Can prepositional phrases function as Subject in a clause?
Yes, but in a restricted way
In an earlier post I discussed the (near)-impossibility of adjective phrases functioning as the Subject of a sentence. What about prepositional phrases? Can these function as Subject?
The answer is ‘yes’. Here are some attested examples:1
[PP Under the bed] is where dust and childhood monsters lurk.
[PP Between half and three-quarters of the farm] is likely to be grassland.
[PP In March] will be fine.
[PP During the vacation] is what we decided.
How do we know these phrases function as Subject? We can apply the Subject-auxiliary inversion test to find out:
Is under the bed where dust and childhood monsters lurk?
Is between half and three-quarters of the farm likely to be grassland?
Will in March be fine?
Is during the vacation what we decided?
Not all readers will find each of these examples equally acceptable.
Jaworska (1986: 356) also mentions the possibility of passivisation: a PP functioning as Direct Object can become the Subject of a passive clause:
The campaigners planned [PP until Christmas] in detail > [PP Until Christmas] was planned in detail by the campaigners.
The new tenants are reclaiming [PP behind the garage]. > [PP Behind the garage] is being reclaimed by the new tenants.
PPs that function as Subject typically seem to express spatial relationships or time (spans), and the range of verbs is mainly limited to verbs such as be, seem, appear and (modal) auxiliaries.
References
Jaworska Ewa (1986) Prepositional phrases as subjects and objects. Journal of Linguistics, 22(2), 355-374. doi:10.1017/S0022226700010835
Quirk, Randolph, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech and Jan Svartvik (1985) A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman.
The first two (attested) examples are taken from my Oxford Modern English Grammar; the second two are from Quirk et al. (1985: 658).
Once again you have me rethinking how I get from words to meaning, which I appreciate.
I can’t tell how much the feels-right-ness of prepositional phrases acting as subjects has to do with idiom or maybe even artistic representation, but some of the ones that feel most right to me have the quality of position as an actual location more so than a spatial relationship. “Above the cedar tree” or “beside the parking meter” are not places I know much about. The “under the bed” you point to, though, is a place for monsters. “On the road” is a place you can live, like Paris or Pittsburg. “Up the creek” is its own special metaphoric destination. Even the more in-motion “into the woods” feels like a place to me, but maybe that’s just because of Stephen Sondheim.
I've always wondeered about the status of the introductory PP in the following, said when looking at a photo: "And up here in the corner is me". Assuming there is always one subject per finite clause it would seem to have to be the PP, because the accusative case of "me", one assumes, must rule it out. However, it still seems to be quite different from the examples above.