This is lucid as usual, and you cover so much ground so compactly. Subjects come in many forms.
I was especially interested in what you had to say about the existential "there" and the dummy "it." In schooldays grammar, I'm used to seeing "there" described in the function you mention as an expletive that isn't the subject in sentences like "There is a fish in the pond"; what is said to be the actual subject ("fish") comes after the verb ("is"). I'm wondering if you would parse the sentence in a similar way, or rather as a sentence with a semantically vacant subject ("There") that has the complement "a fish."
I've never been in Rome in the spring. I'm betting, though, that there are many pleasant things about it!
'There is a fish in the pond' is called an 'existential construction', and you can rewrite it as 'A fish is in the pond'. I think this is why you might want to see 'the fish' as the Subject. Not all existential constructions can be rewritten in this way ('There is a problem' > '*A problem is'). In this existential construction the grammatical Subject is 'there', while 'the fish' is grammatically a Subject-related Predicative Complement. It is sometimes called the 'logical/semantic Subject', though some grammarians feel the latter is a misleading term. Huddleston and Pullum (2002: 1393) use the label 'displaced subject'. About both extraposed Subjects and displaced Subjects they say: "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." (ibid.: 243) They also say that a displaced subject, like an extraposed Subject is not really a Subject, but "an element related to a dummy subject" (bid.: 1403)
I'm glad that's how you see it. "There" makes more sense to me as a subject, because determining the subject would seem to be primarily about syntax (as you explain), which is why the schooldays-grammar explanation always struck me as unsatisfying. I think the *idea* was to help people with a subject-verb agreement problem in a sentence like "There is dogs in the pond," but a better explanation is that "There" should be read as plural (and thus require "are") because of its association with the predicative complement "dogs."
I'm still reading, but it is stated above that "Dummy it and existential there cannot function as Direct Object". However, dummy "it", I believe is known to be able to function as a DO in sentences such as "I take it that you're coming with us?" and in at least some analyses expletive "there" is considered a DO in sentences such as "I found there to be nothing wrong with him", I think.
Yes, you're right, in 'I take it that you're coming with us', we need to regard 'it' as an object, with the clausal object extraposed.
With regard to 'I found there to be nothing wrong with him', for me the most convincing analysis is to analyse 'there to be nothing wrong with him', as a clause. 'There' would be the Subject of this clause, as in my book 'English syntax an argumentation' (6th edition, Bloomsbury, 2024). However, the most common analysis is one where 'there' would indeed be an object. I adopt it in my 'Oxford Modern English Grammar', because it's the more usual analysis and because it's easier to understand for a general audience, but my heart is not in it.
This is lucid as usual, and you cover so much ground so compactly. Subjects come in many forms.
I was especially interested in what you had to say about the existential "there" and the dummy "it." In schooldays grammar, I'm used to seeing "there" described in the function you mention as an expletive that isn't the subject in sentences like "There is a fish in the pond"; what is said to be the actual subject ("fish") comes after the verb ("is"). I'm wondering if you would parse the sentence in a similar way, or rather as a sentence with a semantically vacant subject ("There") that has the complement "a fish."
I've never been in Rome in the spring. I'm betting, though, that there are many pleasant things about it!
Hi,
'There is a fish in the pond' is called an 'existential construction', and you can rewrite it as 'A fish is in the pond'. I think this is why you might want to see 'the fish' as the Subject. Not all existential constructions can be rewritten in this way ('There is a problem' > '*A problem is'). In this existential construction the grammatical Subject is 'there', while 'the fish' is grammatically a Subject-related Predicative Complement. It is sometimes called the 'logical/semantic Subject', though some grammarians feel the latter is a misleading term. Huddleston and Pullum (2002: 1393) use the label 'displaced subject'. About both extraposed Subjects and displaced Subjects they say: "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." (ibid.: 243) They also say that a displaced subject, like an extraposed Subject is not really a Subject, but "an element related to a dummy subject" (bid.: 1403)
I'm glad that's how you see it. "There" makes more sense to me as a subject, because determining the subject would seem to be primarily about syntax (as you explain), which is why the schooldays-grammar explanation always struck me as unsatisfying. I think the *idea* was to help people with a subject-verb agreement problem in a sentence like "There is dogs in the pond," but a better explanation is that "There" should be read as plural (and thus require "are") because of its association with the predicative complement "dogs."
I'm still reading, but it is stated above that "Dummy it and existential there cannot function as Direct Object". However, dummy "it", I believe is known to be able to function as a DO in sentences such as "I take it that you're coming with us?" and in at least some analyses expletive "there" is considered a DO in sentences such as "I found there to be nothing wrong with him", I think.
Yes, you're right, in 'I take it that you're coming with us', we need to regard 'it' as an object, with the clausal object extraposed.
With regard to 'I found there to be nothing wrong with him', for me the most convincing analysis is to analyse 'there to be nothing wrong with him', as a clause. 'There' would be the Subject of this clause, as in my book 'English syntax an argumentation' (6th edition, Bloomsbury, 2024). However, the most common analysis is one where 'there' would indeed be an object. I adopt it in my 'Oxford Modern English Grammar', because it's the more usual analysis and because it's easier to understand for a general audience, but my heart is not in it.