside is straightforward.
EW1:1296 It may even be that the coupon helped to limit the size of the Unionist victory and to 1
prolong the life of the Liberal Party.
HGX:753 Even then it is not obvious that this measure will actually yield the projected area. 1
HPD:1544 It is essential that any topic should meet all of the following: 1
CTY:1327 After all, if &bquo;the system&equo; really was bent upon the form of totalizing control 1
that according to Foucault psychoanalysis, for example, enables, it is worth recalling that
psychoanalysis has never been adopted by the state as such and that its activities remain confined
to a few very limited districts in a handful of prosperous cities round the world.
EVA:310 It could be argued that the very incomprehensibility of the modern world has made us 1
even more credulous.
FRT:1178 An interim injunction was granted to the local authority employers by the judge on the 1
ground that it was &bquo;improbable&equo; that there was &bquo;no serious issue to be
tried&equo;.
AMY:13 it was felt that the happenings of these momentous years of the early eighties would, 1
with the passage of time, become clouded in the memory of those of us who witnessed them.
CKS:313 And while one would like to think that opting out might allow schools greater freedom 1
to develop their own distinctive philosophy, it seems probable that the vetting of proposals for
opting-out will allow only those schools that are choosing to be more, not less, traditional, to do
so.
HHX:2150 Nor is there any serious basis on which it can be argued that there is a party political 1
divide over the particular of reducing tobacco consumption among children.
HPY:639 Thus, it is quite predictable that there should be a means of questioning the verb and the 1
adjective taken together, as indeed there is, although this happens to be a phrasal form — what…
do to…? — rather than a single interrogative word; cf. (13) or (17) and (18).
HX1:178 However it has also been suggested that in areas such as science, engineering and 1
medicine, the linearity of knowledge between school and higher education poses particular
difficulties for mature students if their levels of preparedness in appropriate subjects compares
unfavourably with traditionally qualified school leavers.
HWD:396 It has been estimated that during the last forty years of the seventeenth century 1
between 100,000 and 150,000 people crossed the Atlantic Ocean to start a new life in America.
HTE:802 It should be noted that AS levels in modern languages may not always be regarded as 1
satisfying faculty and course entry requirements; applicants offering these qualifications are
advised to consult the Faculty Office.
ALU:1058 Lists of these were regularly published in the Philosophical Transactions and it is 1
highly probable that Miller, when he was well established at Chelsea, was involved in the
selection of these.
HXV:1570 It would also appear that any consequential economic loss may be recovered. 1
FBE:1208 This is a natural consequence of the Copernican system once it is established that the 1
orbits of Mercury and Venus are inside that of the earth.
CJ3:1569 It is especially interesting that the highest concentrations of the toxins occur in the 1
butterfly's wings rather than in its body.
K5D:9023 It has been argued that it would make sense for whoever runs the train services to also 1
Appendix 16 95
take responsibility for the track.

EVX:524 In that world, to be brief, it could be an accident or mere coincidence that the rain was 1
accompanied by the balcony's being wet.
H81:600 If the defendant's contention were adopted, it would result that in no case of a doubtful 1
claim could a compromise be enforced.
APT:1043 He mainly collected Italian and Flemish paintings of the 16 and 17C and it appears that 1
some of the paintings were bought from the Kunstkammer of Emperor Rudolf II.
CBX:445 It is a defence, however, if the defendant can satisfy the court that it was not known or 1
suspected that drug trafficking was involved, or that he disclosed his knowledge or suspicion to
the relevant authorities.
ANH:92 If he wisely orders his men to occupy a certain hill it does not follow that they had reason 1
to occupy that hill even before they were ordered to do so.
FS6:573 With the changes in housing association operation as a result of the 1988 Housing Act, it 1
seems unlikely that these organizations, in the past an important supplier of accommodation for
older people, will be able dramatically to increase their share of provision.
APX:748 And it is well known that, being required to prepare designs for a useless and costly 1
object by one of our leading nobility, long since deceased, one of princely fortune, but who had an
extravagant passion for building, he purposely appealed to the son to advise his father to give the
intention&equo;.
EA6:877 Once the commitment was public, and peasant expectations soared, it rapidly became 1
clear that the government could not back-track without risking explosion from below.
EAY:1453 Reagan was supported by an exceptionally talented staff in his first term and it might 1
be said that his legislative triumphs can best be explained by the quality of the team around him.
HNW:1687 Considering the nature of this attitude factor, with its stress on effectiveness it is 1
perhaps surprising that reported changes in schools are not differentially associated with it.
HHX:6648 As for communication, there is no way of knowing whether a cab radio would have 1
made any difference in this accident, but I agree with my hon. Friend that it is desirable that cab
radios should be fitted into locomotives and multiple unit fleets.
CA8:405 &bquo;It was afterwards discovered that the young Maltese soldier was on his first night 1
as a sentry, with instructions to stop any passing car with his lamp and if the car didn't stop to fire
his rifle over the top of it.
CBT:3204 It is suggested that, as in the US, this should be a means of injecting share capital into a 1
company without going through the formalities of a share issue.
CEK:4120 It is not that she no longer feels for her children. 1
AC7:1226 I thought it was rather a bad sign that I was told I could, as a family friend, go in at any 1
time.
HWY:333 It is anticipated that most students will reach MBA level within two to three years. 1
CRF:576 Fourth, it seems that, as with parents and children, we need to be aware that there are 1
likely to be quite wide fluctuations in support passing between siblings over the lifetime of each.
FP2:334 On this basis it could be argued that companies should indeed be regarded as purely 1
private organisations, and that state intervention in their internal affairs constitutes an improper
interference with the moral rights of the participants.
G0X:3219 She reminded herself that it was unlikely that all people could possibly be as stupid as 1
she supposed them to be; that at some level even she, Lydia the clever, could find common
ground and communicate intelligibly with other human beings.
HL6:369 On April 19, it was reported that President Kenneth Kaunda had dismissed Dodson 1
Siatalimi, the third Defence Minister to be dropped since the failed coup of July 1990 [see
also pp. 37523; 37909].
H0B:1089 Jackson did promise some attention to the matter but it seems that nothing was granted. 1
GW6:453 In the case of the Earth it has been estimated that this could lead to an underabundance 1
of xenon in the atmosphere of a factor of 10 or more.
FA9:110 If theorists attempted this task it is likely that they would find themselves following in 1
the footsteps of the more deterministic elements of Durkheim's sociology, which have not the
aspects they have favoured so far (Deutscher, 1984; Farr, 1984).
ANC:1471 It is perhaps fortuitous that Healing appeared when he did, his milling business 1
helping to fill the void.
EFD:895 It was not good enough that the IDB say they don't know what to do to develop West 1
Belfast; this issue should be addressed.
JY3:1936 It was just that it was intriguingly difficult to tell if he was issuing blunt ultimatums to a 1
financial contact, or responding to some emotional problem at the other end of the line…
EV5:1291 It is important that adequate pre-discharge assessment takes place to ensure that 1
patients do not go home to situations where they are unable to cope or inadequately supported.
FSE:3276 Tulagai was flushed and it was apparent that Jotan had been baiting him for some time. 1
Appendix 16 96
B0W:87 It was also envisaged that they would play an advocacy and educational role on behalf of 1
dementia sufferers throughout their area.
J6N:1323 The following are the main reasons for including the debtors and creditors in the asset 1
sale: It is probable that the purchaser will have taken over all the books and records of the vendor
relating to the business and the purchaser may have also taken over all of the vendor's accounting
staff.
ASF:453 Jacqueline de Romilly, Professor of Greek Literature at the Sorbonne, in her Messenger 1
Lectures at Cornell University in 1967 on &bquo;Time in Greek Tragedy&equo;, has argued that it
was no coincidence that Greek tragedy was born at the same time as historiography.
FR4:406 It is also worth remembering that since it is the older type of housing that lacks basic 1
amenities, elderly people are more likely to live in such accommodation.
BN3:218 During construction in the mid-nineteenth century, it was apparent that our street had 1
been better planned, with better material used and more care taken.
H7Y:335 The principate of Severus probably saw the greatest expansion, and it is perhaps no 1
coincidence that it may have been he who introduced the annona militaris , a tax paid in grain or
other materials to meet the needs of the army.
ANC:944 The demand for flour continued to rise and it soon became apparent that considerable 1
savings in both costs and labour could be effected if the repeated handling and transportation
could be reduced.
EW8:923 It is usually postulated that some association between infant or childish sexual 1
satisfaction and the fetish object — a strong but not necessarily direct association — is responsible
for its significance to the individual.
CLW:942 It is ironic that the (MSC's) Holland Report was published in the same year (1977) as the 1
Shirley Williams' Green Paper on education which followed on from &bquo;The Great
Debate&equo;.
GW1:124 Moreover, it was felt that acts other than penetration could be equally traumatic. 1
F9G:1657 However, as much of this stock has not become owner-occupied, it may well be that 1
increases in market values will cope with the disrepair problem.
HS3:582 It is pure coincidence that the date of his birthday was 1st April. 1
HAE:448 It was argued that the rule of having only Yorkshire-born players was the perfect way of 1
keeping out the non-whites.
EVX:1182 They are such that it is merely true that they might happen or might have happened. 1
FRL:1345 Since information focus normally falls on the rheme or part of it, and since unmarked 1
information structure involves placing the given element before the new one and unmarked
thematic structure involves placing theme before rheme, it is not surprising that theme often
coincides with given, and rheme often coincides with new.
EBM:1265 It might be argued that this scheme puts the claimant who at present has a choice 1
whether or not to use Ord. 53, at a disadvantage because under the new scheme he or she would
have to seek leave and would possibly be subject to very restrictive time-limits.
J2K:766 Since discourse unfolds in time, it seems natural that time-deictic words can be used to 1
refer to portions of the discourse; thus analogously to last week and next Thursday, we have in
the last paragraph and in the next Chapter.
ALC:419 It was curious that grass production did not warrant a high response when this crop 1
accounted for 83% of the arable land.
CMA:1197 It is a common perception that during the 1950s biology replaced physics as the most 1
exciting domain of science.
CE7:874 It is true that some powerful people, notably Winston Churchill, favoured military 1
intervention.
A0C:129 &bquo;It is most surprising that in the tourism industry the necessity for language 1
training to meet the growing demand for overseas visitors is not felt to be important,&equo; the
report said.
C97:2466 Unfortunately it is then suggested that you repeat the calibration each time you use the 1
unit.
K55:317 He said when Mr McKay's sick note was sent in it was not picked up that it had anything 1
to do with the accident.
EAX:651 The years from 1966 to 1969 saw real GDP growing in excess of 10 per cent annually and, 1
with growth at twice the level of Japan's competitors, it was confidently expected that the
substantial differences in productivity levels between large and small firms would be eroded.
FRB:1752 It was also true that the Gang of Four would obviously lead a new party whereas their 1
position within the Liberal organization would have been uneasy and uncertain.
AB6:1202 So it was not really surprising that despite his upwardly mobile outlook, Collor 1
attended the paupers' summit in June 1990 at which fifteen debtor nations from the
underdeveloped South discussed their predicament.
Appendix 16 97
ABH:2611 But once it became clear that most Algerians supported Iraq, the FIS quickly did the 1
same.
HLB:5258 Further concern centred on a proposal to award full employment rights to temporary or 1
migrant workers working on temporary contract, of whom it was estimated that there were over
1,000,000 in April 1990.
HHW:1171 I recently saw a delegation from the new regime in Ethiopia, and it is obvious that that 1
country needs know-how as much as anything.
J2E:109 It is essential that development of the Single Market does not compound regional 1
inequalities, causing massive emigration from poorer regions and inefficient
&bquo;overheating&equo; in richer regions.
AP7:1029 It is also noticeable that slightly fewer men than women informants reveal any 1
significant memory.
CKM:38 It follows that for practical purposes, the word &bquo;type&equo; ought to be retained… 1
&bquo;
EEM:558 It is true that, from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century, the pursuit of natural 1
knowledge was often subordinate to theological concerns.
FYX:889 At the moment, at least, it seems that gravity can be unified with the other physical 1
interactions only in some supergravity theory.
K1E:3214 Although it'll be decades before the reactor can be made completely safe, experts say it's 1
unlikely that any more major damage will be caused.
K5D:5692 The Prison Officers Association said it was astounding that it was so easy to escape 1
from a building which was supposed to be secure.
FBC:1403 Finally, it should be noted that while a system of guide-lines might be expected to 1
reduce disparity in sentencing, there is no guarantee that it would reduce the overall level of
punitiveness.
CAG:901 Its tally of 184,445 was its highest ever and it is likely that the personal vote for John 1
Hume, its leader, in Foyle, and the conversion of Eddie McGrady's marginal in South Down to a
600-plus majority, will have been boosted by some Protestant crossover.
EVV:836 tines longer than 30cm will not fit conveniently on conventional sized paper (A4) and it 1
may well be that because of this many pupils had relatively little experience of measuring or
drawing such lines.
FAV:1023 In the former illustration it is assumed that the replacement vehicles will simply 1
provide a similar service to those vehicles presently operated.
BPK:88 It is hoped that both this trophy, and the unique race for which it is awarded, continue to 1
appear every third Thursday in March.
EVJ:1159 It seems likely that once the board schools were well established for both sexes, by the 1
1880s, the same thing will have been true of girls.
CKN:719 The radical instability of the Modernist view of knowledge, whether moral or social, was 1
manifest; and if Iris Murdoch, among the new novelists, was alone in her capacity as a
professional philosopher to counter poor arguments with better, it was equally clear that no one
had to be a philosopher to see that the scepticisms of the inter-war years were implausible and
ultimately self-contradicting.
BLW:586 Geoffrey Ross comments &bquo;It has been noticed that many men wash their hair in 1
water that is too hot (which over-stimulates the sebaceous glands and so makes the scalp greasier
than it should be) and are rough-actioned with the towel when drying the hair.
BMA:903 Given this overall approach it was clear that the question of the so-called worker- 1
peasant alliance was to be one of the main economic, social and political problems in the period
that lay ahead.
B08:1172 In the industrial context, too, it might be relevant to consider whether your reputation 1
will be damaged if it becomes widely known that you have had your work taken away from you.
HTV:232 It is no wonder that the United States keeps such a large navy patrolling the trade routes 1
of the world.
G1G:1385 But it should also be emphasised that the limitations on peripheral leverage are severe. 1
G31:209 It is argued that the lobby is used to channel dis-information to a gullible public. 1
HWU:1411 Still, the final details of the Quebec package have yet to be determined, although it 1
appears that the province won't be asking these people to renounce their right to sue.
A5R:471 It seems remarkable that the three who remained in France did not abandon their 1
mission following the arrests in Ireland.
HY5:638 It could also be argued that this would help to build up a body of men with substantial 1
diplomatic experience from which the diplomats of the future might be drawn.
AMM:1800 As noticed (p. 59) it is now known that the graptolites were an extinct branch of the 1
phylum Hemichordata, an insignificant group today, consisting of a few encrusting colonial
organisms.
Appendix 16 98
CS7:1096 It was proposed that land should be identified at both hospitals which could be released 1
to fund new community services.
ASL:520 Returning to the sea-urchin embryo, it can be seen that the animal-vegetal differences 1
could be used to establish the boundary regions, that is, which end is to be which.
G0G:830 Among the West Saxons it may be that it was Aethelbald's support which enabled 1
Aethelheard to defeat the aetheling, Oswald, and that this established both Aethelheard and his
brother, Cuthred, who subsequently succeeded Aethelheard in 739, as Aethelbald's dependants or
at least obliged them to make territorial concessions.
K59:1564 It was agreed that if it did, the disclaimer would have no effect because the defenders 1
were not able to show that it was fair and reasonable to incorporate it in the contract.
ANA:1212 It is said that mentally handicapped people do not normally enjoy a happy life. 1
ABB:798 For many years it was considered that tea-bags were filled only with tea dust, the fine 1
residue left after the sorting and packaging of tea, and that the drink obtained by using bags was
therefore of very inferior quality.
EAU:428 A minimum of self discipline should prevent abuse of this feature, and it is anticipated 1
that the system capacity will be sufficient for the nine lexicographers.
ED4:496 Jackie Drake was denied Invalid Care Allowance because it had been assumed that 1
married women didn't need to work.
APR:39 It was immediately clear that the book had been undisturbed for a very long time, 1
perhaps even since it had been laid to rest.
K1T:1655 It's likely that we shall also discover new species. 1
CL6:242 Once the Bible began to be approached as historical material, open to critical historical 1
study, it was natural that the New Testament, and in particular the life and personality of Jesus
himself, should come to be re-examined.
HL9:1398 It was revealed on July 25 that Fuji Bank, the country's fourth-largest commercial bank, 1
had dismissed four employees at the centre of an illegal loans scheme using forged deposit
certificates worth 260,000 million yen (about &dollar;2,000 million).
ASK:416 It is quite true that Corbett has been applied to situations outside marriage, eg. , the 1
alteration of birth certificates, unfair dismissal ( White v.
CMU:760 It was found that although a four-week tutorial programme had been prepared, the 1
children in the mainstream school were far more receptive and accepting of the situation and
could not see any reason for delaying the child's integration.
HC2:772 In particular, it has been confirmed that changes announced in the Budget to the Loan 1
Guarantee Scheme will come into effect on 1 July 1993.
G2V:2407 Where the Prime Minister of the UK goes, for instance, it would seem that at least 50 1
assorted helpers and hangers-on must go, too.
CE9:1202 There were seven people in our dormitory and I think five were awake; we all heard the 1
mysterious sounds without any doubt but it appeared that none of the inhabitants of the other
dormitories heard anything at all.
BN7:1510 Not many children try solvents before the age of 11, and it seems that the peak age for 1
experimenting is around 13 or 14 years.
HU3:6354 It is suggested that the fibrosis seen in this disorder has its origin in the transformation 1
of smooth muscle fibres from a purely contractile to a myofibroblast collagen synthetic
phenotype.
AB6:561 It is estimated that every year more than 200 billion tonnes of carbon are exchanged 1
between the atmosphere, living things and the ocean in a natural cycle.
B0W:53 We had wanted two contrasting areas (more than two would have been preferable of 1
course in terms of the extent to which one could generalise from our findings but the projects
would become expensive and it was acknowledged that we could not include more than two),
and Ipswich and Newham were felt to fill this requirement.
BLW:793 It is important that no decision is taken without thorough investigation of all the 1
possibilities, and that everyone is satisfied that the decision taken is the best all-round solution.
HLK:2190 Following a meeting between representatives of the Central European Initiative (CEI, 1
the former Hexagonale — see p. 38786) and Bulgarian officials on May 6, it was announced that
Bulgaria would take part in four CEI working groups, on the environment, small and medium-
size businesses, transport and communications.
EES:919 This is because their world knowledge tells them that the banks found near rivers are not 1
usually of the financial type (although it must be stressed that this interpretation is not wrong , it
is just less likely ).
CA8:385 It also seems that at least one Hurricane had got into the air, for Sgt. &bquo;Jock&equo; 1
Norwell of 261 Squadron noted in his logbook that he too was attacked by a Messerschmitt on this
date, and his aircraft was damaged.
EVV:1382 Again, validity needs to be considered, and it seems likely that the length of 2.8 cm can 1
Appendix 16 99
be obtained by using a whole number strategy which avoids the use of decimal concepts.
CE8:1168 It is therefore not surprising that this should also be reflected in a rise in demand for 1
health care.
HBK:24 It is hoped that a visit to Hunterston by staff of the Ukraine Station will be arranged early 1
in 1993.
CLS:112 The craze hit Dallas in 1907 and it was observed that the first audiences were made up of 1
women and children; only later did men follow.
FDC:364 It will be readily apparent that the section is silent on the question which arises in the 1
present case, namely whether a minor who has attained the age of 16 years has an absolute right
to refuse medical treatment.
J27:103 Nevertheless, it is recognised that the young person is becoming increasingly influenced 1
by the world in which he/she lives — in the main a pluralist and secular world.
HY5:1239 In 1856 French secretaries of embassy and legation were divided into three classes and 1
it was ordered that no one was to reach the third and lowest class without having already served
as an attaché for three years, while everyone must spend at least three more in each class before
being promoted to a higher one.
K97:16573 He said: &bquo;It is an absolute disgrace that a new hospital should have so many 1
faults and defects in its water systems.
C9V:384 Although theoretically any potency can be used, in practice it was found that some 1
potencies were more effective than others.
B7C:2082 It is pertinent that WHO has been sponsoring comparable field trials in African 1
countries to confirm the adequacy of safety margins in case of inadvertent exposure to pest
control agents.
K5X:102 It is worth noting that Oct-1 and Oct-2 have extensive sequence homology within this 1
region, and both are multiply spliced within their coding regions (18, 20, 21, 29, 46).
CD6:559 &bquo;It's not my fault that these people don't understand what dancing is. 1
EDL:658 It is submitted that this leaves in place the binding character of Article 13 of the original 1
Convention as to service of documents by accredited consular or diplomatic agents.
FSE:94 Rostov was not sure what purpose his stateroom had served previously but it was obvious 1
that it had been occupied by at least four persons, all of whom had been possessed of diverse
tastes with regard to the minimal decoration which was permissible aboard a ship designed for
deep space exploration.
JY9:316 Deal or no mysterious deal, now that it had been established that he had not tracked her 1
down all she wanted was for him to go.
H8T:1806 It struck me he might have come up with something one day that wasn't just 1
embarrassing but downright scandalous.
CLR:1049 Indeed, given the level of activity within the Six at this time and the patent way in 1
which Britain's Grand Design seemed to go against everything they were working for, it is
surprising that the Six were willing to discuss the scheme in the first place.
FD4:201 It is not contended that the duty arose out of contract: the contract was between the 1
defendants and Mrs. Walker, and so far as contract is concerned it was to Mrs. Walker the
defendants were liable for breach of it.
JXK:1013 It is intended that all the information will be presented in a graphical, rather than 1
tabular form and that, where relevant, concept /keyword maps will be inserted as part of the
access to the information.
AN3:566 Is it the case that the rural sector is undergoing a process of proletarianisation or 1
peasantisation?
AMM:1229 The Carboniferous is popularly known as the &bquo;Age of Amphibians&equo;, and 1
it is true that the amphibians reached a dominance in the vertebrate world at this time which they
never again equalled.
B1E:934 Thus, tourism and conservation are closely interlinked and, as Farrell and McLellan 1
(1987) point out, it is essential that tourism and its policy-makers should take account of the
sustainability concept which, while being particularly relevant to agricultural development and
forestry practices, is equally important in the context of tourism.
CM9:462 It is thus possible that, just as we are suggesting for some of the other finds at Mycenae, 1
it was taken from Knossos: if so, the implication is that other pieces of statuary and relief carving
from Minoan Knossos were also removed — by some Mycenean equivalent of Lord Elgin,
perhaps.
HP4:1407 It is said that each of these elements has a symbolic meaning. 1
FAM:1574 In the year 1981/82 it became clear that the evaluation project had had a number of 1
&bquo;spin-offs&equo;, for instance:
CRM:10957 The DNA-binding domain of CAP consists of residues 135–205 and includes helices 1
D, E and F. But, perhaps because of the irregularity in the second helix of the NMR structure of
Appendix 16 100
GH5, it was concluded that there was no correspondence between helix II of GH5 and helix E of
CAP and that there was no helix-turn-helix motif in GH5.
G2V:1177 Whatever the outcome, it's clear that affairs shake marriages — often to their roots. 1
H7Y:460 The officers, whether beneficiarii, stratores or regionarii , might have been in charge of, 1
and therefore accommodated in, the mansio , if one existed, though it has been argued that a
beneficiarius , usually only a legionary, was too junior in status to have charge of such an
important building.
GU5:217 In Sweden, it is claimed that nearly 10,000 lakes have such high concentrations of 1
mercury that any fish caught in them should not be eaten.
HX5:12 It is significant that many of the pilot initiatives of the Centre have already been accepted 1
as mainstream activities of the University.
CE8:504 Although it is certainly true that individuals can gain a false idea about the ease of 1
making money on the Stock Market, there is also no doubt that privatisation has generated
substantial interest in the Stock Market, much of it from new investors.
J2Y:423 Or is it that they are being manipulated by people in the soft wood trade… to tarnish the 1
good name of tropical hard wood?
EVX:1089 It may simply be said that what is needed for two events to be cause and effect as we 1
understand them is that the probability of the second, given the first, is higher than the probability
of the second, given the absence of the first.
HA6:2257 It was untenable that he should blame her for something that was not her fault. 1
EFD:258 It did, however, provide that the Agency, through investigation, could help to ensure 1
that employers promoted equality of opportunity in employment but it did not provide that
employers had a duty themselves to promote equality of opportunity in employment.
HL4:131 Only after the war was it revealed that reports concerning the role of the task force had 1
been an element of allied disinformation as it had already been decided not to conduct an
amphibious assault.
EC8:1093 It is significant that Buchan gave his middle-aged hero, the Glasgow grocer Dickson 1
McCunn, a literary ancestry:.
CFE:1431 Organisations have to provide services in advance of knowing precisely which 1
individuals will use them, and it is inevitable that to some extent the individual has to &bquo;fit
in&equo; with what is on offer.
GU5:366 However, it is now generally agreed that there is a large range of uncertainty in the 1
numerical results quantifying the risks of an accident, as recent reactor accidents have
highlighted.
H0C:638 We were cruising slowly with no lights and as the other craft approached, it became 1
obvious that she was also without lights.
K5A:3809 Thus it is likely Derek Turnbull will find himself on occasions deployed in that region. 1
B2D:439 It has been recognised that without sufficient processing capacity a potentially serious 1
waste problem could arise.
HGX:1131 An attempt to determine the relationship was described in Chapter 4, and it was found 1
that the A-measure varies roughly linearly with the radiometer reading over a wide range of
exposures.
EW6:740 From this it follows that they satisfy the exclusion principle. 1
EDC:1288 During the process of interviewing the known sector, it was found that, because of the 1
enigmatic lifestyle of heroin users, an average of three or four home visits were necessary before
the interview with any given individual successfully took place.
JXY:647 She couldn't care less what he had been up to, but quite suddenly it had become 1
imperative that she steer the conversation away from herself and divert the interest he was
showing in her.
K52:6846 It is quite possible that the obvious has been overlooked. 1
HHY:563 It is well known that survey data is subject to a variety of sources of measurement error 1
such as misreporting, recall errors and telescoping of past incidents to give a false historical
record.
BMH:75 In our view it is manifestly not right that councillors should allow their personal opinions 1
on a political or industrial matter to stand in the way of the right of access of the public to all
publications which can reasonably be provided.
JXM:447 Total membership fluctuated widely around 5,000 and it is clear that many members 1
only stayed with the Party for a short time.
HA0:2201 It was true that the shower curtain should have been renewed. 1
HL7:3798 In November 1990 it was reported that discussions were taking place among opposition 1
parties about the formation of a united front to challenge the NDP.
CHF:1357 Looking at the remaining 16 error cases from our system (see table 5.4) in more detail, it 1
is clear that some of these can in fact be solved by applying some simple substitutions where the
Appendix 16 101
recognition has failed.

HLN:1208 On Aug. 13 it was reported that a Manila judge had dismissed 11 of the 39 charges 1
against Marcos on the grounds that the government's de-regulation of foreign exchange dealings
had removed the court's authority to hear charges relating to currency violations arising from the
overseas bank accounts held by Marcos.
EEC:621 The Cabinet agreed that in these circumstances it was inevitable that the decision on this 1
issue should be left to a free vote.
GUB:280 It is important that the instructions are followed carefully in view of the many different 1
types of fibres and finishes used in modem fabrics.
HNW:428 It does seem that the inspection provided a dimension in the appraisal process which 1
otherwise would have been lacking.
HHX:5341 The recovery is slow and patchy, but the policy is sound — Labour Members who 1
laugh and snigger at such remarks ought to ask themselves why it is that Britain of all the
countries in Europe has the most inward investment from overseas investors.
KA5:254 It was proposed that the shop stewards work on a brief response to Michael Taylor's 1
memo and present to SMT members before the meeting where decision would be taken.
K55:7542 It's wrong that everybody is not treated the same way. 1
K27:1809 It's important that people on TV don't just stay icons, but meet people in living colour, if 1
you don't mind the pun!
ABA:637 And so it came about that while the Operational Staffs of the three Service Ministries 1
were grappling with the Suez crisis of 1956, which entailed increasing the Defence effort and
calling up reservists to fill gaps in the order of battle for the contingency plan Musketeer , they
were answering questions posed by the Hull Committee about the implications of halving Service
manpower by April 1960 or 1961 at the very latest!
AE6:287 Since so much had been done peacefully through economic change, population increases, 1
emigration and Parliamentary legislation, it is not surprising that ministers, like others, naturally
assumed that progress through the same channels would continue ad infinitum .
CRM:9719 If the Alfvén speed is of order , it follows that the pressure of the molecular gas in the 1
bulge, , is about three orders of magnitude higher than that of the diskgas.
EVB:164 It may appear that putting this strategy into practice will take more time than the 1
conventional practice of writing words in the children's own spelling books.
GW1:750 Indeed, it seems that the Committee was less concerned with certainty than with 1
checking the expansion of the law of rape heralded by Olugboja .
HL4:892 It was proposed that the budget of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration 1
(NASA) should rise by &dollar;1,200 million to &dollar;14,700 million, including &dollar;175
million for design work on a new family of heavy lift rockets.
EVP:1316 It is certainly not self-evident that the central institutions of political democracy are, in 1
their present forms, well designed to play their central role in a democratic polity and society.
HJ5:2033 It is inevitable that the lawyers will reach deadlock in their negotiations over the 1
detailed terms in the purchase and sale agreement.
HC2:282 It was made clear that a management buy-out was not on the agenda. 1
A6G:318 It was clear that the dominant element in his government, that is, the Conservatives, 1
were determined upon an election.
CU0:1423 It was fitting that his last innings for Middlesex should bring him 221 — his highest 1
first-class score.
ASR:145 It was obvious that oceanic crust must be continually destroyed somewhere at a rate 1
comparable with that of its creation at the oceanic ridges in order to maintain a balance.
BNB:690 It was always my opinion that a strong squadron kept at sea to the westward and a 1
squadron of smaller ships in the North Seas were the only secure guardians to these His Majesty's
kingdoms against invasions.
K8X:1283 In 1985, BR announced that it was withdrawing from existing agreements with the 1
unions, although it seemed unlikely that this would seriously reduce the level of unionization.
HPM:1213 It appeared that for exemplars of the generally risky junctions risk ratings were 1
positively correlated with P(A).
ECB:1185 And why is it that not one of the seven demands of the women's movement specifically 1
addresses questions of housing?
HHW:5384 It was clear that the Government were not able to get their legislation right at the first 1
attempt.
HU3:7268 ONly in one report was it suggested that &bquo;fundic gland metaplasia&equo; was a 1
transient lesion, which tended to disappear spontaneously within a few months.
BM4:735 Lighting columns now have to be to regulation safety standards, and it is hoped that the 1
new lights chosen will be complementary to the street.
B30:1292 In one study of a small group of wrist-slashers it was found that more than half were 1
Appendix 16 102
well, or had shown improvement, 5–6 years later (Nelson and Grunebaum 1971).
AYJ:1432 Because you are so familiar with the evidence it may seem obvious that certain 1
proposals or actions should follow.
ACH:26 In addition, it became clear that there was a substantial restructuring of population as 1
regional migration occurred to the expanding light industry areas of the Midlands and the South
East and from the declining industrial areas of Scotland, Wales and the North.
CEY:2241 It was perfectly obvious that this man had been allowed to get very close to both 1
English and Italian girls and, she decided, had probably known a great many of both.
K2L:860 Despite the brinkmanship it's virtually certain that Tbilisi will go ahead with the appeal 1
— and lodge it before the deadline.
EBM:620 For example, in one case it was held that electrical contractors, as such, had no right to 1
complain that a local authority had not followed proper tendering procedures in letting out a
contract for the installation of central heating.
H81:1491 It is to be noticed that in the Sixth Interim Report of the Law Revision Committee, paras. 1
K23:150 It's a compliment that Rover have asked the Faringdon factory to build the new 1
bodyshells.
HHX:6918 If there is such an emergency, why is it that there is no analogous Bill for Scotland? 1
BMB:1902 Later it was revealed that its founder had completed a three-year prison sentence only 1
six months before becoming a GRE agent.
K24:854 It's claimed that he was secretly paid commission for awarding work to three firms in 1
Italy, Germany and Norway.
B01:1169 The report's publication followed a conference at which it was estimated that older 1
people were then spending upwards of £14 billion a year in the marketplace.
FU3:2668 Perhaps the mightiest indoor rally ever held in Britain, Mosley had no sooner begun to 1
speak than it became clear that organised Red gangs, each hundreds strong, were occupying
positions in every part of the huge arena… with the sole intention of preventing the speech being
heard.
H8U:678 As work has progressed, it can be seen that every part of the definition of DMVs can be 1
subjected to debate.
HJD:773 As the advancing figures crossed the highway towards them, it became evident that four 1
of them were unwilling members of the group.
G1R:162 It is possible that some Latin American judgements that Soviet goods are uncompetitive 1
are founded in the belief that Soviet producers take less trouble over &bquo;aesthetic&equo;
qualities, such as finish, than do their Western rivals.
HRE:704 It was widely believed that, as Iran was known to have massed troops all the way along 1
the frontier, this move, though sizeable, was a trick to conceal the real intention, a thrust in the
south or centre.
HXX:808 Taken with Gaimar's story, however, it is more likely that these men were the Welsh of 1
Wales.
HX8:1733 A copy of the figures are enclosed and it was suggested that perhaps class members and 1
secretaries might be interested in seeing how their subscriptions are spent.
GT6:1229 He remained with Champneys until 1880, but it soon became clear that architecture 1
would never be his chief preoccupation.
HPD:686 It is recommended that those who have little or no experience of investigation 1
techniques should complete 81218 Community Welfare 1.
HJH:1115 Doesn't it occur to you that they could be used again? 3
HDA:521 So it was considered by the staff that the best solution would be to close the school for 3
the afternoon.
AE0:1477 It seemed to him that he was Kurz, in some strange way. 3
JXS:3830 It had struck her that perhaps that was where Jake had been going that night he'd called 3
her from Heathrow Airport — on a secret brief honeymoon with Janice after a quick, quiet register
office wedding.
CK5:3363 Why it's so unfortunate for England that other cultures seep into England. 3
GVA:1282 It was an implicit assumption of much of the early research carried out in 3
psycholinguistics in the 1960s (see Greene, 1972 for a review) that certain syntactic forms were
exactly equivalent in meaning.
H8N:1110 Doesn't it occur to you that they could be used again? 3
K9B:248 It struck me that all these people were getting excited about something we had made. 3
ADS:1086 It angered her that he appeared to think this amounted to a great concession. 3
EEC:319 Under Section 36 of the Criminal Justice Act 1988, where it appears to the Attorney 3
General that the sentencing of a person in the Crown Court has been unduly lenient he may refer
the case to the Court of Appeal, with leave, for the sentence to be reviewed.
CL2:335 It was typical of him that he &bquo;allowed everybody to ride it&equo;. 3
Appendix 16 103
H8Y:1493 It was typical of Edward Crumwallis that, even at this stage, his first reaction was an 3
instinctive determination to cover up.
ABM:785 It is not part of Locke's empiricism that we know these things by observation and 3
experience.
G3M:1241 It must be a condition of all seamen's canteen licences that food and non-intoxicating 3
drinks are always available while alcoholic liquor is being sold: subs.
ANH:920 It may mislead people into obeying the law where, but for their consent, it would have 3
been clear to them that it is better to disobey.
HBP:725 It is not a condition of the relief that a trainee must qualify at the end of a course. 3
CA9:1823 But the whole incident has depressed me and for the first time since being diagnosed it 3
occurs to me that I might be dying.
GU7:713 It need not surprise anybody that Victorian cities were unhealthy places. 3
HA6:1278 Obviously there was some kind of partnership involved, but it seemed to her that 3
Adam did most of the running of the outfit.
HH3:6194 It seemed to Elizabeth that it took people half an hour to greet each other each day. 3
J6X:316 It is a reasonable and probable consequence of a wrongdoer's breach of duty that a person 3
hurt will incur expenses in following the treatment prescribed by reputable experts employed by
him to cure him.
HHW:13919 It is a fundamental principle of the Bill that the impounded lake should permanently 3
cover the existing mudflats.
K21:2076 It went on to say it's a sad reflection on the Criminal Justice system and on society today 3
that this should have happened.
K97:12289 I think it is a tragic commentary on the state of the English game that Everton and 3
Forest, two sides who at least try to play, are third bottom and bottom respectively.
HLK:1664 It was announced on May 6, however, that two independent bills had been brought 5
before the Sejm to overrule the Doctors' Congress resolution.
CBN:1766 A shadow fell on them from time to time, from his own past as well as from hers, and it 5
seemed then that they were threatened by some evil which could blot out their joy at a moment's
notice.
EEM:1267 It must not be supposed, therefore, that the desire of Protestants to dissociate 5
themselves from Catholic Christianity automatically created a disposition in favor of free thought.
CKP:96 It is estimated with some reliability that one in five of those aged 85 and over now suffer 5
from dementia (Norman 1987a: 2).
HPD:1584 It is essential, however, that the student takes responsibility for the final decisions on 5
the selection of strategies and means of implementation.
G3S:2524 We carried on a rather halting conversation and it came to me with a bump that my 5
mind had been forced on to different tracks since I had left her.
K97:9449 IT SEEMS to me to be tough on Dr John Bromley, head of a four-GP practice, that he 5
should take sole blame after a two-year-old boy had wandered into a surgery and swallowed
some carbolic acid which should have been locked away.
GVG:494 However, in two later cases courts have refused to follow this and, it must surely be 5
right (at any rate if the price has been paid) that the buyer obtains such rights as the transferor
had.
AM7:213 This pessimism may have some truth given the present management approach within 5
our schools but it is suggested here that if that managerial frame of reference was itself to be
radically re-oriented, then teachers' perceptions of their own professionality would also be
powerfully affected and they may indeed come to feel that effective classroom activity was
positively related to their performance in the wider school context.
HXF:242 It is perhaps not surprising, therefore that from the early days when the state became 5
involved in the education of the masses one of the principal aims of the curriculum enunciated by
successive Presidents of the Board of Education, Ministers of Education and Secretaries of State
for Education has been that of the preparation for citizenship.
H97:4089 As he handed her one of the glasses their eyes met briefly, and it occurred to Lisa, for 5
just a fleeting instant, that he was feeling almost as nervous as she was.
ASK:1746 It is conceded, however, that liability may follow some omissions, when there is a 5
relationship between the victim and the defendant imposing on the defendant a duty to act.
H0R:1404 It was said by his acquaintances in the pub that he gave value for money, but there was 5
a touch of genius in the way he talked that night.
CMS:1371 It was stated frequently by solicitors that the effective choice of solicitor by the 5
unrepresented defendant is either the duty solicitor or a named or identifiable solicitor.
CAR:1047 Support in South Ronaldsay and the neighbouring island of Burray had grown so 5
strong, and there was so much anger, that it was decided within the community that this strength
should be channelled into action.
Appendix 16 104
HHW:13771 It is important to understand — this is too often misunderstood — that access funds 5
are not intended to be a replacement for the social security benefits to which most students are no
longer entitled.
G20:1339 It should be noted, too, that most of the experimental schemes have not included 5
commercial enterprises.
ALS:188 It is fortunate also that I, as Mayor, have full powers as a Magistrate. 5
CRR:3 Eighteenth-century politics have long had an unsavoury reputation, and although in the 5
case of Scotland much of that reputation can be traced to the persuasive, but not strictly accurate,
writings of Henry Cockburn and other Whig reformers of the early nineteenth century, it must be
conceded at the outset that there is something to be said for the received account.
A0V:503 So you see, it's the opinion of the majority (and including the crazy fan) that Steffi is 5
great!
GVR:1311 It was not alleged by the inspector that there was any obstruction of the highway, nor 5
that any person present at the gathering had either committed, incited or provoked a breach of the
peace.
F9S:116 It is still popularly held, in the face of all the evidence, that women are incapable of doing 5
certain forms of work.
B2P:1279 It is clear, too, that the text is concerned with public as well as private matters: 5
Pomponius specifically gives as an example of an obligation which is purely moral (and, as he
puts it, rests on the auctoritas scribentis ) the case of a bequest for statues to be put up in a
municipality.
CAT:341 Mrs Williams was at the time the most popular women in the world, after Mother 5
Teresa, and it occurred to me, rather too late, that I was on to a loser here.
G21:877 It should be noted, however, that a few papers do still contain real rag content, as is 5
explained in the table.
CB1:33 It appears then that in the last resort, with all the facts before me, and all my ungrounded 5
principles logically ordered, I still have no grounds upon which to choose.
EDL:927 It would seem, however, that appropriate language in the relevant arbitration clause may 5
prevent a party seeking a Mareva injunction (or corresponding orders in other jurisdictions).
EDP:1247 It is not to be expected, however, that the killing of the fatted calf for the prodigal son 5
will evoke any more enthusiasm in his virtuous brother than it did in the scriptural parable.
B7J:1446 It appears, in fact, that the speed and reliability of a bee's flower memory at least roughly 5
corresponds to the degree of variability it is likely to encounter among flowers of the same species
in nature (including variation from day to day of an individual blossom).
FA6:616 It is clear too, that the arts are associated with sexual pleasure, the sciences with sexual 5
restraint….
EBM:6 But it should be said at the outset that none of the terms &bquo;check&equo;, 5
&bquo;control&equo; or &bquo;render accountable&equo; has a single clear meaning: there are
several ways of checking and controlling and several types of accountability.
GTF:403 It is clear, moreover, that Edward's counsel was valued on artistic matters. 5
K5C:697 It adds that many cannot afford the fuel required to keep even one room warm. 6
CRA:290 Yet it is also too much to hope that an improved economy will miraculously turn this 6
prime minister into a leader.
FP8:24 If a government exercises some &bquo;power without right,&equo; it seems to be 6
necessarily implied that the people have a corresponding right to resist.
HX8:1549 It is very heartening to know that so many of you are prepared to under-write the 6
future of the Society's works in such a positive way.
C8F:1401 However, it is also the basis for our belief that improving the pedestrian's lot would 6
deliver great benefits to an enormously large number of consumers.
F9W:939 The fact that meaning is not constructed from the formal language of the message alone 6
is crucial in explaining what it is that makes people perceive some stretches of language as
coherent discourse and others as disconnected jumbles.
HH3:173 Finally I had to reconcile myself — I really believe this, but it's not a thing you can say 6
without emotion and maybe regret — that, yes, life is sacred, but the quality of life is also
important, and it has to be the determining thing in this particular case.
K2D:2469 IT seems like only yesterday that Nigel Worthington set off from Ballymena to Notts 6
County with the Ulster Young Player of the Year trophy and a Bass Irish Cup winners medal in
his suitcase.
A18:1155 In the general excitement — the novel has scarcely begun — it gets borne in upon the 6
reader that Stavrogin's conduct is not the only thing to be puzzled by.
J2C:240 It is hoped that it will be possible to continue the post after the first appointment so that 7
there can be a series of three year appointments but this will be dependant on a review of the
financial position.
Appendix 16 105
ABR:938 It was also sad that no English spinner had been seen throughout the rubber, and that 7
both sides blatantly and cynically ignored the ruling about bowling 90 overs in a day, so that play
just continued until the light faded every day of the series; those two factors left many people
fearful for the game's future.
FD7:231 It is clearly established that the onus lies on the party repudiating the signed document to 7
establish the necessary ingredients of non est factum and it would, in my opinion, have been open
to the judge simply to have said that there was no evidence before him sufficient to establish Mrs.
Steed's lack of understanding of what she had signed.
K1J:2119 It may be that money worries are behind the disappearnce, but there's no firm evidence 7
to support that and police are carrying on with the investigation because there may yet be another
explanation.
EVA:1280 It is, however, undeniable that there is a great difference in the quality of experience 7
during REM bursts and REM quiescence, with visual and auditory hallucinatory sensations
characterizing the REM bursts, even if the difference is not quite as striking as was first thought.
CAW:726 It is of course true that there are parallels to certain of these ideas in Greek and Roman 7
philosophies, in Eastern religions, in the writings of mystics and in eighteenth-century sublime
poetry, and well-read and inquiring students like Wordsworth and Coleridge could not have
avoided hearing about them.
G3C:637 It was no small achievement that Athens and Aigina were reconciled in the national 7
cause; and the north, where Persian agents had long been active — not disdaining the use of
beautiful women among other weapons — was rotten with enemy propaganda.
BP0:663 He answered, when pressed, that he didn't know why, but it was understood that the 7
young fellow was mad, that is, Monseigneur the King was in one of his fits of impatience.
G16:1022 Soon it became clear that Sarah was seriously ill with rheumatic fever and would not be 7
able to work for some time, and another girl, Hetty, was engaged temporarily.
H7Y:692 It is likely that most small towns contained a tannery since the processes and equipment 7
needed for the production of leather were not entirely suitable for domestic use, apart from the
exceedingly unpleasant smell generated.
FA1:1242 … And at times in retrospect you wish you had taken a certain stat, because it turns out 7
that the whole thing has boiled up, completely beyond what you know it to be, but it's become
political and the authority is being attacked and the chiefs can't defend it and say, &bquo;OK.
HNL:1146 Yet it must be the case that the two valuation methods lead to the same fair price, 7
otherwise there is an inconsistency.
EBU:1317 It so happened that the Gulf War in Kuwait was filling our attention, and so I switched 7
on a video tape whenever something attracted me and I found that I would be most likely to
record the daily sessions on the BBC's Newsnight with Peter Snow discussing the disposition of
troops over the battle zone using a visual aid which is now known as the sandpit.
K45:364 It seems certain that the player will leave White Hart Lane if Venables is not re-instated 7
after his power struggle, and Spurs would ask at least £2m for Ruddock's services.
J6T:73 It was expected that case law would give rise to sufficient precedents to flesh out the 7
relatively few guidelines available under UCTA, but in fact cases have been few and not very
helpful.
AR3:534 Moreover, now that I come to think of it, it is perhaps not so surprising that it should also 7
have made a deep impression on Miss Kenton given certain aspects of her relationship with my
father during her early days at Darlington Hall.
G1F:794 First, because it is evident that many of the problems which the Authority identified in 7
1985 when it established PNP were centred as much on professional attitudes as professional
expertise — attitudes to children, to curriculum, to teaching methods, to parents, to ethnic
minority groups, to gender issues — and indeed we have picked up and reported the resilience of
many of the attitudes which the Authority sought to change.
HH3:9852 And it is essential that we should be the ones who control just which parts of our brains 7
we use so that we can achieve what we have decided are our goals.
C97:2347 It is improbable that any of them will be healing up yet if they have ulcers and it is 7
certainly too early to do any pond treatment, as this will only slow up the filter maturation
process.
CBT:3039 As far as BCCI is concerned, it is understood that a very high proportion of the loans 7
made by BCCI have some sort of deposit associated, and this will obviously make a substantial
difference to the amount which can be claimed on behalf of BCCI.
B2C:782 Conversely, it has also been shown that in the absence of another meal, the previous one 7
may be kept in the stomach for more than twice as long as usual (Chitty, 1938), presumably with a
gradual increase in stomach acidity, and the bones in this instance are likely to be strongly
modified or even totally destroyed.
HPH:1354 Members of the jury, it is clear that there is more here than meets the eye and I call on 7
you to reach the only verdict that matches the evidence;
Appendix 16 106
K5D:899 In fact, it is highly unlikely that the Government would use such a drastic step and 7
ministers have told Mr Major that politically it would have terrible consequences.
A0P:1542 (It will be remembered that he had studied drama at McGill, and the plays of Britain's 7
&bquo;angry young men&equo; had made waves in Canada.)
CEH:2566 It was odd, Lucinda thought, that men should be doing a job more suited to women, 7
but this was a real ship, wasn't it, on which, if Molly was to be believed, women had yet to
establish themselves.
C8R:326 It may be that some hereditary peers are well worth a place, but it is also true that some 7
who are not hereditary peers are equally deserving and it is hard to argue that they should not be
considered on their merits on the same basis, with life peerages being conferred on those most
suitable.
HU3:237 It is of interest that the positive tumours in the present series were both 7
&bquo;large&equo; polyps 2 cm in size, and that one had undergone focal malignant
transformation.
CLE:187 It is not only that, as with industrial relations generally, it is multidisciplinary in its 7
dimensions but it reaches across cultures — thereby exacerbating the difficulties of finding
appropriate bases for making inter-country comparisons.
CPW:31 IBM Corp significantly stepped up its efforts in the merchant semiconductor market late 7
Monday when it announced that it is now sampling the PowerPC 601 RISC microprocessor, with
production volumes shipping in the third quarter, and announced its entry into the application
specific market with CMOS and BiCMOS process technologies and access to industry-standard
ASIC design tools and new applications support services, aiming to deliver ASICs based on gate-
array and standard-cell technologies for computer and other systems manufacturers.
H0P:837 Simplistically, it would appear that this change could be accomplished merely by making 7
family planning information, services and supplies available to all women of reproductive age
and motivating them to use the services, confining childbearing to ages 20–34, reducing the total
number of pregnancies and lengthening inter-birth intervals, but much more is involved.
CBR:1232 It may be that this relexicalized version has not been actually attested and, may never 7
occur in the future but it acquires normality because it is relatively easy to conceive of a context
for it.
ACJ:792 It is true that the Attorney-General's Reference did not confront these particular issues 7
directly, and the Lord Chief Justice perhaps intended no more than a sweeping reference to other
kindred situations.
HHX:5173 It is terrible that, for 45 years, we have not done that — that is the scandal of our time. 7
EB7:1285 It is suggested that this was intended to represent a Roman cavalry standard-bearer, as 7
the insignia is not unlike an imago , similar to that held by Flavinus of the Ala Petriana , found
near Corbridge and now in Hexham Abbey.
CKP:809 It is true that Hannah's work on occupational pension schemes suggests that large 7
companies may have managed the retirement process in order to control their internal labour
markets, but for most of the century such schemes have covered only a minority of workers.
H0E:1797 It is true that an obvious field with high benefits and low risk would quickly get 7
overcrowded, but if we generate a new concept there is no reason why the rewards should not be
great and the risks low.
GVW:379 In each case it is evident that physical geographers had to become conversant with 7
progress in related disciplines and a number of excellent papers in Progress in Physical
Geography (1977-) provide reports reflecting progress in other disciplines.
H7S:950 It will be noted that the date of the commencement of the composition of the work fits 7
nicely with the conclusion reached above about the probable date of Molla Husrev's departure for
Bursa, but it would perhaps be dangerous to draw from el-Kefevi's assertion the conclusion that
Molla Husrev was still in Bursa in 883/1478.
J6S:989 Until recently, it was the Revenue's view that group relief was not available between the 7
vendor and Target in respect of the accounting period during which the acquisition of Target
occurred or during which" arrangements" for the disposal of Target came into existence, though
the basis for this view has always been unclear.
HWC:2354 It was just lucky that I spotted it in time and did something about it at such an early 7
age, or God knows what the child might have turned into, with Saul's soul possessing him.
CGS:1150 It was noted that Stefan did not play with his toys for more than a few seconds before 7
leaving them, so she was advised to reward him for playing longer (so that he would have less
time for wandering out of the house).
CHA:1540 Curious in that with the bulk of the country's youth taking their cultural signposts 7
from America and the more visceral thrills offered by rock'n'roll, it seems strange that such a
dated and wrinkly musical form should enjoy such an upsurge in fortunes, particularly when it
faced competition from sexier young pups operating in the rock idiom such as Tommy Steele and
Cliff Richard.
Appendix 16 107
HHV:3825 It is clearly stated there that, if the hon. Member who originated the question rises and 8
states that he intends to seek to raise the matter on the Adjournment, that is the end of that
particular question.
B2T:230 It may be apparent from the head chef's comments that more time needs to be given to 8
basic skills in the college's scheme of work or that parts of the housekeeping syllabus need
revision.
HX1:47 It can be noted from Table 1 that the differences between the NSEs and SEs are relatively 8
small, and Molloy and Carroll describe this as a relationship of &bquo;virtual parity&equo;.
HHV:24567 My hon. Friend's constituents will recognise that it is vital for the future prosperity of 8
Swindon that those schemes be implemented as quickly as possible.
H91:122 It is certainly one of the ironies for Britain that the more thorough her privatisation 8
programme in the 1980s (including gas, electricity, air transport and telecommunications), the
more disadvantaged she became in the argument for pan-European liberalisation of trade.
J6V:704 1.74 It is now clear from Ollett v Bristol Aerojet Ltd [1979] 1 WLR 1197 that the 8
substance of an expert's report, which the rules require the parties to disclose as a condition
precedent to calling him at trial, includes his opinion, which is, after all, the whole reason for
calling him.
FRL:1754 It is a recognised text convention governing the field of discourse of news 8
reporting/investigative journalism in French that a concept referred to in a noun phrase will not
be expressed in the same way twice running in a text.
EBV:1906 Long considered only a maker of images, it is quite apparent from the Hayward 8
Gallery's exhibition that he is a craftsman of extraordinary technical facility, capable of luscious
passages of brushwork, occasionally using thick impasto for expressive effects and employing his
own distinctive and changing palette.
EVX:880 One thing to be said of that is that it does not at all follow, from the fact that we cannot 8
give particular descriptions of items that fall within a set, that we cannot satisfactorily conceive of
and describe the set.
B1T:251 When the committee system of the ASEA is considered as a whole, it is apparent that 10
members were consciously operating an employment policy based upon casework, the practice
most conspicuously associated with the COS, which, given the origins of the Association, is by no
means unexpected.
CBK:1175 To replace them, it was agreed that car No. 1 should go to Leeds, when the Croydon 10
routes were abandoned.
CGT:1914 It is likely that the child has received criticism, ridicule, and anger about the soiling 10
which will exacerbate their distressed emotional state.
FBV:480 This absolute privilege is founded on the principle that it is advantageous for the public 10
interest that the citizen should not be in any way fettered in his statements, and where the public
service or due administration of justice is involved he shall have the right to speak his mind
freely…
BPK:1679 Public health officials did all in their power to stop the 1964 pie going ahead; there was 10
a typhoid epidemic in Aberdeen in the 1960's and it was found that the last serious epidemic
before that had been in Denby Dale in the 1930's, and the infection can linger for many years.
HAJ:600 It is obviously important that everyone understands exactly how the law applies and 10
your solicitor will be able to explain the situation.
HS2:344 Weeks later, it was reported that a new one was being grown — good spring growth no 10
doubt, being that time of year.
HX1:181 It is clear that there is some justification for this, on the basis of the established 10
relationships between Highers and A-level scores and success in higher education for traditionally
qualified students.
CJG:327 It is likely that the specialised services for visually handicapped children will be part of 10
the local education authority's educational services, although some advisers are based on a special
school for visually handicapped children.
CEG:849 Since the density of wood averages about one-fourteenth of that of steel it may be that 10
about thirty times the volume of wood is used, taking the world as a whole.
A0P:1793 But that other &bquo;landscape&equo;, quieter perhaps, but like an underground 10
stream, unconscious and very persistent, never failed to obtrude itself on him: &bquo;It is strange
that even now prayer is my natural language,&equo; he said, in &bquo;Lines From My
Grandfather's Journal&equo; (The Spice-Box Of Earth, p10) which powerfully reflect his own self-
questionings; the &bquo;tyranny&equo; was asserting itself.
CR3:188 (It's worth remembering that Unix Labs has maintained from the beginning that COSE 1 or
would eventually result in an agreement on the kernel, namely System V.4 or its descendent. 9
AJU:904 Rules and regulations are firmly in place, however, and it is thought to be extremely 1 or
unlikely that Mrs Marcos would make any serious attempt to return the body. 9
EFV:511 It was a regrettable side-effect of such disputes that the" general public" suffered — 3 or
Appendix 16 108
villagers might see their homes and livelihoods destroyed, they might be hurt or occasionally 6?
even killed, but how else was their lord to be brought to reason or to arbitration except by
ensuring that he could not collect his rents?
GV0:646 It used to be argued that turbulence was necessary to ensure the oxygenation of the 7
water and the continuation of the food supply, but it is now thought that the main role of and
turbulence is in getting rid of excess carbon dioxide. 1
Results:
directly after verb/adjective/noun; only element 1 312
directly after verb/adjective/noun; something else following (except for subordinate or 0
coordinated clause) 2
after verb/adjective/noun with its other complements 3 24
bevor the other complements of the verb/adjective/noun 4 0
at the end, not only complements intervening 5 32
unclear 6 9
directly after verb/adjective/noun; subordinate or coordinated clause following 7 42
ambiguous: 3 or 5 - 8 9
ambiguous: 1 or 7 - 10 11
unclear - other 4
Total 443
Appendix 17 109
Appendix 17 List of adjectives that allow a [that_CL] but no [to_INF]

extraposed subject according to the VDE
apparent likely
apt (A) lucky
awkward (A) manifest
certain (A) notable
characteristic obvious
clear (A) plain
comprehensible positive (A)
conspicuous predictable
credible probable
definite suspicious (B)
dubious typical
fortunate uncertain (A)
immaterial unclear
implicit unfortunate
improbable unlikely
incomprehensible unusual
incongruous urgent
indisputable well-known
inexplicable
it + adjective + [to_INF] NS1 NS2 NS3 NS4 comments
1: no; 2: "not completely wrong but nobody would say it", "might be American/British", "I can hear people say that, but
I wouldn't accept it"; 3: "maybe"; "not sure"; "ok in conversation but not in written language"; 4: acceptable but would
prefer to rephrase it; 5: ok
Could it be Bardsley 's production of Therese Raquin ? Well , there were times when it struck me as slow and over- NS4: 'wondered whether' instead of
solemn , and watching it seemed as much fun as witnessing a laborious post mortem . But there were others when her 'if'
imagination was , if anything , too unrestrained and I wondered if it would have been more apt to have found
Appendix 18
straitjackets dangling from our programmes . (newsmerge) [extraposition?] 4 5 5 5

Given her conviction that she , not Graves , was the great poet and thinker , and that he had stolen her ideas , it seems
apt to ask what exactly she achieved , by way of thought and poetry , in the years before and after her collaboration
with him . (newsmerge) 5 5 5 5
Scorn – Matthew Parris – Penguin - pounds 5.99 , pp272: Rather than simply compiling a list of scornful and witty
historical remarks , Matthew Parris much too nice a bloke to create his own insults has explored ` the dark side of
language , the use of the spoken word to hurt , wound or ridicule ' . Split into sections like ` Men and Women ' , `
Religion ' , ` Journalism ' , the earliest insult Parris can find comes from a tomb in 2300 BC , which translates in its polite
form to ` Come here you copulator ' . However , the most vitriolic and amusing scorn comes from the ` British Politics '
section . Perhaps it was therefore very apt to dedicate this book to the person who became the single most favoured
object of scorn , Margaret Thatcher ` The Immaculate Misconception ' as Norman St John-Stevas referred to her .
(newsmerge) 5 5 5 5
NS3: wrong word
On this realisation , it is apt to ask to what extent the gallery itself worked to resocialise its objects and why . (academic) 5 5 1 5
NS1+NS4: 'it' is referential; NS3:
extraposed [to_INF] subjects
wrong word
I am inclined to look on this as , on the whole , the most philosophical account which has been given of the law of
association . It at once explains the cases of simple repetition in which one link of a chain of ideas which had previously
passed through the mind , being caught , all the rest come after ; as when we have got the first line of a poem committed
to memory , and the others follow in order . It easily explains , too , all cases in which we have had a variety of objects
before us in one concrete act , -- thus if we have passed along a particular road , with a certain person , observing the
mountain or river in front , and talking on certain objects , -- we find that when any one of these recurs it is apt to
suggest the others . (academic) [extraposition?] 5 1 1
Appendix 18 Native speaker judgements on adjectives with
Diffarreation , a kind of Roman divorce, could be nicely extended to use about the celebrity divorces that seem to fill the
news. “I don’t need to hear any more about Meg Ryan’s diffarreation ,” you could say, and certainly mean it. Since
confarreation was the highest form of marriage among the ancient Romans, it seems apt to use both words to describe
the joinings and disjoinings of the people who people the tabloids. (verbatimmag.com) 5 5 5 5
110
As we get older and perhaps more worldly, it is sometimes awkward to admit that we ever believed such nonsense,
and even more difficult to admit that not everything we imbibed was bad or wrong. (AE8 198) 5 5 5 5
Well, it well, it well yeah, it has to be rather awkward to read that I think, I don't think I'd fancy having a go at NS4: ok as a transcription
Norwegian. (JP4 700) 5 5 1 5
He will be in Rome for a week or so . Isabel feels it is awkward to have Lord Warburton in Rome , but there’s nothing to NS3: but very old, stiff, formal
be done about it . (academic) 5 5 4 5
She decides that although Darcy has told her to consult Colonel Fitzwilliam for the truth of all this , it would be NS3: but very old, stiff, formal
awkward to ask him and surely it is unnecessary . (academic) 5 5 4 5
Appendix 18
NS2: but 'would be' instead of 'was'

But these problems can be solved - more farm reform, less regional aid, more of a multi-speed Europe - if attention to is ok
them is not dreamily postponed . After all, it was awkward to establish the Community in the first place. (newsmerge) 5 1 1 4
‘I think it would be awkward to have an impeachment vote during the bombing in Iraq,’ Mr Hyde said. (newsmerge) 5 5 3 5
After all , it is becoming increasingly awkward to explain why Swiss people can buy any amount of property in , say ,
Britain , Italy , and the south of France while people from those countries do not have the same right here . (newsmerge) 5 5 3 5
It would be characteristic to see him do that. (made up) 1 5
It is clear to see at most training clubs that praise is in very short supply with novice and even more experienced NS4: both non-extraposed variants
handlers. (AR5 1530) [What is the extraposed subject?] 1 5 1 5 not acceptable
As Flaubert describes the route to Yonville and the surroundings of the town , it is clear to see why he is judged as such
an outstanding writer of realistic fiction . (academic) 1 5 5 5
While reading , it is clear to see that each chapter ends in the middle of an event . (academic) 1 5 1 4 NS3: 'it can be clearly seen'
Clearly there is a raised threshold of threat against the United Kingdom . That isn't just because of the Iraq situation , NS4: first two sentences slightly odd.
also we have been a primary partner in the war against terror . But I think it's clear to say that we are entering a danger
period . (newsmerge) 1 5 5 5
This goes to a man who has "assisted in the battles that women have fought". ( Battles ? What battles ? If one is truly
honest it is clear to see that it is often easier to get ahead because one is a woman ! ) (newsmerge) 1 5 1 5
If you take a close look at their lantern- or cup-shaped flowers , it is clear to see that hellebores are part of the buttercup
family , ranunculaceae , which also includes clematis , delphiniums and aquilegia . (newsmerge) 1 5 1 5
Looking at the market for industrial and warehousing accommodation in Bracknell itself, it is clear to see that the level
of demand for warehousing units is very low. (popmerge) [court verdict] 1 5 1 5
When we look at how old the children in question are , it is clear to see that as the children get older , the number of
111
them who " always " travel in a purpose made restraint drops off significantly . (popmerge) 1 5 1 5
It would be entirely comprehensible to see him do that. (made up) 1 5
It would be conspicuous to wear a rabbit suit at the Oktoberfest. (made up) 1 1
I think it is rather too definite to say that Mr Al Fayed was unwilling to put the arrangement on a more formal basis NS1+NS2+NS4: to-INF depends on
because my conversations with him were always rather unstructured . (newsmerge) [too ... to] 5 5 1 5 'too'
Thus, if a majority of people commit criminal actions it becomes somewhat dubious to maintain a distinction between
criminal and non-criminal, in terms of personal characteristics . (B17 348) 5 5 1 5
Appendix 18
It is perhaps dubious to argue that a prayer or worship becomes more efficacious if more people join in, but there is no
doubt that man was created a social animal and ritual that is shared is ritual that becomes more meaningful. (B1J 2166) 5 5 5 5
It might have been dubious to have had any of the characters holding the scissors, but because it was the child of the NS2: ok, but only up to 'scissors'
foursome doing it, that made it an even bigger mistake, which I accepted, putting it down totally to inexperience on my
behalf. (F9Y 795) 5 5 1 5
But even if we assume that it is sound at an abstract philosophical level, it would be extremely dubious to assert that
this theory can justify our present practices of punishment or anything like them. (FBC 463) 5 5 5 5
NS2: not common
At the beginning she had known clearly enough that he was an irrevocably solitary man, and it had seemed to her
fortunate to live with him at all. (FSP 881) [Beware! Is 'to her' a valency complement of 'fortunate'?] 1 4 5
The " proletarian literary culture " that the league promoted was far too rudimentary to offer viable creative models ,
and Chinese authors , as members of the petty bourgeoisie , were by definition incapable of producing proletarian
literature . " At the present time , it is fortunate to be blind and wise to fall silent."[89 ](academic) [Beware! non-native
context] 1 5 1 5
Definitely not like McGonagall . Way too open and outgoing . But it was still fortunate to find someone talkative , NS3: non-standard construction, I
Remus realized with some amount of relief . (fanfiction) 1 5 3 5 think.
If they were all masterpieces it would seem almost immaterial to ask whether , like Rubens , he has at times been able to NS1: better 'irrelevant'
draw on the assistance of a gifted workshop . (newsmerge) 4 5 5 5
Provided that in fact the commands of the lawgiver are those beyond which the community never looks , it seems
immaterial to inquire whether this lawgiver in turn takes his orders from somebody else or is habitually obedient to
such orders when given . (popmerge) 4 5 5 5
NS4: too rare to make an informed
It would be implicit to deliver all care for the benefit of … (variation of VDE example for to-INF) 1 4 judgement
If, as many believe, Edison's drum made Enrico Caruso's superstardom possible, the televsion and the 45 single made NS1: I don't like it, but it's used.
Elvis; the LP freed the Beatles to make Sgt Pepper, FM radio made the Eagles, the video made Madonna, the harmonic
range of the CD gave Nirvana its revolutionary edge, and the sampler made dance music , then it's not improbable to
think something new will emerge from digital distribution . (news) 4 5 1 5
112
If so many are at it, then it's improbable to expect readers to be outraged indefinitely. (news) 4 5 1 1 NS1: I don't like it, but it's used.
It is as sad as it is improbable to see them in such disarray. (news) 4 5 3 5 NS1: I don't like it, but it's used.
Is it too improbable to think of that dead child as young Charles Dickens, dead to his family in the Marshalsea, without NS1: I don't like it, but it's used.
caste and hope, working in the blacking factory? (academic) 4 5 1 1
It is not improbable to suggest that, especially with the modern proliferation of home computers, most people have had NS1: I don't like it, but it's used.
experience with the infamous "computer error." (popmerge) 4 5 1 5
‘The public will find it incomprehensible to include a BMW in a general manager's pay package,’ Mr Darling added.
Appendix 18
(K5M 10987) [Beware! no subject] 1 5 1 5

NS3: better: 'it would be
In the light of the recent economic difficulties, it is imcomprehensible to include a BMW… (modified version of incomprehensible to the public to
previous sentence) 1 5 5 include…'
It is indisputable to claim that the weather is fine today. (made up) 1 5
To an educated Greek in the Fourth Century A.D. it would have seemed inexplicable to be reading in a preface to the NS1: ok, but wouldn't express it that
poems of Archilochus a statement of who this famous poet was, when and where he lived and what kind of verse he way
wrote. (aoidoi.org) 4 5
If you feel you have done well at an interview and everyone seems to like you it is quite likely to find that you haven't NS1: no due to action verb
got the part. (A06 1894) 1 1 1 1
This means that in most cases it is more likely to be a matter of relaxing the forward pressure to allow the aircraft to
level out rather than pulling it out with a positive backward pressure on the stick. (A0H 879) 5 5 5 5
But all in all, it seems likely to be a long time before we reach that ‘Utopian world of RDS’ for all listeners in cars, at
home or on foot! (A19 2161) 5 5 5 5
It would be likely to find that , so often , it is men who are in positions of power who are making decisions which are to
the detriment of other men . (newsmerge) 1 1 1 5
NS4: both non-extraposed variants
not acceptable
In addition , the U.S. population today generally expects more from its federal lands--more recreational opportunities ,
more wildlife and habitat protection , more watershed protection , more timber and forage production , more historic
and cultural preservation , more sensitivity to tribal concerns , as well as more mineral activities . It is likely to become
increasingly difficult to find sites that will not stimulate some opposition from groups with competing values and
interests in the same lands . (newsmerge) [Which to-INF is extraposed?] 5 5 5 5
It also is likely to occur to you -- and this is probably the most important line of thought , though the hardest to perceive NS2: 'It is also'
in its fullness -- that when you cease working you cease earning , and when you cease earning you cease spending .
(newsmerge) [ambiguous] 5 5 5 5
NS1: ok, if meaning is 'to bring you
3955 ‘I'm told that flattery will get me everywhere.’ 3956 ‘Not with me it won't’ 3957 ‘Are you quite sure about that?’ luck'; no, if meaning is 'fortunate'
3958 ‘No,’ she laughed, thoroughly enjoying herself. 3959 With a startled squawk a rook flew from one tree to another
113
where it perched complaining loudly. 3960 ‘It's very lucky to see a solitary rook on a Sunday,’ Nevil said. (AN7 3960) 3 5 5 5
‘Yes, well, if you feel it's lucky to see all the things you held dear being handled and bought by strangers just to pay off NS1: ok, if meaning is 'to bring you
your father's debts, then I suppose you could say I'm lucky.’ (CKD 2257) 5 5 5 5 luck'
Other cultures see port-wine stains in varying ways . ` Indian people have come up and congratulated me , ' Deborah
says . ` They 've said it 's very lucky to have a port-wine stain . In India nothing is made of it. (newsmerge) 5 5 5 5
Appendix 18
It 's smart to be lucky and it 's lucky to be smart. (newsmerge) 5 5 1 5

It is fairly obvious to say there are two classes of buildings to be studied — those which still stand, and those which
have been destroyed, fallen down, or otherwise disappeared. (B1P 555) 5 5 3 5
‘It might seem obvious to say it, but the essential thing is to listen real hard to what the band is doing! (C9K 1757) 5 5 5 5
It is obvious to see from the photos that nuff of them were rushing out of their heads! (CGC 9) 1 5 5 5
It seems obvious to blame the fall in fertility from the mid-1960s on the pill and legal abortion. (EDK 1098) 5 5 5 5
It may seem obvious to try the investigation yourself first, but this can have hidden dangers. (H88 1668) 5 5 5 5
It is perhaps obvious to state that it is essential for all stories shared to be authentic i.e. not to make up stories — for if
stories are fabricated the work of passing on the flame of faith will not happen. (HS7 245) 5 5 3 5
I realised that in a port you 've got so many different things going on in one place police , security , customs , ships ,
passengers , lost kids , you name it and once I 'd decided to do something on a port , it seemed obvious to go for the
biggest one Dover. (newsmerge) 5 5 5 5
So when Steve came back from the office it seemed obvious to ask him to wash the dishes and scrape the remains of our
vegetarian lasagne off the baking tray. (newsmerge) 5 5 5 5
It is obvious to see that a military coup will occur in a very short time , removing whatever pro-American leader the US
plans to install , replacing him with yet another Saddam . (newsmerge) 1 5 1 5
Whatever the disciplinary practices across the generations, it is plain to see that without a reasonable amount of co-
operation and compliance from the child, parents wouldn't get far in fulfilling their objectives. (B10 23) [plain to see] 5 5 5 5
Also, below the surface among the grass-roots leadership, it was usually plain to see that the party was scraping the
barrel for competent politicians. (CAH 999) [plain to see] 5 5 5 5
Even through the thick net, it was plain to see that the squirrel's right hind leg was damaged. (JYE 568) [plain to see] 5 5 5 5
In terms of attitude , ubervixen is the word that springs to mind . It 's plain to see that these skirts are supposed to be
threatening . (newsmerge) [plain to see] 5 5 5 5
He added : "In the circumstances the council has tried hard to deliver a complete community at the Willows and it is
114
plain to see that much has been achieved . (newsmerge) [plain to see] 5 5 5 5
NS1: non-extraposed rather V-ing;
NS2: prefer 'Winning is positive'
It’s positive to win, but for every winner there are countless losers, and who wants to think about those? (academic) 5 4 1
On the contrary, I found it fairly positive to announce that complaints were down to one (now doubled); that in NS2: but probably not noticed in
recession 1,266 entries were judged; that entries came from all over the world; that the system had changed in direct spoken language
response to comments made by members. (HAK 92) [Beware! no subject] 5 2 1 1
Appendix 18
IT MIGHT seem wearisomely predictable to promote the talents of another young cricketer blessed with a background
of public school and Cambridge University, but it would be dangerous to scoff: Ed Smith is no ordinary representative
of the breed. (newsmerge) 5 5 5 5
NS1: does not like non-extraposed
Either way, it is fairly predictable to say that Smashing hope to leave its guests both shaken and stirred. (newsmerge) 5 5 5 1
It seems however, more probable to assert that Bernardo Boil, the Franciscan, was a different person from Bernardo
Boyl, the Benedictine. (popmerge) 5 5 1 1
It seems, however, more probable to say that St. Clare, when she was still a very young girl, embraced the rule of the
Third Order of St. Francis (secular), together with her older sister and a number of other pious young maidens, who
wore the habit of the Third Order of St. Francis and followed that particular mode of life in community which their
piety and fervour suggested . (popmerge) 5 5 5 1
NS1: non-extraposed rather V-ing
At this point, Thucydides steps back from his narrative to note that it was suspicious to travel through a country
without consent, hence the provision of guides by allies might have another aspect : when a foreign army passed
through one's own territory, guides were the physical manifestation of one's assent to the passage . (academic) 5 5 5 5
NS1: non-extraposed rather V-ing;
NS3: that-CL; NS4: 'under these
It is obviously very suspicious to have two fires start in these circumstances and so early in the morning. (newsmerge) 5 5 1 5 circumstances'
NS1: non-extraposed both ok; NS2:
MI5 officers later said they could not follow because it would have been suspicious to get any closer. (newsmerge) 5 4 1 5 prefer 'for them to'
He added : “It is much more uncertain to roll into the investment trust , which is a new complicated split trust , because
we don't know whether it will trade at a premium or a discount.” (newsmerge) 5 5 1 5
‘It seems particularly unfortunate to find within the elegant and modern buildings of Feltham, so carefully landscaped,
all the defects of poor regimes’ (Home Office 1989). (CRT 41) 5 5 5 5
It is rather unfortunate to call it a force because it isn't one. (FEF 1060) 5 5 1 5
115
NS2: prefer of/for N to-INF
While Thatcher made clear in a speech at a dinner in Havel's honour that she saw a continued need for NATO and the
presence of US troops in Europe, Havel stated in a press conference during his visit that it was "unfortunate to keep on
insisting on NATO" , as the European situation was changing rapidly, and he made clear his preference for a common
security system subsuming both NATO and the Warsaw Pact. (HKS 1473) [Beware! non-native context] 5 4 5 5
Appendix 18
As much family work is a team effort when counsel is instructed , the Society believes that it is unfortunate to devise a
new fee scheme which applies only to the work of barristers . (popmerge) 5 5 1 5
It would be unlikely to see 100/30 in a betting shop cause that would be a non-standard way of displaying odds. NS1: I don't like that use of unlikely
(www) 1 5 1 5
It would be unlikely to see this continue through February and March. (www) 1 5 1 5
It IS likely that some countries of the Commonwealth would choose to no longer acknowledge her as Head of State and
draft individual legislation changing from a constitutional monarchy to something else. It would be unlikely to see a
concerted effort by all members. (http://www.answerbag.com/q_view/1719037#ixzz1Dal8Vt00) 1 5 5 5
NS4: both non-extraposed variants
We have already found there are ‘big’ lecturers’ jobs and ‘small’ lecturers’ jobs. It is very unlikely to turn out that a not acceptable; awkward style
lecturer is a lecturer is a lecturer. (newsmerge) [not sure this counts as a counter-example] 1 5 1 4
No sentences for:
apparent
certain
(characteristic [occurs with of N + to-INF])
(comprehensible)
conspicuous
(definite)
(implicit)
(incomprehensible)
indisputable
manifest
notable
well-known
116
Appendix 19 117
Appendix 19 List of adjectives that allow a [to_INF] but no [that_CL]

extraposed subject according to the VDE
accurate fruitless negligent

adequate generous polite
arrogant handy (A) popular
bad hard (A) practicable
bold harsh (A) productive
brutal hateful proper (A)
burdensome healthy prudent
careless heartless radical
civil heroic rash
clever honourable reckless
clumsy hopeless (A) responsible (A)
compassionate human rude
complacent humane safe
constitutional hurtful scrupulous
correct (B) ill-advised selfish
counter-productive illegal senseless
courteous impertinent sentimental
cynical impolite simple
destructive improper smart (A)
difficult imprudent smart (B)
discreet inadequate sound
dishonest inconsiderate special
disloyal incorrect (B) suitable
early indiscreet superb
easy inefficient tedious
eccentric inept uncommon
economic insensitive uneconomic
economical irrational uneconomical
efficient kind unethical
ethical legal ungrateful
exact legitimate (A) unkind
excessive liberal unproductive
expensive mean (B) unsafe
extreme memorable unwise
false mindless useless (A)
fatal misguided valid (A)
fearful (B) moral valuable (A)
foolhardy naive vicious
foolish nasty wicked
fruitful negative (A)
it + adjective + [that_CL] NS1 NS2 NS3 NS4 comments
“I think it’s accurate that the peace process has been salvaged and is back on track,” said an enthusiastic Mr
Christopher, after he delivered a message to Yitzhak Rabin, the Israeli prime minister, from President Assad of Syria.
(newsmerge) 5 5 1 5
Appendix 20
Nor is it necessarily accurate that doctors’ lax prescription habits are to blame, for this is to underestimate the
staggering adaptability of bacteria allowing them to survive in any environment. (newsmerge) 5 5 5 5
It may be apocryphal, but it’s pretty accurate that 90 to 95 percent of Defense Department communications systems are
in fact privately owned and operated. (academic) 5 5 2 5
While it is surely accurate that decisions should be more efficient, making them may require real evidence of the
consequences of neglect before people understand the costs and demand action. (academic) 5 5 1 1
My partner, Alexandra actually fights with me on the battlefield - and it’s historically accurate that the women fought
too. (popmerge) 5 5 1 5
It is adequate that he achieved only 60% on the test. (made up) 1 1 5
It is arrogant that he doesn't greet people who wave to him. (made up) NS2: But "That he doesn't greet … is
1 5 5 arrogant." is ok
But I think it’s too bad that it keeps cropping up all the time. (EBV 1828) 5 4 1 5 NS2 + NS3: colloquial
It is bad that so much bias should be shewn, but it is, I suppose, inevitable. (FRT 263) NS2: only if "really bad"; not wrong,
but prefer other adjective; NS3:
5 4 1 5 wrong word
extraposed [that_CL] subjects
Fletcher said: ‘It’s bad that they are going away so soon after what has been a very hard and difficult tour. (K5J 3489) NS2: not wrong, but prefer other
5 4 3 5 adjective; NS3: not written
It was that bad that we went [pause] when I bought my house in Manchester (KBP 3777) [Beware, that-CL might NS3: not written
depend on premodifier] 5 5 3 5
I soon realised the British question didn’t interest me at all. What I did feel was that it was very bad that there should be NS2: not wrong, but prefer other
a passionate argument going on in the Middle East largely confined to the Israelis and the Palestinians. (newsmerge) adjective
5 4 5 5
Appendix 20 Native speaker judgements on adjectives with
It’s usually a good meeting. The crowd like it and it’s pretty bad that the Scots can’t take part. (newsmerge) 5 5 1 5 NS2: ok only with "pretty"
He brings with him a young, strong, and confident Bohemian man named Anton Jelinek, who tells Grandfather that it is
very bad that a priest is unavailable. (academic) [Beware! possible non-native context]
5 2 1 5
He also knows that his future depends on a judging system that is arbitrary and random. It seems brutal that after his NS3: if written: "unfair" instead of
118
Spartan heroics, the future of his family could be ruined by a panel deciding that, despite his symmetry and bulk, his "brutal"
conditioning and shape, they just like the other guy’s muscles better. (newsmerge) 5 5 3 5
It is burdensome that Peter has to climb so many flights of stairs to get to my office. (made up) 5 1 5 NS3: wrong word
It's burdensome that we have to refute ignorant criticism from journalists. (made up) 5
It was clever that the company used this advertisement during the superbowl. (made up) 4 4 5 NS2+NS3: prefer for N to-INF
It was compassionate that doctors helped the tsunami victims. (made up) 1 1 5
It is constitutional that people are allowed to own guns in the US. (made up) 1 5 5
Appendix 20
It remains factually correct that you can buy a coffin direct from the undertakers. (CES 1069) 5 5 1 5 NS3: unidiomatic
Is it correct that up until this tour you hadn’t played, literally, for twenty years? (C9L 693) 5 5 5 5
It is of course correct that at no stage was the purchase of either property made legally conditional upon the purchase of
the other. (FDT 126) 5 5 5 5
It is, however, correct that these percentages were at their highest in the 1970s when the number of strikers was also at
its highest. (FR4 1321) 5 5 5 5
“My father was meticulous about updating his records and it is correct that he updated his will the day before he died
ironically on Friday the 13th but as far as we’re concerned it was a strange but utter and total coincidence,” said Deputy
Coveney. (newsmerge) 5 5 5 5
But Mr Luis Miyares, the director of the Fondo de Bienes Culturales, which oversees art sales, says bluntly: We do not NS1: would not use "correct" in this
want them to succeed. In our society, health-care is free, education is free, funerals are free, electricity, telephone and context, rather "right"; NS3:
water are cheap. And if the artists receive all these benefits, it is correct that they pay us part of their income. unidiomatic, wrong word
(newsmerge) [Beware! looks like translation from Cuban Spanish] 1 5 1 5
It is correct that only two out of those merchant ships reached harbour but to report that only two out of 17 did so
suggests a disaster on a scale similar to that of the later ill-fated PQ17 on the Russian run. (newsmerge)
5 5 5 5
Although it is correct that there can be fixed costs of access to the information, these costs do not invalidate the
proposition that reuse of the information will neither deplete it nor impose further costs. (academic) 5 5 5 5
Is it not illogical and counter-productive that the British electoral system denies or impairs their voting rights? (AJ6 849) NS3: NOT without coordination
5 5 5 5
Is it not counter-productive that benefit officers have been told to push people on to invalidity benefit to bring down the
claimant count, which passes for Britain’s unemployment total, only to complain about it and start looking for ways to
scrap it? (newsmerge) 5 5 1 5
There were two summer tours and it is nicely courteous that Englishmen allowed an Indian shining with promise to top
the batting and a Pakistani ditto the bowling. (newsmerge) 5 1 1 5
While the Turkish government celebrates human rights in such an openly cynical way, is it no less cynical that our NS2: prefer for N to-INF
government continues to supply Turkey with arms and advice on policing methods? (newsmerge) 5 2 5 5
119
It was destructive that you made that comment at that particular moment. (made up) 1 1 5
It is perhaps a little difficult that education should be absolutely central in all aspects when we have problems in other
areas such as funding. (newsmerge) 5 1 3 5
But when you look at (the) Maastricht (treaty), it seems quite difficult that a sufficient number of countries can meet the
criteria and therefore be part of a monetary union in 1999. (newsmerge) [Beware! Italian politician]
1 1 1 5
Peter offers to sell his soul; Howard tells him that it is much more important and difficult that he keep it. (academic) NS3: ok in a book, still ok without
Appendix 20
"important"; NS4: only acceptable

because of coordination; not without
"important". (i.e. sentence ok,
relevant construction not)
1 1 4 1
It was very discreet that you didn't mention it. (made up) 5 1 4 NS4: prefer of you to-INF
It was dishonest that the government claimed that there was no trouble in the Middle East. (made up) 3 1 5
It was disloyal that I was able to divert myself, but appalling that I did so with Otto. (FAT 471) 1 1 1 5
It's eccentric that he would wear his shoes to bed. (made up) NS2: not horribly wrong, but
unidiomatic; NS3: cant' say that it's
wrong, but it doesn't feel right; NS4:
prefer for/of N to-INF
3 3 4
It's economical that 4 of them are in the car. (made up) 5 4 4 NS4: prefer for N to-INF
Is it really fair and efficient that more public money per student is spent teaching those who are already doing well? NS3: ok even without "fair"
(newsmerge) 5 3 5 5
“It’s efficient that I don’t have to work out another university degree before apply for master’s course in the UK,“ said NS2: not ok, even if we correct the
Yang, who got his diploma in China in 1998. (newsmerge) [Beware! non-native context] rest of the sentence; NS4: ok for the
efficient part, not for the rest
1 1 1 5
It is ethical that animals are slaughtered quickly and painlessly at the Happy Animal Ranch. (made up) 5 1 4 NS4: prefer for N to-INF
It does seem excessive that there are six dissertations under way on Apollonius Rhodius’ *Argonautica* and none on NS2: only with "seem"
Ennodius, but perhaps there I betray a prejudice. (academic) 5 5 5 5
It is false that only a person in authority is an authority. (ANH 437) 5 3 1 5
First, is it false that he is doing something? (CK1 1391) 5 5 5 5 NS3 + NS4: ok in logic
It is thus false that if certain other things had happened, although we got yesterday, we would still have got last night.
120
(EVX 293) 5 5 1 5
However, the letter goes on to say: It is false that Mr Gallagher paid Ben Dunne’s ransom money; It is false that Mr
Gallagher gave £1.5m in cash or any other money to accountant Noel Fox; It is false that any such request was made to
Mr Gallagher by Mr Haughey; It is false that Mr Gallagher’s brother, Paul Gallagher, is prepared to pay/give Mr
Haughey £1m or £3m to pay off tax and debts; It is false that Mr Haughey and Mr Fox asked Mr Gallagher to provide
£1.5m and that Mr Gallagher this sum into a briefcase and gave it to Mr Fox; It is false that property owned by the
Gallaghers and referred to in the article is worth £3bn on paper. It is false that land is being sold in Co Wicklow to “help
Appendix 20
compensate those who lost money when the original Gallagher business collapsed”. (newsmerge)
5 5 1 5
For even if it is false that the poor have got absolutely poorer, or that Britain is more unequal than other countries,
Britain has certainly become more unequal than it was. (newsmerge) 5 5 5 5
Thus Kripke observes that dispositionalism is only remotely plausible if dispositionalist analyses are idealized by
means of ceteris paribus clauses, since it is clearly false that meaning addition by ‘+’ is simply the disposition to add up
correctly. (academic) 5 5 5 5
But it is utterly false that I have had any such dealings with the Court of Saint Germains as are described in the paper NS3: trying to sound formal; sort of
which Your Lordships have heard read. (academic) ok, but unusual/unidiomatic
5 5 3 5
It is however false that I have abandoned the property, removed my personal effects, lost touch with it, or given up NS3: wrong word
intent to return to it. (popmerge) 5 5 1 5
It was fatal that he left the gun unattended. (made up) 5 1 1
It is fatal that the Lib Dems should have accepted so many compromises. (made up) 5
Are you fearful that your children will not find word? (made up) 5
From that point on Strauss lived in semi-disgrace and, in retrospect, it seems both courageous and foolhardy that he NS3+NS4: also ok without
should have attempted an opera on a pacifist subject to a libretto by an exiled anti-fascist Jew in 1938. (newsmerge) courageous
5 5 5 5
‘We’ve been talking so much, it’s foolish that we don’t even know each other’s names.’ (HDC 1967) NS2: wrong word; NS3: sounds
5 1 2 5 1950s, not today.
It seems extremely foolish that when it is supposed to be making an income British Rail just does not put on the number
of carriages that are required. (newsmerge) 5 5 5 5
He tells them that it was foolish that he exposed himself on top of the hill. (academic) 5 4 3 5 NS2: prefer for N to-INF
Both Okonkwo and Uchendu think it was foolish that they killed this man without knowing his story. (academic)
5 5 5 5
Jim does not understand why Mr. Shimerda wants to give him his expensive gun, and he thinks it is foolish that the NS2: prefer for N to-INF
121
family is so generous. (academic) 5 4 1 5

It was extremely generous that he left her $ 25 million in his will. (made up) 3 5 4 NS4: prefer of N to-INF
Cage, the notorious composer of 4’33 ‘, in which a man sits at a piano and plays nothing for four minutes and 33
seconds, was also an authority on mushrooms, so it’s handy that when he was picking a letter at random out of the
alphabet for his title he alighted on M. These ‘writings’ are similarly random, set out like concrete poetry, ludic of
typography, acrostically capitalised, oddly compelling. (newsmerge) 5 5 1 5
So what did Sanders do? He scrubbed up, grabbed a scalpel, cut open his fellow executive and operated on his heart. >
It’s not the sort of skill they usually teach at Harvard Business School. So it was handy that Sanders, before he became a
Appendix 20
boardroom director, trained as a cardiologist and rose to be head of Massachusetts General Hospital. (newsmerge)
5 5 5 5
That means parking is not too easy, so it is rather handy that the “egg box” grille is made from a flexible, impact-
resistant plastic just in case it all goes wrong in the multi-storey. (newsmerge) 5 5 5 5
A full-size spare wheel is in the well under the floor, and it’s handy that all four doors have pockets for oddments.
(popmerge) 5 5 5 5
It did seem a little hard that, just when things were beginning to go really well, the even tenor of their lives should be
upset by the arrival of someone else — someone who, although a friend, was none the less a stranger. (BMU 2572)
5 5 1 5
It seemed very hard that she should have had to uproot herself completely while her husband could not even be NS2: prefer "harsh"
bothered to accompany her on holidays to her own country. (FSC 1593) 5 4 1 5
It may be hard that the occupier of land should have no right to compensation for harm done by the fall of a large thing, NS2: prefer "harsh"
like a tree, on his premises, but his plight is no worse than in any other instance of inevitable accident. (FSS 952)
5 4 1 5
It was hard that she had to choose such an arrogant, disdainful man to fall in love with. (J54 779) 5 1 1 5
“At the time it was hard that I wasn’t the one who was being asked to direct at the National Theatre or run a rep,” says
McDermott of the split. (newsmerge) 5 5 3 5
“He said it seemed hard that art was at so low an ebb that an artist was obliged to write doggerel for his bread and
butter,” his nephew recalled. (newsmerge) 5 5 1 5
It seems hard that we have to get up at 9.30 to hear England’s coach tell us that an earthquake is a result of our spiritual
disconnectedness, our distance from God, and that the human body is an ‘overcoat’. (newsmerge)
5 5 3 5
He says it is hard that, while the judges are carefully chosen and selected, physicians are practically their own judges,
and that of the men who may give us a quick despatch and send us to Heaven or Hell, no enquiry or examination is
made of their quality and worthiness. (academic) 5 5 3 5
But there are two sides to the question. It is hard that a plaintiff who has incurred costs should not receive them in full;
but it is also hard that a defendant who has paid a sum into court with a general expectation of limiting his liability to
122
the amount of costs endorsed on the summons should find it increased after the acceptance of his payment in.
(popmerge) 5 5 1 5
It may seem a bit harsh that after decades of oppression the South Africans should see their country become a dumping
ground for the unwanted rich flotsam of the western world. (newsmerge) 5 5 5 5
Teams cannot expect to get away with not turning up, but as Blackburn’s Tony Parkes has said, it seems harsh that Boro
had to forfeit three points not just to Rovers but to the rest of the League. Robson’s signing policy, underwritten by
Gibson and criticised so roundly before Christmas, looks less extravagant now. (newsmerge)
Appendix 20
5 5 5 5
He made a string of outstanding saves so it was harsh that his bravura performance should end in frustrating defeat.
(newsmerge) 5 5 5 5
It was hardly the tour operators’ fault that the Jamaica test was abandoned and it may seem harsh that they have to
compensate those who missed out on cricket watching. (newsmerge) 5 5 5 5
It appears harsh that where two or more companies are treated as the operator of a ship otherwise than by virtue of
sharing the same interest in the ship, tonnage tax profits are computed as if each were the only operator. (popmerge)
5 5 5 5
It is hateful that people despise the poor. (made up) 5
490 ‘At Reading,’ recounts John, ‘the girl from the Clothes Show was talking to us. 491 And she said, We want to do a
feature on you, we want to do an anti-fashion thing. 492 Perhaps that’s what it is. 493 Cos Manchester’s the fashion. 494
So it’s quite healthy that we’re not.’ (HWX 494) 5 5 1 5
In the meantime, it doesn’t seem very healthy that on the one hand we are being persuaded to supplement our diets,
tempted by "cure-alls" and worried about what we think we are missing, and on the other, "detoxing" ourselves of all
our excesses. (newsmerge) 5 5 5 5
I think it is healthy that house prices are starting to fall now while the economy is still growing by up to 6.5pc this year
and 5.8pc next year on a best case scenario. (newsmerge) 5 5 1 5
Certainly it is healthy that entrepreneurs like O’Brien have become the new role models in this country instead of
politicians, lawyers or even priests. (newsmerge) 5 5 1 5
In relationship terms it is quite healthy that people get to know each other not through their physical looks but by what
they say. (newsmerge) 5 5 5 5
So perhaps it is ultimately healthy that Quinn and Buckley are sticking around even if it is for the wrong reasons.
(newsmerge) 5 5 1 5
It is healthy that universities have to compete for students and are funded accordingly on a per capita basis.
(newsmerge) 5 5 1 5
“It is healthy that you are active,” he said. (newsmerge) 5 5 1 5
Except where a community-based housing association is being established, we do not believe it to be healthy that a
single registered social landlord should be identified as the only route to transfer. (popmerge)
123
5 1 1 5
It is heartless that you would refuse to give that animal water. (made up) 4 1 5 NS2: prefer to-INF
It was heroic that you saved the child from drowning. (made up) NS2: borderline, prefer of N to-INF;
NS4: sounds more formal than 'of
3 1 5 you to'
He responds by telling Volumnius that the enemy has driven them to the edge of the pit, and it is more honorable that NS2: prefer for N to-INF
they leap in themselves than be pushed in by the enemy. (academic) 5 4 5 5
Michael Whinney, assistant bishop of Birmingham, said he had spent Wednesday evening wondering what he would NS1: I find this use of human very
Appendix 20
say, only to be woken in the early hours with the news of the latest tragedy. “It is human that the sharing of pain is the odd. NS3: in that specific context
beginning of healing,” he told the congregation. “I offer you my sympathy from the bottom of my heart.” (newsmerge) (sermon) ok
1 5 5 5
I will be the first one to understand the feelings of an affected family for it is only human that they should feel so.
(popmerge) 5 5 5 5
It is humane that they should put down the injured animal. (made up) 3 5
It is humane that the injured animal is put down. (made up) 5
That’s French for you have arrived, which is what he normally says (this car is a he), but we’re in France so he’s talking
French. It’s a bit hurtful that he isn’t using the familiar tu - we’ve been getting on well the last few days - but there are
five of us so he’s probably addressing us plurally. (newsmerge) [Beware! non-native context]
5 5 5 5
He said it was quite wrong and hurtful that such allegations had come into the public domain as they did. (newsmerge) NS2: ok also without "wrong"
5 5 5 5
It must have been very hurtful that they saw their hero standing next to this person who’s not only a woman but also NS2: prefer for N to-INF
an Oriental. (newsmerge) 5 4 1 5
It seems ill-advised that they asked the villain for help. (made up) NS2: prefer for N to-INF; NS3: "It
4 5 5 was ill-advised…"
It was illegal that he downloaded porn off the Internet. (made up) 1 1 5
It was illegal that she was fired just because she was pregnant. (made up) 1 5 5
It was impertinent that he asked my weight. (made up) 3 1 4 NS4: prefer for/of N to-INF
It was impolite that he asked my age. (made up) 3 1 4 NS4: prefer for/of N to-INF
Sir Richard Attenborough, chairman of Channel 4, said it was ‘utterly improper that any government should have
direct control over the appointment of who will run Channel 4’. (A96 684) 5 5 5 5
The Dean admits that the landowners are good preservers of the landscape, but he finds it ‘improper that private NS2: ok apart from missing verb
citizens should enormous tracts of the English countryside’. (ED9 3073) 5 5 5 5
7323 Sheriff Crozier told him: ‘I did say to you to stop using it. 7324 I thought it was improper that it should be used. NS2: clumsy
124
(K5D 7324) 5 2 1 5
Mr Justice Morris said he saw no reason why all or any of those arguments could not be put before the judge hearing
the case on October 24. It would be improper that he (President) should embark on a part hearing now on the
arguments. (newsmerge) 5 5 5 5
It was evidently improper that two offices, one of which was meant to be a check on the other, should be united in the
same person; and this the Commons represented to the King. (academic) 5 5 2 5
The matter was long debated, but Lord Thurlow, who appeared in the House of Lords for the last time in order to
Appendix 20
support the bill, turned the scale by arguing that it was improper that the wife should under such circumstances return
to her husband (see Campbell, Lives of the Chancellors, vii. 145). (popmerge) 5 5 5 5
It was imprudent that you ran with scissors. (made up) 5 1 5
He said that it was totally inadequate that complaints against gardai should be investigated internally by the Garda NS2: prefer for N to-INF
Siochana. (newsmerge) 5 4 5 5
Moreover, it is clearly inadequate that the nature of the failing, in indivivual cases, was not disclosed by the SFA in the
Barings case. (newsmerge) [sic!] 5 5 5 5
It was inconsiderate that he asked about the circumstances of my husband's death. (made up) 4 1 5 NS2: prefer for N to-INF
“It is incorrect that Switzerland was the only neutral country to take gold from the German Reichsbank,” Mr Abegg NS2: should be "simply not true" or
declared. (newsmerge) 5 2 1 5 "not correct"
A Department of Transport spokeswoman confirmed yesterday that an announcement is expected within the next NS2: trying to sound official; NS3:
fortnight, but said it was incorrect that the grey route had already been chosen. (newsmerge) 5 2 2 5 plausible but unidiomatic
Though it is probably incorrect that such an event has occurred to all depressives, it is likely that children who have
suffered the loss of a parent are especially predisposed to depression. (academic) 5 1 1 5
It was also incorrect that he had carried out the kidnap for a buzz. (popmerge) 5 1 5 5
He submits that it is incorrect that his general practitioner found that he had pain in the lower lumbar region.
(popmerge) 5 1 1 5
It was indiscreet that he should ask my income. (made up) 1 1 5 NS2: prefer of N to-INF
It is inefficient that we both go. (made up) 1 1 5 NS2: prefer for N to-INF
She believes it was politically inept that they cut such training programmes at a time when the jobless total is rising fast NS2: to-INF in VDE is ok
and will soon top three million. (variation of VDE example) 1 5
“It seems to me incredibly insensitive that the people at the top of the decision-making process are taking such
enormous pay rises while asking nurses and others in the public sector to accept virtually nothing,” she said.
(newsmerge) [slightly different wording but surely same source as below] 5 1 5 5
“It seems to me to be incredibly insensitive that the people at the top of the decision-making process are taking such
enormous pay rises while asking nurses and others in the public sector to accept virtually nothing.” (newsmerge)
125
[slightly different wording but surely same source as above] 5 1 5 5

In this case it felt ridiculously insensitive that we would play football a couple of hours north of a region where
television reporters were describing old women having their noses cut off before being murdered in the name of
nationalism. (newsmerge) 5 1 5 5
A few simple facts paint the real picture: It may seem irrational that both the cost of labor and net wages could improve
under the new system, but that in fact seems to be the case. (academic) 5 5 5 5
it is submitted that given the Adjudicator’s finding that there was a risk of danger to the appellant if he returned to NS3: wrong word
Appendix 20
Turkey it is irrational that the Secretary of State has not granted exceptional leave to remain. (popmerge)
5 1 1 5
If she’d meant to lie, she’d have planned the lies; as it was, it was more like someone else speaking, someone for whom NS4: not "in the circumstances" but
all the tales might be true: the tales of the amorous husband who would not be denied, or even delayed; of her horrified "under…"
discovery that her tried and trusted dutch cap had let her down after all these years, of her disappointment that she
would not now be able to train as a doctor or run a campaign for more zebra crossings or offer a home to her poor ailing
mother; and then of course there were the medical difficulties, what with her diabetes and the early mongol child that
died and all those Caesarians; and the home where there wasn’t an inch of space and how the baby would mean
eviction and bankruptcy; and the fear that the baby might be too obviously of mixed-race; and the over-riding, gut-
rending terror that the baby might have royal blood (of course if ever this got outside these walls there would be no
answering for the political consequences for the western world) and in the circumstances it seemed kind that the child
should never be born. (BP8 945)
5 1 5 5
Is it fair, equal or even legal that our country is the only EU member without its own national parliament? (newsmerge)
[slightly different wording but probably same source as below] 5 1 5 5
Does he consider it fair, democratic or even legal that England should be the only member of the EU without its own
national parliament? (newsmerge) [Beware, no subject! slightly different wording but probably same source as above]
5 5 5 5
The pipe-lines left out of the pool began to ask how it could be legal that the railroads should enter into an arrangement
which obviously would drive them out of business. (academic) 5 1 5 5
That must have direct effect on education standards, and it is legitimate that Her Majesty’s inspectorate should
comment on it. (HHX 17362) 5 1 1 5
If someone does 90 per cent of the work, it’s quite legitimate that that person should get more than an equal cut.
(newsmerge) 5 1 5 5
"If the international community has found it acceptable for Uganda to return to the DRC, for all the dubious reasons it
has given, then it is legitimate that Rwanda should go into the DRC to contain this new situation, " Rwanda’s foreign
ministry said in a statement. (newsmerge) [Beware! non-native context] 5 1 1 5
126
But no effort was made to maintain chastity in the unmarried man; on the contrary, it was considered normal and
legitimate that he should visit brothels; sex (in the male) was an appetite like hunger, and might be indulged in without
any other disgrace than that which would in any case attach to immoderation. (academic)
5 1 3 5
It is, however, legitimate that plaintiffs would be responsible for the attorneys’ fees of defendants if the court
determined the suit was frivolous, harassing, or unreasonable, even if it was not brought in bad faith. (popmerge)
Appendix 20
5 1 3 5
He further submitted that since the assets were valued on the basis of a going concern, if the profit was substantially
reduced (in his example he reduced it by 80 %) he said that the assets could no longer be valued on this basis and it was
therefore legitimate that the damages should eat into the value of the assets (as the claim was originally pleaded) or as
now, taking 85 % of the value attributed to goodwill. (popmerge)
5 1 5 5
It is very liberal that the Netherlands allow cannabis consumption. (made up) 1 5 5
It was mean that they left me here on my own. (made up) 1 5 5
It's really mean that the government can cut benefits with no warning. (made up) 5
He employed his ten years of exile in studying politics in what was then the centre of European diplomacy, and it is NS3: wrong word
memorable that his keen eye detected the inherent weakness of the second French empire beneath its imposing exterior.
(popmerge) 5 5 1 5
It was simply mindless that this trap door was left open. (made up) 1 5 5
Is it unfortunate or misguided that an England team squanders a 2-0 lead against the Dutch at Wembley? (newsmerge) NS3: makes no sense; NS4: ok only
with unfortunate but not without
(i.e. sentence ok, relevant
1 1 1 construction not)
It is moral that one consider others' needs to be equally valid to one's own. (made up) 1 1 5
It sounds very naive that I didn’t know she was going to be killed but that is the truth. (newsmerge) [Beware! no NS3: "It was very naive that…" also
copula] 5 1 5 5 ok
It is nasty that beer is served at room temperature here. (made up) 5 1 5
It's nasty that you should be the only one to bear the brunt of the cuts. (made up) 5
One of the first acts of the newly free eastern European countries was to commission their own national museums, so it
seems almost criminally negligent that Scotland’s ruling elite preferred to spend most of the past 50 years squabbling
over narrow political definitions of nationhood and the minutiae of devolution. (newsmerge)
5 5 5 5
127
I thought that it was very polite that we should go there in the evening and assess for ourselves exactly the harm th-- NS2: but not "It was very polite that
the possible harm that it could do to their gardens at the back and [unclear] and that’s why we did that. (HYG 534) he went there."
5 5 1 5
It's popular that people go to the beach, buy an ice cream and go home again. (made up) 1 3 NS4: prefer for N to-INF
This saddles the defendant with the task of proving that it was not practicable that the procession should have been NS4: wouldn't use the word
postponed. (GVR 883)
Appendix 20
5 1 5 4
It was obviously not practicable that directions for removal be given now so under paragraph 10 the secretary of state NS4: wouldn't use the word
could give directions requiring arrangements to be made for their removal. (newsmerge) 5 1 5 4
It was not productive that you brought up the boss's past mistakes at the meeting. (made up) 1 2 5
The Archbishop said: ‘It is right and proper that we should bring our indignation with us to God’s house. (A8K 1159) NS2: because of "right and proper"
5 5 5 5
For it was proper that in matters of sacrifice the ruler should fare better than the commoner and the nation than the NS2: formal/stilted
ruler, since the whole should always be superior to the part … (ACL 376) 5 4 5 5
At the other extreme is the stance taken on the MoD’s continuing tenure, which insists that it is not proper that the
public continue to be excluded some of the time from all, and all of the time from some, of the finest coastal scenery in
the British Isles. (CG1 177) 5 1 5 5
We have seen, however, that it is entirely proper that the results of research will be drawn on, within that educational
process. (G0R 776) 5 1 5 5
I think it’s right and proper that there is a strategic policy which erm emphasizes protection for the countryside across NS2: because of "right and proper"
the whole of the area. (J9V 449) 5 5 3 5
It is proper that Yeats is referred to throughout as WBY, for the famous initials remind us that this was a life conceived NS2: formal/literary, ok in such a
of in dramatic terms, a combat between the Man and the Masks (although the Yeatsian Mask is a means towards the context.
discovery not the concealment of the self). (newsmerge) 5 4 1 5
5 1 1 5
Recognizing that, when several agencies have a finger in the pie of, say, biotechnology, it is prudent that there should
be a committee to coordinate their spending, the committee’s budget then becomes an identifiable object in itself, to be
judged against what may be called’results’. (HRN 63) 5 1 5 5
Given the widespread fragility of confidence in the economic recovery, the directors believe it prudent that the dividend
for the year to March 1993 should reflect that year’s results and not be presumptuous as to any future economic upturn.
(HS3 10) [Beware! no subject] 5 1 5 5
“When we paid our bonuses, we suggested it would be prudent that they save some of their money,” Boyle said.
(newsmerge) 5 1 5 5
128
It is therefore prudent that we make timely provision to accommodate these claims. (newsmerge) 5 1 5 5
Be that as it may, in the world that prevails, it is only prudent that the United States retain some capability, across the
board, to address the concerns or problems of the arsenal as they arise. (academic) 5 1 5 5
At a word from Magua, however, Duncan insists that it would be more prudent that they be silent. (academic)
5 1 1 5
Therefore, it would be prudent that after any maintenance check related to the overwing doors, a check on the
integrator condition should be carried out. (popmerge)
Appendix 20
5 1 5 5
It appears to be a bit rash that the narrator is pressured to seal the union as soon as he returns from England. (academic)
5 1 5 5
It was reckless that you trank so much and then drove home. (made up) 1 1 5
It was very responsible of them that they separated their garbage. (made up) 1 1 5
Fielding thinks it is rude that she has left without telling her host. (academic) 5 1 5 5 NS3: tensing is weird
It was frightfully rude that he said that. (variation of VDE example) 1 NS2: but ok with to-INF
It was very scrupulous (of him) that he insisted on repaying the 1 dollar. (made up) 1 1 5
It’s selfish that men should expect it all. (newsmerge) 5 1 5 5
It is senseless that so many people died. (made up) 1 5 5
Contemporary law and international declarations make it very clear and simple that dignity is a respected interest. NS4: ok, but not without clear and
(popmerge) [Beware! no subject] 1 1 1 1 not as subject without clear
It is smart that you took the train. (made up) NS3: colloquially maybe ok, written
1 2 5 not
It’s equally sound that the new body should include health and further education in its brief. (newsmerge) 5 5 1 5
As I grew up, it became very special that I had these godmothers who had time to spend with me on my own. NS2: better if "special to me that I
(newsmerge) had…"; NS4: Guess I have to accept
5 1 3 4 that; uneducated use.
Both his grandfather and father were stationmasters in Great Eastern Railway territory so it is suitable that he should NS2: wrong word, should be
produce a pictorial survey of British railway stations. (CJ4 418) "appropriate"; NS3: wrong word;
5 1 1 5 NS4: strange use of suitable
It was not suitable that he should meet the eyewitness, he had been told. (CLD 632) NS3: wrong word; NS4: strange use
5 1 1 5 of suitable
‘It is suitable that I do something involving a black rhino to raise the money.’ (K47 174) 5 1 1 5 NS4: strange use of suitable
In such an unreal atmosphere, it was perhaps suitable that BG “B” was the most active stock. (newsmerge) NS2: wrong word; NS4: strange use
5 1 1 5 of suitable
The first one, I had a relationship with a guy who was really nice, but we were both very difficult and disturbed people
129
at the time and it wasn’t suitable that we should have a baby. (newsmerge) 5 1 1 5
Do you think, perhaps with the benefit of hindsight, that it was suitable that your meeting with Mr Wisheart would NS2: no, whole sentence is wrong
have been joined by the cardiologists rather than with you being given an opportunity to see the cardiologists
separately? (popmerge) 5 1 1 5
It is superb that you were able to come to my party. (made up) 5 2 5 NS3: not any more
It is superb that you have been accepted by Oxford. (made up) 5 NS1: spoken
Appendix 20
On the contrary, he seems to find it slightly tedious that his name has become indelibly linked with a set of redundant NS4: replace slightly with rather.
rules, which were hardly the main work of his life. (newsmerge) [Beware! not a subject] 5 5 5 5
It is tedious that my name has become… (made up) 1 1 5
It appears to him slightly tedious that his name… (made up) 5
It is not uncommon that, during the investigation phase of Commission procedures, there will be an amicable NS4: prefer for N to-INF
settlement of a dispute using the good offices of the Commission. (BP5 901) 1 1 5 4
It is not uncommon that litigants have to wait for nine months more to be seen by a consultant. (newsmerge) NS4: prefer for N to-INF
1 1 1 4
It is not uncommon that new members are granted first shots at filling in committee seats of the members they replace. NS4: prefer for N to-INF
(academic) 1 1 1 4
A large proportion of our forces had to be ready to travel to distant theatres of war and it was uneconomic that they NS4: misuse: should be
should be composed of National Servicemen, admirably though those carried out their duties …. (ABA 626) uneconomical
1 1 1 1
A large proportion of our forces had to be ready to travel to distant theatres of war and it was uneconomical that they
should be composed of National Servicemen, admirably though those carried out their duties …. (modified version of
previous sentence) 5
It was unethical that the manager accepted his large bonus after the company had almost gone bankrupt. (made up)
1 1 5
It was unkind that you referred to my baby as a monkey. (made up) 1 1 5
It was rather unproductive that you referred to the company's losses at the shareholders' meeting. (made up) NS4: prefer to-INF
1 1 4
It was unsafe that you were riding about without a helmet. (made up) 1 1 5
Given the long-standing hostility between the clubs’ fans, it was unwise that United’s players had to run a gauntlet
through the Liverpool supporters to collect the trophy. (newsmerge) 1 1 5 5
Some will think it politically unwise that we recommend a process and guidelines for identifying activities that can be
reduced or eliminated and for reallocating the savings to ones more essential to preserving U.S. leadership in science
and technology. (academic) [Beware! no subject] 1 1 5 5
130
It was politically unwise that we recommended … (modified version of previous sentence) 5 5

It was useless that we continued to waste matches trying to light green wood. 1 1 5
Therefore, it was useless that we, the philosophers of education, continued to tell metanarratives to teachers. (adapted
from www.ffst.hr) 1 1 5
Despite the above, it still remains valid that the importance of the covariances between the returns of securities is the
mot effective method of reducing risk where the number of shares in a portfolio is necessarily limited. (HNM 256)
[Beware! remain] 2 5 3 5
… it is still valid that … (modified version of previous sentence)
Appendix 20
5
It is valuable that she has raised some very important and complex questions, but regrettable that her account of the
Bulletin was extremely misleading. (CAL 1219) 5 1 1 5
It is valuable that their contributions have been so accurately recorded, both in Committee and on Report. (HHX 18840)
5 1 1 5
If schools can serve as workshops in self-government, it will be both likely and valuable that they be diverse in this NS3: not without likely; NS4: also ok
respect. (academic) 5 1 5 5 without likely
It is vicious that the IRS will simply keep your reimbursement without asking you first [.] (www.buzzle.com)
1 1 5
It’s wicked that it should bloom unseen in the wild. (G33 1244) 5 1 1 4 NS4: ok but odd
I think it was wicked that he could not spend more time with his father. (newsmerge) 5 1 1 4 NS4: ok but odd
It is wicked that people should have been deceived for so long. (newsmerge) NS3: not sure, 70% no; NS4: best one
5 1 3 4
No sentences for:
bold
careless
civil
clumsy
complacent
early
easy
economic
exact
expensive
extreme
131
(fearful)
fruitful
fruitless
(hateful)
hopeless
inept
(misguided)
Appendix 20
negative
radical
safe
sentimental
(simple)
smart
ungrateful
132
It is a fantastic achievement to win an election amid deep recession; marred by the loss of Mr Patten's seat, and so many NS4: 'amid a deep'
of his colleagues. (AK9 831) 5 5 5 5
NS3: to-INF; NS4: not non-
Appendix 21
It is a safe bet to assume this competition will present no problems for them leaving them the first pipe band in history
to collect every available award and go undefeated for the duration of the season. (K2D 1108) [Beware! to_INF or extraposed
that_CL?] 5 5 5
If that's your idea of a good party, then it's a safe bet to assume that you haven't made the Social and Personal lists of
Ireland's top 100 party people. (news) [Beware! to_INF or that_CL?] 5 5 5
If you are looking for a new job, it's not always the best bet to apply to the agency, or company, whose advertisement
looks the trendiest,' says recruitment specialist Anne Hobbs. (news) 5 5 5 5
The US is now the world's fattest nation, and the fattest since records began. In other words, it's a pretty safe bet to say
the fattest ever. (news) 5 5 5 5
It is a fair bet to say that a book written so recently did not fetch such a good price because of its literary merit. (news) NS4: wrong collocation 'fair bet'
[to_INF] subjects
[Beware! to_INF or that_CL?] 5 5 5

If Camilla could look into her own future ( or even her own past ) she might learn the fundamental truth that in the NS1: only with premodifier
realm of soothsaying it is always a good bet to underplay your hand: (news) 5 5 5 5
It was a difficult case to argue, though, without sounding as if I were asking the Government to give in. (FS0 427) NS1+NS4: NO EXTRAPOSITION
[to_INF dependent on difficult or difficult+case?] 5 5 5 5
NS2: non-extraposed to-INF just
about ok, that_CL not
I think it's absolutely not the case to say that we're sending the wrong signals, I think there's a recognition in the
country that the economy has been mismanaged, and the price that's being exacted by people is too high, high levels of
unemployment, low levels of growth, and social services undermined, and people recognize that Labour is setting out a
new way forward. (HUW 368) [Beware! to_INF or that_CL?] 1 5 5 1
And as it is the first case to come up in Scotland, it could help other people in the same circumstances. (K5M 10750) NS1: NO EXTRAPOSITION; NS4:
[depends on first?] 5 5 5 5 only with superlative
NS3: fixed chunk
It's a real tough case to make that this is actually a legal action although the administration feels confident that they can
base it on previous UN resolutions that were passed over the past 12 years. (news) [VORSICHT, to-inf oder that-cl?] 5 1 5 5
Some of the evidence had not been before the Costs Judge, but nevertheless the Judge felt that it was an appropriate NS1: maybe legal language? not
case to direct that the Defendants should pay costs on the indemnity basis, and the matter was remitted to a different common in everyday language
Appendix 21 Native speaker judgements on nouns with extraposed
Costs Judge for final resolution. (popmerge) [it referential?] 2 1 5 1

133
Although this was a borderline case, it was a proper case to hold that the two threshold tests had been satisfied. NS1: no idea what to make of it;
(popmerge) [it referential?] 1 1 5 NS4: NO EXTRAPOSITION
It is his unforgivable fault to be faultless: (academic) [Beware! non-native context] 5 1 5 5
NS1: 'It's a fault to over-hyphen' also
ok; NS3: 'more common'; NS4:
It is a much commoner fault to over-hyphen than to under-hyphen. (academic) [dependent of commoner?] 5 5 5 5 should be 'hyphenate'
It is a big fault to think that you can learn how to manage people in business school. (news) [Beware! to_INF or NS2+NS3: wrong word
Appendix 21
that_CL?] 1 1 1
I know this isn't a popular view at the moment, but having had 2 kids run out in front of me yesterday, without even NS2: 'in order to save'; NS3: wrong
looking ( I was following Mrs.Pebbledash, in the Fyffes Special, which aint subtle or quiet)I am seriously begining to word
believe that some parents are relying on the fact that it's the motorists fault to save their poorly educated childrens lives.
(popmerge) 1 1 1 1
Hawk picked up the torch at the entrance and decided at last that it was their own fault to leave this "chamber" open all NS1: 'mistake'; NS2+NS3: 'for
by itself. (fanfiction) 1 1 1 5 leaving'
The standard of applications was exceedingly high and it was a tough job to do the initial short listing never mind the NS3: 'doing'
final judging ! 5 1
It is sometimes good judgment to breakfast before the system is fully purified, then to return to abstinence after an
interval of corrective diet. (academic) 5 5 1 5
It was a rationalized judgment to become more like the Commonwealth's other comprehensive universities. (academic) 5 5 1 5
But a leading Mayo GAA official said it was an "inappropriate judgment to foist a man with a criminal record on a
club". (news) 5 5 1 5
They did not plead for mercy since they believed it was God's judgment to take their lives. (news) 5 5 5 5
A spokesman said that it had been an editorial judgment to stay with the Welsh game. (news) 5 5 1 5
Is it really good judgment to return to bombing Beirut? (news) 5 5 1 5
War has been my life, and although my loyalties lean toward its continuation, it would be a mercy to see it end. NS2: not common; NS3: ok in
(fanfiction) 5 4 5 1 literature
Sometimes, after the Dark Lord had been through with someone, it had been a mercy to kill them rather than let them NS3: but ok with 'was a mercy'
twitch and spasm for hours before death. (fanfiction) 5 5 1 1
Hermione whimpered and Draco realized it would be a mercy to kill her quickly rather than let her suffer the torment NS2: but rare
she now endured. (fanfiction) 5 4 1 1
NS2: 'There was'
It was a need to answer precisely that question that led to the establishment of the large scale comparative research
project analysed in the next chapter. (C8F 594) [NO COUTER-EXAMPLE. Noise due to clefting.] 1 5 5
134
At some point in nearly every gay person's life, Alyson said, there comes a time when they need to travel as a kind of NS2: 'There was'; NS3: yes,
pilgrimage to discover themselves. Alyson did this himself in his early 20s, traveling to Europe for a year and ending up extraposition
in England, where he lived and worked for six months. "I think it is a need to come to terms with who we are," said
Alyson. (news) [Extraposition?] 5 1 5 5
Suddenly we saw a pattern emerge - so many cases of deprivation, loss of a loved one, love which is not given, divorce NS1+NS4: NO EXTRAPOSITION;
NS3: non-referential
Appendix 21
and so forth. In the case of some women, the very fact that they were told they couldn't do things when they were
children may have contributed to the drive. It is the need to prove themselves to signficant others. (news)
[Extraposition?] 5 5 5 5
NS1+NS4: NO EXTRAPOSITION;
NS3: ambiguous
The second factor driving the guerrillas is a calculation familiar from many previous civil wars - including the one in
Algeria four decades ago. It is the need to ensure that the country does not fade from the headlines, that the foreign
governments accepting - faute de mieux - the current regime have some incentive to reconsider their policy and that the
fiction of an improvement in the situation is brutally exposed. (news) [Probably not Extraposition] 5 5 5 5
Let's stick "Atrocitainment" in the dictionary, because there's a lot of it about and it is oh so respectable: millions watch it
as they snuggle down at a safe distance. There's no harm in it, after all. Just enough to get the adrenalin pumping before
Ovaltine. Maybe it is a need to meet in virtual reality what we fear most, or maybe it hits the fear button and gives
people a buzz, but I imagine anyone who has suffered the reality of any of the horrors now up as entertainment
switches off. (news) 5 5 5 5
According to Dr Oruc: "It is a need to fight against death. People want to reproduce themselves as a survival instinct."
(news) 5 5 5 5
Eight months ago Teeton Mill was contesting hunter chases; now it would be a bold opinion to name his superior over
fences.(news) [possibly dependant of bold?] 5 5 1 5
It is, however, an exaggerated opinion to regard the Pavilion de l'Horloge as the best example of French architecture.
(popmerge) 5 5 1 5
They felt that it was partly their responsibility to bring up their children in an atmosphere of knowledge and
understanding of protestants, as they believed part of the difficulties of life in Ulster were caused by this lack of contact.
(A07 1396) 5 5 5 5
It is his responsibility to decide whether the glider should be manned at the nose or tail, and whether someone is NS2: non-extraposed only to-INF;
needed in the cockpit. (A0H 138) [theoretically ambiguous] 5 5 5 5 NS4: not non-extraposed
This could be done more effectively if the law was changed so that it became the jury's responsibility to assess only the NS1: non-extraposed prefer V-ing
actual damage to the plaintiff and the judge's responsibility to impose an unlimited fine on the defendants according to
his view of their culpability. (A1F 229) 5 5 5 5
135
It is a man's responsibility to educate himself but also to educate his wife and children.’ (A6V 1056) 5 5 5 5
it + noun + [that_CL] NS1 NS2 NS3 NS4 comments
It is an obvious advantage that ASV provide two substantial fill-ups in shorter pieces by the same composers, though it
is conceivable that Hyperion might recouple what was one of its early CD issues, adding more material by Finzi and
Stanford already recorded by the same soloist. (ED6 1199) 5 5 5
Appendix 22
Besides, in one way it was an advantage that they were so hard, because they would last longer. (EFW 1328) 5 5 5
NS2: very stilted, literary; prefer for
It is to your advantage that I go away, for if I do not go away the Paraclete will not come to you. (G3A 755) 5 4 5 N to-INF
NS2: unnatural, trying to be posh;
For example, if you have the situation where you want to put two occasionally-used machines quite close to one another prefer for N to-INF
, it may be to your advantage that their heights are exactly the same so the job can run across both tables. (A0X 1125) 5 4 5
It's none of your business that I left my car open. (made up) 5
It's none of your business that I plagiarized my thesis. (made up) 5 5
[that_CL] subjects
It is no business of yours that I plagiarized my thesis. (made up) 5

It was an ancient custom that on the fourth day of her menstruation, when a woman had taken her ritual bath, her NS1: only extraposed; NS2: prefer
husband was honour-bound to have intercourse with her. (ACL 726) 5 4 5 for N to-INF
NS1: canonical also ok; NS2: prefer
for N to-INF
It used to be the custom that the issue of the writ should be moved by chief whip of the party in the House of Commons
a member of which had held the seat prior to its vacation, but this practice was occasionally the subject of abuse by the
moving party being reluctant, by reason of its unpopularity in the country and consequent fear of being humiliated in a
poll, Constituents in one instance were left unrepresented for over nine months. (C8R 335) 5 4 5
It is a well-known custom that as soon as the siren of a fire-engine is heard, other vehicles should pull up at the side of NS4: 'pull up' looks british
the road, in order to afford free passage. (FRA 325) 5 5 5
‘It is a delight that this great office of Lord Chief Justice is to be held by a distinguished son of the North-East,’ he said. NS1: non-extraposed ok; NS4: ok,
(K4W 5196) 5 5 4 but wouldn't use it
It is a great delight that the trade has stopped , even if the reasons have nothing to do with animl welfare. [sic!] (news) 5 4 1
I doubt whether the working party will get any further than recommending the status quo, because I'm absolutely sure NS2: duty + 'has to' is strange, prefer
in my own mind, that it is a duty that this council has to support village schools, where the parents support them, and for N to-INF
where they're educationally beneficial, to support them in the village communities, because they are, they have other
136
importance than just education. (JJG 432) 1 4 1

Its message was simple : it was an Islamic duty that Abu Zeid be killed . (news) 5 5 1
On the entry form you will see that stepchildren are not permitted and it is my error that adopted children did not
feature on the form ; this will be corrected for next year. (news) 5 5 5
So while it is literally an error that the ' he ' in the poem should be both God and Adam , this deliberate distortion of the
familiar text engenders interesting and perhaps novel ideas , so that we murmur felix culpa to the poet and go on
reading him . (academic) 5 5 5
NS1: 'happening' -> 'developing';
Appendix 22
But it 's fun that my acting career is happening . And it 's fun that I can write too. (news) [Ex model, dyslexic, English NS2: very colloquial; 'acting carrer is
but raised in South Africa] 5 4 5 happening' is odd
The US Marine Mammals Protection Act of 1972 stated that: ‘ … it shall be the immediate goal that the incidental kill or
serious injury of marine mammals permitted in the course of commercial fishing operations be reduced to insignificant
levels approaching zero morality. ' (ABC 1169) 5 4 5
‘It is our goal that sometime in the future we will not be able to find enough dangerous places in the world to justify
writing a book about the subject,' the authors declare. (news) 5 5 5
Television is one of the most important social influences , and it has been a fundamental goal that nobody should be
denied access to it. (news) 5 5 1
But it 's my goal that the whole team becomes better , I just want to use my skills for the team , and , if we profit , that 's NS2: prefer for N to-INF
what I really have come to England for. (news) (Ruud Gullit) 5 4 5
We should make it a goal that all children of moderate intelligence leave school with at least one European language .
(news) [Beware! no subject] 5 5 5
It is our goal that all… (modified version of previous sentence) 5
NS2: prefer for N to-INF
It is a realistic goal that measurement tools will be developed that both rate health care institutions on the quality of care
and provide consumers with information on deciding which health care plan to select . (academic) 5 4 5
In principle, in any case, the story of the princess and the frog is unacceptable. 2923 Not that I have anything against NS1: yes, looks like cleft structure;
ugliness. 2924 Some of the most attractive men are ugly. 2925 No; it is the idea that if you force yourself to offer sexual NS2: no cleft structure
favours to an abhorrent creature you will be rewarded by its transformation into a beautiful prince. (A0R 2925)
[possibly some sort of cleft structure?] 5 5 5
It's a nice idea that in business or banking you can go through a period of ‘consolidation’, but it seldom works out that
way. (A6L 610) 5 5 5
‘It seems an attractive idea that this might be a general scheme for all cells,’ he said. (AHV 21) 5 5 5
NS2+NS4: only spoken, prefer for N
But is it really a good idea that students should be taught about sex in seminaries? (AJW 22) 5 4 4 to-INF
It was his idea that it would become a model city at an initial cost of £100,000. (B3H 959)
137
5 4 5 NS2: only spoken, prefer for N to-

INF
It is no new idea that RNA copies of genes can be copied back again into DNA and reinserted into new positions. (B7N
888) 5 5 5
NS4: common semantic error, ok in
It is an illusion that the Arctic is dark in winter. (A6T 2078) 5 5 4 that sense
It was an illusion that a building society has never gone bankrupt; there was two that had done so, where investors had NS1: 'there was' is informal; NS4:
lost money. (G28 1045) 5 5 4 common semantic error, ok in that
Responding to the vote , Gerald Malone , the Health Minister , said it was an illusion that limited industrial action sense
NS4: common semantic error, ok in
would not harm patients. (news)
Appendix 22
5 5 4 that sense
This probably accounts for the better figures , and it is an illusion that our roads are getting safer. (news) 5 5 5
‘They say that it was a mistake that we had been told that the outbreak was due to Salmonella enteriditis,’ she said. NS2: lacks clarity out of context
(A49 158) 5 4 5
It is no coincidence or mistake that it was the Conservative party that applied to take Britain into the Community, and NS2: also ok without 'coincidence'
which took Britain in. (HHW 11766) [coordination; HANSARD] 5 5 5
It is not a mistake that all that happened as a result of Conservative policy, because the Conservative party has
consistently been dedicated to raising the living standards and the material prosperity of our people. (HHW 11768)
[HANSARD] 5 5 5
The courts are generally loathe to take a licence away , unless a person has breached the law since he or she got the NS2: prefer for N to-INF
licence . We admit it was a mistake that he got it , but we did n't feel that we would win the case if we brought it to
court . (news) 5 4 5
As London becomes the focal point this week for attempts by the British and Irish governments to find a strategy to
rescue the peace process , SeÃ¡n Neeson said it was ` ` a grave mistake that the Executive at Stormont was not
established in July last year or at least by September or October ' ' . (news) 5
NEITHER was it a mistake that Blair refused to answer a question put to him 11 times during the next day 's bad-
tempered press conference . (news) 5
It was no mistake that Mr Hague chose the same room for his announcement where a hapless John Major made his
infamous ' ' do n't tie my hands ' ' plea during the election campaign and where the party commiserated on the night of
May 1 , 1997 , after the electorate punished the Tories , partly because of their divisions over Europe . (news) 5
It's the modern practice that Shylock dominate any version of ‘Merchant,’ whatever the interpretation, despite the fact
that he appears in only five of 20 scenes. (AAH 238) 5 5 5
It is good management practice that any change of policy should itself be assessed: the process should help to decide NS2: prefer for N to-INF
whether LMS can take the credit for any improvements that occur. (B23 1571) 5 4 5
NS2: prefer for N to-INF
138
Every day in many countries, it is routine practice that books, pamphlets, newspapers, etc. are censored on a massive
scale, and those whose ideas are the object of censorship risk death and imprisonment as a matter of course. (BMH 5) 5 4 5
It is basic AIB practice that the investigating team carrying out the original field investigation follows the work right NS2: prefer for N to-INF
through all the stages of testing and researches to the ultimate production of the report, thus ensuring complete
continuity throughout. (CN2 85) 5 4 5
NS1: just about ok, should be
' It is our purpose that the dialogue leads to establishment of trust , friendship and co-operation between the two subjunctive; NS4: odd use of
countries , ' ' India 's foreign ministry secretary , Salman Haider , said . (news) [Beware! ESL context]
Appendix 22
4 1 1 'purpose'
As Harry made his way up the winded staircase he asked himself if it was a purpose that one had to feel dizzy after all
those steps .(fanfiction) [authorship unclear] 1 1 1
No sentences for:
habit
instinct (only 'by instinct')
interest (as in VDE only with [it + in])
job (only 'a good job that', but no alternative to the VDE to-INF pattern)
role
task
tendency
139
it + noun + V-ing, extraposed and dislocated NS1 NS2 NS3 NS4 comments
all judgements in this file are for the preferred variant, i.e. with or without intonational boundary; not all preferences for
intonational boundaries are recorded
It's quite an achievement being in the Sunday Sport. (HUL 124)
Appendix 23
5 5 4 5 NS3: prefer to-INF

And I felt like I remember sometimes feeling as a child when I was doing something a bit difficult, a bit daring. I felt
‘Ooh, what an adventure!’ Silly, wasn't it, when all I was doing was going down the road to the Post Office? But it was a
little achievement, going out in the rain that day when there seemed nothing on earth to want to get better for, and
feeling better all of a sudden. (H9G 289) 5 5 5
It's a positive advantage going in on the admin side. (newsmerge) 5 5 1 5
You know, I can’t blame John Travolta. It would seem a safe bet, producing and starring in a major science fiction epic NS3: only with "would have
with all the high-tech hullabaloo that was afforded to The Phantom Menace, The Matrix, and all those other major seemed"
science fiction epics. (academic) 5 5 5
[V-ing] subjects
It's a safe bet putting (all your) money into a savings account. (made up) 5 5
But it seems that it is a mixed blessing having the most successful racing driver of all time as a boss. (newsmerge)
5 5 5 5
I did not care if he parked it in the middle of Princes Street Gardens or set up a taxi business for the next few hours ; it
was just a blessing not having to spend the rest of the day looking for a space. (newsmerge)
5 5 5
Rugby Football League spokesman Dave Callaghan said: 'It is a blow losing a sponsor of the quality of Stones Bitter but
work has already started on finding somebody who will have a long-term commitment to the exciting principle of
Super League.' (newsmerge) 5 5 5 5
It was a big blow having to send on a substitute after about ten minutes. (newsmerge) 5 5 5 5
You can tell that it is still a blow losing his Bath constituency the result, he is sure, of tactical voting and being whisked
away from the heart of the action he once thrived upon. (newsmerge) 5 5 5 5
It was nice of her to say that. Edwin went outside and looked left and right. No sign of either of them. They’d probably NS3: artistic use in novel
picked up a call. Or were in some pub or other near here. It was a wearisome and drunken business, looking for one’s
wife. (academic) 5 5 5
It’s a hairy old business, standing out there mucking about for a living, but what’s the worst that can happen ?
(newsmerge) 5 5 5
It’s a dirty business betraying friends. (newsmerge) 5 5 5
140
A police spokesman said: ‘It was a particularly nasty crime, picking on a woman in distress. (CEN 6214) NS1: definitely pause; NS3: only
5 5 5 with pause
It's a crime killing innocent people. (made up) 5
It's a crime not eating any of that pudding. (made up) NS1: ok if used in a non-literal,
5 1 4 ironic sense NS4: prefer to-INF
It's a custom going out on a Friday night. (made up) 4 NS4: prefer to-INF
‘It's a downright disgrace wasting the ratepayers' money like this.’ (A73 810) NS2: prefer canonical position; NS3:
Appendix 23
5 4 2 5 prefer to-INF
“It’s a bloody disgrace, allowing these people to march like this,” Mr Schuhner, a 40-year-old buildings inspector, said, NS1: definitely pause; NS2: both ok;
incredulous that his street had been invaded by skinheads marching eight abreast as far as the eye could see. NS3: only without pause
(newsmerge) 5 5 5
‘It's a disgrace, allowing it out on the road like that — in a state like that.’ (BPD 1700) 5 5 5 NS1: definitely pause
It was his duty doing it. (made up) 1 1
It was an error reversing in the one-way street in my driving test. (made up) 4 prefer to-INF
It was an error leaving the garage door open. (made up) 5
Oh it's my fault leaving it there. (FMF 353) NS1: "for leaving"; NS2: prefer "for
leaving"; NS3: "for leaving", NS4:
1 4 1 4 prefer to-INF
But the other women were just embarrassed, and the men uncomprehending. It was my own fault, getting pregnant NS2: prefer "for"
again, a personal matter, not something you should take to the union. (academic) 5 4 5
She alerted the British Transport Police who accompanied her the next day and promptly arrested Pearce. He accepted NS3: "for picking"
in court that he had misread the position and apologised to her: ‘It is my fault, picking up the wrong vibes,’ he said.
(newsmerge) 5 1 1
As Frank Clark pointed out, Forest had a right to be jaded after their midweek exertions in Germany, but he could not NS3: "for needing"
detect any difference in tiredness between the two sides in extra time - although another big game on Wednesday is a
lot to ask. ` It’s our own fault, needing so many replays, ' the Forest manager said. ‘But at least we're still in the
competition.’ (newsmerge) 5 4 1
They think it is just harmless fun, playing on the ice-covered reservoir. (newsmerge) fun without comma is frequently
attested and was thus not tested;
5 5 5 NS3: only without pause (for all 4)
And I have to say that it is fun, driving round in a big orange van with enough kit in the back of it to build a car from
scratch, never mind mend one by the roadside. (newsmerge) 5 5 5
It can be fun, scouring the world at the 11th hour for what the customers want. (newsmerge) 5 4 5
It was fun, stomping through the bushes, looking for tracks and clues. (newsmerge) 5 5 5
141
This week’s Modern Times ( BBC2 ) was about toy enthusiasts. It echoed the film about Proms obsessives a week ago,
followed by something about Reliant Robins. It’s a great British television habit, reading people in exactly the way they
ask themselves to be read, flattening British society into something whimsical and apolitical and untrue. (newsmerge)
5 5 5
Tim Sebastion isn’t his real name. It’s a druid habit, changing your name. (newsmerge) 5 5 1
Appendix 23
Clarence: There's no <pause> there's no price on there I presume?

Nina: No that's just the thing.
Clarence: Ooh!
Nina: It's a stupid habit, not putting the price on. <pause> People must lose sales for that. <unclear> <-|-> (KBP 3039;
reformatted)
5 5 5
It was my idea asking you. (AT4 2237) NS1: to-INF or non-extraposed; NS2:
to-INF or canonical positon; NS4:
1 1 1 1 But ok in initial position
It was a good idea taking your own dressing gown though wasn't it? (KE3 271) NS1: intonational gap; NS2: prefer to-
5 1 3 5 INF NS3: prefer to-INF
My eldest wondered if it was a good idea getting married to a guy who’s doing a life sentence. (newsmerge) NS1: intonational gap; NS2: better
5 2 3 5 than above, but still prefer to-
It’s a nice idea thinking that if we take the necessary precautions our children will be fine, but in my opinion, you INF/canonical
NS1: intonational gap; NS2: to think;
should tell them not to divulge any information, and then there’s not much else you can do. (newsmerge) NS4: poorly worded
5 1 5 4
Lastly, don't think it’s a great idea getting the five o'clock Oxford tube back to University. (newsmerge) NS2: prefer to-INF and take over get ;
NS3: ok as an imperative, not with a
5 1 5 5 nominal subject
Hetty also finds it a cruel idea, hunting when one doesn’t need the meat--spirits wouldn’t do that her mother told her not a subject
so. (academic) 5 5 1
Some Cabinet ministers are unhappy about the upward ratcheting of base rates, and have started to wonder whether it
was such a great idea, handing over the day-to-day control of monetary policy to the Bank of England. (newsmerge)
5 5 5
It seemed a good idea - making a film of Muhammad Ali’s comeback fight in the heart of Africa. And so it was.
(newsmerge) 5 5 5
It is an attractive idea, getting well-known authors to provide prefaces to texts that were once familiar, but are no
longer. (newsmerge) 5 5 5
Mud-brick architecture is a very complex thing to maintain long term. It’s a very Western idea, keeping a building alive
142
for generations,' she said. (newsmerge) 5 5 5

It's an illusion believing that you can fly. (made up) 5 5
USNM 189017 [ catalog number of a key specimen in the United States National Museum ] is the best of only about 3 (
out of thousands ) specimens which show these limbs in lateral view ( they are almost without exception totally
obscured by the carapace, compaction etc. ), and as you can see on Plate 5 ( Briggs 1978 ) it was a huge job preparing the
specimen to show them. (academic) 5 5
In an average night, he would walk 35 kilometres on his rounds. ` It was a tiring and responsible job, checking for signs
of customer and staff fraud, and watching for fire alarms. (newsmerge)
Appendix 23
5 5
It’s quite a job, being responsible for satisfying the world’s dreams. (newsmerge) 5 5
It was a fantastic job, travelling all over the world with rock bands. (newsmerge) 5 4
It's quite a job, keeping the windows clean on Integrity 2. (CJA 3633) 5 5
Self taught, Albert, who is a relative of George Barron, of BBC TV's Beechgrove Garden fame, has been tending the
gardens for 16 years and has been a consistent winner in the gardens competition over the years. It's a full time job,
looking after a walled garden, three plots of vegetables and cut flowers, lawns, a rock garden and three greenhouses
where he rears thousands of plants. (HB2 445) 5 5
It is no joke coming home at night to an empty house. (newsmerge) 5 5 5
It is no joke, trying to build a new National Theatre. (newsmerge) NS2: unnatural with pause; NS3:
5 4 4 better with pause
It was great luck missing the pitchfork in the hay. (made up) 5 5
It's a mercy knowing he passed away before this happened. (made up) 5 5
‘I knew it was a mistake giving you responsibilities.’ (BP1 972) NS2: only with pause or in canonical
5 0 4 5 position; NS3: prefer to-INF
There wasn't much he could do about Preston except shout abuse across the garden fence at his nan while she was NS2: to-INF/canonical
putting the washing out, but he managed to persuade her it would be a mistake sending him to a Catholic school. (F9C
2791) 5 1 5 5
‘I should have realized it was a mistake getting involved with Compeyson. (FPU 1655) 5 1 3 5 NS2: to-INF
Barber did not take back what he said, but he said it was a mistake making his opinions public. (newsmerge) NS2: to-INF/canonical NS3: ok if
5 1 3 5 spoken
It was a mistake, sending my grandfather here! (CB5 499) 4 5 NS2: prefer to-INF
There wasn't much he could do about Preston except shout abuse across the garden fence at his nan while she was NS2: pause or to-INF; NS3: to-INF
putting the washing out, but he managed to persuade her it would be a mistake sending him to a Catholic school. (F9C
2791) 3 1
Towards the end Schumacher, now running with more downforce on the Benetton-Renault, tried unsuccessfully to get NS2: prefer to-INF, V-ing only with
back on terms. “It was a mistake, changing the set-up, but we had to try,” he said. (newsmerge) pause; NS3: better without pause
143
3 4
It's an urgent need getting this done in time. (made up) 1
It is a good policy promising not to increase taxes. (made up) NS1: to-INF or non-extraposed; NS4:
1 4 prefer to-INF; non-extraposed ok,
It was a common practice walking arm in arm, sitting on a floor resting one’s head on the knees of a friend or on the NS2:
too to-INF
arm of a chair with one’s own arm flung over his shoulders. (popmerge) 5 1 5 5
“Unless this one matter,” he says, “be thoroughly understood, it is to no purpose proceeding any further in our to no purpose; NS4: very formal, I
inquiry.” (popcorp)
Appendix 23
1 1 1 5 like that one

‘It's quite a responsibility running a course like this,’ she says. (ACR 2231) 5 5 5 5 NS2: prefer with pause
It could be an awesome responsibility knowing that someone has died for you.’ (C8T 2149) NS2: prefer with pause; NS3: wrong
collocation; acceptable if awesome is
5 5 5 5 replace by terrible
It is a colossal responsibility being the midwife. (newsmerge) 5 5 5 5 NS2: no pause necessary
It’s a very demanding role being Prince of Wales, but it’s an equally more demanding role being King. (newsmerge) NS3: the missing after being
5 5 5 5
The Taranaki coach, Ian Snook, accepts that it is a hard task trying to keep Bedford afloat but, sink or swim, he will be [alle mit Adjektiv]
grateful for any signs of improvement. (A1N 261) 5 5 5 5
IT CAN be no easy task making a satisfactory book out of a disparate collection of television scripts, but with one NS3: prefer to-INF
glaring exception Nova has achieved just that. (B7N 1741) 5 5 1 5
One would think that it must be a daunting task finding worthy nominees every year. (C9F 1320) 5 5 5 5
If it is a bit of a thankless task being an MP, what must it be like to be an MP’s son or daughter? (newsmerge)
5 5 5 5
It is not an easy task, creating a child-care strategy from a standing start, after two decades of nil investment and NS2: V-ing sounds more like you're
against the background of a stand-still budget. (newsmerge) 5 5 already doing it (as opposed to the
to-INF)
No sentences for:
duty
goal
instinct
judg(e)ment
need
opinion
tendency
will
144
it + noun + [that_CL] complement comments
NS1 NS2
1: no; 2: "not completely wrong but nobody would say it", "might be American/British", "I can hear people say that,
but I wouldn't accept it"; 3: "maybe"; "not sure"; "ok in conversation but not in written language"; 4: acceptable but
would prefer to rephrase it; 5: ok
And to be able to keep oneself warm by mental power is obviously handy on a winter journey. (fiction) [to_INF] 5 5
I'm hitting the ball as well as I've ever hit it but to leave without a win is not happy for me. (newspapers) [Cricket
Appendix 24
player born in South Africa.] [to_INF] 1 1

NS1: "Creating…"
That he created a sterile environment through excessive cleanliness was harmful to his immune system. (made up) [that_CL] 1 1
That such a wide range of offences should be punishable by death seems incredibly harsh to the modern reader. [that_CL] 5 5
To eat lots of junk food does not seem healthy. (made up) [to_INF] 1 1 NS1+2: "Eating…"
That he ate lots of junk food was not healthy. (made up) [that_CL] 5 1
That he put her in jail was heartless. (made up) [that_CL] 5 1
NS1: heavy very colloquial meaning
serious but grammatical; NS2: ok, very
informal (“Sounds like some sort of
California beach bum.”), synonym for
Wiping out on a cold-water wave can be pretty heavy. (newsmerge) [V-ing] 3 5 “bad”
Watching this biff-bang confrontation between the gangly German and the Aussie on Pat Cash legs was heavy going. NS1+2: heavy going is one unit -
(newsmerge) [V-ing] >irrelevant
Another relatively similar case, that of the Hammelburg raid to release prisoners of war in Germany during World NS1+2: fighting is a nominal form ->
War II, was only partly successful as well, because fighting with German forces subsequent to the raid was heavy. irrelevant
(academic) [V-ing]
Supporting the weight of a horse's leg is uncomfortably heavy. (newspapers) [V-ing] 5 1
subjects with adjectives starting in h
That he only left her 3,000 pounds was not particularly helpful, either. (made up) [that_CL] 5 1
NS1: marked, odd, not grammatically
wrong; NS2: ok, but prefer not to have
That supermarkets are starting to label low GI foods is very helpful. (made up) [that_CL] 3 4 that at the beginning
That they played at all was heroic, a testament to their willingness to roll up their sleeves (literally) and get on with it.
Appendix 24 Native speaker judgements on non-extraposed
(newspapers) [that_CL] 5 5
That he can talk about "getting things done" with a straight face is hilarious. (newspapers) [that_CL] 5 5
NS1: Replace "unknown person" by
"person he did not know"; NS2:
145
He felt that to write to an unknown person would be more honest and more like himself. (made up) [to_INF] 5 1 "Writing..."
it + noun + [that_CL] complement comments
NS1 NS2
NS1+2: ok, would not be noticed
That you gave back the wallet you found in the street was very honest of you. (made up) [that_CL] 4 4 (hesitant)
That they increased welfare benefits was indeed quite honourable. (made up) [that_CL] 1 1
That you let her go was extremely honourable of you. (made up) [that_CL] 5 4 NS2: just about ok
That he left early was hopeful. (made up) [that_CL] 1 1
Appendix 24
A lot of women who are my age simply give up and think they will grow old alone, so just to read that someone their NS2: "gives you hope"
age is falling in love is hopeful. (britnews) [to_INF] 5 1
But if to marry is hopeful, divorce is more real (newsmerge) [from a poem] [to_INF] 5 1
Tom now told them that he reckoned the Sun would shine tomorrow, and it would be a glad morning, and setting out might be nominal
would be hopeful. (fiction) [V-ing] 5 1
Even being self-blaming can be hopeful if you feel the power to change yourself is in your hands. (academic) [V-ing] 5 1
Still, he says, there is no good treatment for Parkinson's now, and replacing the body's equipment seems more hopeful
than finding better drugs. (academic) [V-ing] 5 1
NS1: "hopeless here is too colloquial/sub-
standard in the context of evidence"
That he accused her on such thin evidence was hopeless. (made up) [that_CL] 2 1
NS1: also ok with "is so horrible."; NS4(!):
That a Fellow of Newnham, and supporter of so many local churches and charities, could have been tainted with the "is inconceivably horrible." is ok
sin of perjury is too horrible to contemplate. (newspapers) [too horrible to contemplate] [that_CL] 5 5
That so many people lost their lives is horrific. (made up) [that_CL] 5 1 NS2: But ok with "The fact that"
NS1: hostile is a bit odd, but it would be
To studiously ignore whole sectors of the population by concentrating on white Anglo-Saxon males is foolhardy and passed over; not teach, not mark it wrong
hostile to our declared mission. (newsmerge) [to_INF] 4 5
Playing on the road in the States is totally hostile. (newspapers) [V-ing] 1 1 NS1: No idea what that means
You think that to live with your girlfriend is hot. (made up) [to_INF] 1 1
That you can live with your girlfriend is hot, but you should be aware of the responsibilities. (made up) [that_CL] 5 1 NS2: But ok with "The fact that"
It’s one thing that he stole a car, but that he dumped a baby in a pitch black road was not human. (made up) [that_CL] 5 2
That Mrs Pretty was provided with the tools by which she might overcome and end her physical disabilities is
humane, appropriate and just. (made up) [that_CL] 5 1
That he suggested that I would use racist language is very hurtful. (made up) [that_CL] 5 1
That he even suggested that I would use racist language is very hurtful. (made up) [that_CL] 5
146
That he did the contrary was hugely hypocritical. (made up) [that_CL] 5 1
it + noun + [that_CL] complement NS1 NS2 comments
That it was division of labour which gave modern humanity its edge over the Neanderthals is not a completely new
idea. (newspapers) [that_CL] 5 5
That he did the contrary was plain ignorance. (made up) [that_CL] 5 5
Appendix 25
Having it tested in a laboratory and not in match conditions is plain ignorance. (newspapers) [V-ing] 5 5
That the "you" is the poet or the reader or someone else is another illusion exploded by the poem. (academic) [that_CL] 5 5
NS1: sight or scene, not image
To see serious war wounds for the first time would be an image that you never forget. (made up) [to_INF] 1 1 (collocation)
That he saw serious war wounds for the first time was an image that he never forgot. (made up) [that_CL] 1 1
NS1: collocation sight or scene, not image
Seeing serious war wounds for the first time is an image that you never forget. (newspapers) [V-ing] 1 5
Scissoring off long hair can be a quintessentially liberating image for a woman, yet here it is executed strictly within
the confines of filial rectitude. (newsmerge) [V-ing] 5 5
image is good here because it is used in
the extended meaning of picture of
Plonking a baseball cap on his head to try to give himself a youthful appeal is an image that still haunts him - the first oneself that others have whereas above it
thing Tories mention when asked for a list of his mistakes over the last year. (newsmerge) [V-ing] 5 5 means something seen
Seeing his work was a lasting impact. (newspapers) [uttered by a Belgian painter] [V-ing] 1 1 NS1+2: "had a lasting impact"
That the eggs should be fresh, free-range and from a well-fed chook is of paramount importance. (newsmerge) [that_CL] 5 5
Looking like a pig was not the best impression to make. (fiction) [V-ing] 5 5
subjects with nouns starting in i
Eating like a pig was not the best impression to make. (modified version of previous sentence) [V-ing] 5 5 NS1+2: better collocation
That he ate like a pig was not the best impression to make. (invented) [that_CL] 1 5
To eat like a pig would not be the best impression to make. (invented) [to_INF] 1 5
NS1: marginal case, I would write
To take the children and leave would be an impulse rather than a solution and would create huge unhappiness all "Taking" and "leaving"; NS2: ok, but more
round. (made up) [to_INF] 2 4 natural with impulsive
Appendix 25 Native speaker judgements on non-extraposed
NS1: marginal, I would not write this;

That he took the children and left was an impulse rather than a solution and created huge unhappiness all round. NS2: ok, just about let that one through
(made up) [that_CL] 2 4
Taking the children and leaving is an impulse rather than a solution and will create huge unhappiness all round.
147
(newspapers) [V-ing] 5 5
That they got into second place was such a massive incentive for the players. (made up) [that_CL] 5 2
That they won the match was such a massive incentive for the players. (made up) [that_CL] 5
From all we know of her, refusing everything must surely be her personal inclination. (made up) [V-ing] 5 4 NS2: no; ok after hearing the context
From all we know of her, that she refused must surely have been her personal inclination. (made up) [that_CL] 5 1
From all we know of her, to refuse must surely be her personal inclination. (newspapers) [to_INF] 5 5
Abolishing the rebates is a tax increase. (newspapers) [V-ing] 5 5
Appendix 25
His aim is to limit the rise to the inflation rate, but fares normally go up by increments of 10p and taking the 70p fare to
80p would be an increase of almost 15 per cent - five times the rate of inflation. (britnews) [V-ing] 5 5
To abolish the rebates would be a tax increase. [to_INF] 5 5
That they abolished the rebates was a hidden tax increase. [that_CL] 5 4
NS2: just about ok, better with "But" at
That he sold The Big Issue was a stabilising influence in Goddard's life. (made up) [that_CL] 5 4 the beginning
T S Eliot once remarked of Henry James, "There will always be a few intelligent people to understand James, and to be very interesting construction
understood by a few intelligent people is all the influence a man requires. (newsmerge) [to_INF] 5 5
To realize her own issues with him was an interesting insight. (made up) [to_INF] 1 1 NS1: "Realizing what her…"
That "the country" in whose interests policy is designed is to be understood in class terms is, of course, no recent
insight. (academic) [that_CL] 5 5
Seeing him in action at his GEC HQ off London's Park Lane was a rare insight. (newspapers) [V-ing] 1 1
Seeing him in action at his GEC HQ off London's Park Lane was a rare insight into his everyday working life.
(modified version of previous sentence) [V-ing] 5 5
NS2: just about ok, prefer "But the fact
That he achieved all that in Athens was an inspiration. (made up) [that_CL] 5 4 that he…"
NS2: ok, but prefer "But" at the beginning
That he immediately went after them was instinct. (made up) [that_CL] 5 4 and "pure instinct"
To form, use and sever cords is a feminine instinct that carries on throughout life, and not just in the process of
physical motherhood. (CCN 345) [to_INF] 5 5
It will point to one of the conclusions of the government-commissioned Deloitte and Touche report which suggests only due to blunt? NS2: not wrong, but
that to give a set budget to a newly opened hospital is a "blunt instrument". (made up) [to_INF] 5 4 unusual; prefer V-ing
That they gave a set budget to a newly opened hospital was a "blunt instrument". (made up) [that_CL] 1 1 NS1: "Giving…"
NS1: "against losing Raikkonen"
To sign the 24-year-old Spaniard would appear more than adequate insurance against Raikkonen's loss. (made up) [to_INF] 4 1
NS1: "against losing Raikkonen"; NS2:
just about ok, prefer with "But" at the
That they signed the 24-year-old Spaniard was more than adequate insurance against Raikkonen's loss. (made up) [that_CL] 4 4 beginning
148
NS1: marginal, -ing is the antural form;
infinitive is odd; NS2: borderline, but
To prevent a full-scale Balkan war, he insisted, was a strategic interest for all the West. (made up) [to_INF] 2 2 rather no
That nobody else could ever get the money was his prime interest. (made up) [that_CL] 5 4 NS2: just about ok
To have an annual battle with some dry old blue fromage would not be the best introduction to the joy of cooking with NS2: just about ok, V-ing much, much
blue cheese. (made up) [to_INF] 5 4 better!
Appendix 25
NS2: very borderline, wouldn't say that

That she read a couple of good books going beyond these summaries was an adequate introduction. (made up) [that_CL] 5 3 but maybe ok
That they had two principal drivers in one team was an invitation to trouble. (made up) [that_CL] 5 1
149
Appendix 26 150
Appendix 26 List of active verbs with [to_INF] subject with and

without extraposition according to the VDE
extraposed non-extraposed comment

amuse(A) + +
annoy() + +
appear(B) + + see separate discussion
attract(A) + +
become() +
begin() +
bring(B) +
buy() +
call(F) +
cause() +
come(F) + +
commit(A) +
compare(B) +
concentrate(A) +
confirm() +
cost(A) + +
cost(B) +
count(B) +
decide(alpha) +
delay(B) +
demand(A) +
discourage() +
do(alpha) + [for_NP_to_INF] both extraposed and non-extraposed
ensure() +
excite() +
fall(E) +
feel(C) +
fill() +
form() +
free() +
get(epsilon) +
get(gamma) +
give() +
give(gamma) +
grieve(alpha) +
guarantee() +
harm() + +
have(A) +
have(E) + +
help() +
hit(A) +
indicate(A) +
interest(A) +
introduce(B) +
keep(D) +
land(C) +
let(A) +
lift(B) +
limit() +
look(C) + [pattern of II] as extraposed subject
make(D) +
make(E) +
Appendix 26 151
extraposed non-extraposed comment

mark(B) +
mean(C) +
mean(D) + +
meet(D) +
meet(E) +
move(D) +
need() + + pattern in D2 may have to be moved to D1
occur(A)
occur(B) + +
offer(B) +
owe(B) + not a subject
pass(D) +
pay(alpha) + + difference between patterns
place() +
please() + +
prepare() +
present(C) + + restriction in pattern T5
preserve() +
prevent() +
protect() +
prove(A) +
prove(B) + [clause of III] as extraposed subject
remain() + copula; [pattern of II] as extraposed subject
remind(B) +
represent(B) +
require() + +
save(A) + +
save(B) +
seem() + pattern of [II] as extraposed subject
shock() + +
signal(B) +
sound(B) + [for_NP_to_INF] only non-extraposed
strike(J) +
suit() + +
surprise(B) + +
take(gamma) + + see separate discussion
touch(B) +
trouble(A) + +
turn(B) +
unite() +
wash(C) +
weigh(C) + +
Appendix 27 152
Appendix 27 Social information on native speaker informants
Abbreviation NS1
Year of Birth 1941
Place of Birth London, UK
Sex male
Mother native speaker? yes
Father native speaker? yes
Has lived in Germany since 1970
Secondary School London
B.A. and M.A in French and German,
Education Oxford
Teacher Education PGCE, Exeter
Diploma Applied Linguistics, Edinburgh
Abbreviation NS2
Year of Birth 1970
Place of Birth Belvedere, Kent, UK
Sex male
Secondary School in Hampshire
B.A. in Modern Languages and

Linguistics, Leeds University
Education
M.A. in German, Leeds University
Postgraduate Diploma in Law, BPP Law

School, London
Appendix 27 153
Abbreviation NS3
Year of Birth 1969
Place of Birth North Wales
Sex male
Has lived in Germany for 2 years
Secondary School in Wales; lived in

England from age 16 to 33
B.A. Hons. Communications- and

Education
Information systems, Bournemouth
M.A. English Language Education,

Istanbul
Abbreviation NS4
Year of Birth 1967
Place of Birth Eastern Long Island, New York
Sex male
Secondary School in Eastern Long Island,

New York
B.A. in German Studies, Harvard
Education M.A. in German Literature, University of

Virginia
PhD in German Literature from

Georgetown University
Appendix 27 154
Abbreviation NS5
Year of Birth 1985
Place of Birth Frimley, UK
Sex female
Has lived in Germany for 6 months
Fleet Secondary School, Farnborough

Education
College for A-Levels, University of Keele
Abbreviation NS6
Year of Birth 1985
Place of Birth Phoenix, Arizona, United States
Sex female
Has lived in Germany for 6 months plus one year in 2003/04
Primary School, High School, College

Education
(German/Political Science)
Appendix 27 155
Abbreviation NS7
Year of Birth 1986
Place of Birth Chicago, Illinois, USA
Sex female
Has lived in Germany for 7 months
Oak Park and River Forest High Schol
Education (2000-2004), Illinois
from 2004: Kalamazoo College, Michigan
Abbreviation NS8
Year of Birth 1986
Place of Birth Dublin, Republic of Ireland
Sex male
Has lived in Germany for 2 summers and 7 months
Primary School, Grammar School, UCD

Education
(History and German)
Appendix 27 156
Abbreviation NS9
Year of Birth 1982
Place of Birth Edinburgh, UK
Sex male
Has lived in Germany for --
Erskine Stewart’s Melville Schools,

Edinburgh, age 5 to 17
Education
MEng in Mechanical Engineering
(Lancaster)

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From Valency Grammar to a Constructionist Treatment

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018936674

Bibliographic information published by the Deutsche Nationalbibliothek

© 2018 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston

Abbreviations, symbols and frequently used labels | xv

4 Clausal Subjects in active clauses | 71

5 Analysis of subjects in passive clauses | 93

6 Analysis of subjects in copular clauses | 123

6.3.1 Adjectives and extraposed clausal subjects | 130

7.4 Case study: tough movement | 228

9 Conclusions and perspectives for syntactic models | 279

9.3.2.2 Long-distance dependencies and multiple valency carriers | 306

Appendix | available online

Note: Appendix available online https://doi.org/10.1515/9783110589801-222

Symbols for linguistic units

Symbols for example status

VDE A Valency Dictionary of English (Herbst et al. 2004)

Sources of examples and data

Fig. 33: Syntactic representation of the relevant part of (28) | 308

1.2 Brief account of the theoretical background

1.3 Research questions and hypotheses

Furthermore, research carried out during the compilation of the Valency

4. Whether subject extraposition is obligatory, optional or impossible is de-

5. The concept of subject in grammatical theory represents an amalgam of

2.1 History of the term

We can thus already understand Aristotle’s approach in the linguistic sense in

to form complex sentences” in Aristotle’s theory. Simplicity/complexity is de-

(1) a. SCOTT wrote Ivanhoe. (Seuren 1999: 46)

2.1.2 Treatment in reference grammars over the past 100 years

It is, indeed, unfortunate that the grammarian has to use the

It is commonplace in works on linguistic theory to refer to concepts from the

If we analyse sentences like

Jespersen also describes sentences of the type

(2) The path was easy to find.

Furthermore, he also shows the limitations of a semantically defined subject:

He then goes on to list example sentences with italicized subjects, most of

(6) a. John left me confused

(8) a. This story really left me confused.

Where the superordinate clause is complex-intransitive it is the PC [=predicative comple-

(10) a. Kim is fond of animals. (CamG 252; their emphasis)

2.2 The role of the subject in generative grammar and in

Noam Chomsky’s theory of generative transformational grammar (Chomsky

2.2.1.1 Early generative grammar

In a hypothetical account, Chomsky proposes the definition of “Subject-of” in

(7) (a) John was persuaded by Bill to leave [...]

It is easy in such a model to relegate any non-conforming behaviour to the lexi-

mance.29 Stefanowitsch (2010) on the other hand argues that an item-based

(11) John had been shot twice by Jill.

2.2.1.2 GB and Minimalism

Tab. 1: Cartography of subject positions according to Cardinaletti (2004: 136)40

SpecSubjP Subj° SpecAgrSP AgrS°* spec??P ??° spec?P ?°* SPECVP V°

DPs Weak Weak DPs DPs

It is noteworthy that Cardinaletti introduces a “subject-of-predication feature”

2.2.1.3 Generative Studies endorsing the subject concept

(12) a. A student wrote a poem. (Keenan 1976: 313)

(13) It seems that this sentence needs a subject. (Rothstein 2001: x)

Contrary to established generative theory, she claims “that it is this syntactic

(14) a. John and Mary first met in 1989. (Rothstein 2001: 4)

Of course she is nonetheless happy to “make the fairly non-controversial claim

2.2.2 Valency models

2.2.2.1 Basic tenets

Abbreviations, symbols and frequently used labels | xv

4 Clausal Subjects in active clauses | 71

5 Analysis of subjects in passive clauses | 93

6 Analysis of subjects in copular clauses | 123

6.3.1 Adjectives and extraposed clausal subjects | 130

7.4 Case study: tough movement | 228

9 Conclusions and perspectives for syntactic models | 279

9.3.2.2 Long-distance dependencies and multiple valency carriers | 306