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You Asked Me This Question / Re: What are substantive clauses and attributive clauses?

« on: January 09, 2011, 09:04:42 PM »

Thanks for the quick reply. As I said, I don't disagree with your conclusion at all. But I do think that your usage of the terms "clause" and "complement" in the thread we are referring to was faulty, or, at least, highly non-standard. And I think that this is unfortunate, since it somewhat detracts from the entirely valid lines of reasoning that, at first sight, appear to be based upon that usage - when in fact the two approaches are quite independent of each other, as far as I can tell.

Incidentally, I also came across this document during my google-binge which led me to your site. It contrasts traditional prescriptivism and modern common-usage descriptivism for what they call "persistently troublesome cases" of subject-verb agreement, and clearly supports your recent claim that such cases often come down to one's point of view at the end of the day, rather than being an absolute matter of right-and-wrong. What sets it apart from most publications of this sort is that they employ actual statistically relevant samples of native speakers to figure out what "common usage" is, rather than rely on their own intuition. It might give you some extra ammunition.

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You Asked Me This Question / Re: What are substantive clauses and attributive clauses?

« on: January 09, 2011, 06:51:00 AM »

Hi Jose,

I was going to start a new thread, but your latest column topic seems so closely related to what I wanted to talk about that I'm replying here instead. Feel free to split this off if you don't agree, of course.

I came across several discussions concerning the use of the singular "has" in the sentence "Many people discover to their dismay that their many years of formal study of English has not given them the proficiency level demanded [...]", and was confused and intrigued by the manner in which you broke it down at one point, namely in this post (slightly modified by me):

• 1) "Many people" - subject
• 2) "discover" - verb
• 3) "to their dismay" - ?
• 4) "that their many years of formal study of English" - direct object of (2)
• 5) "has not given them the proficiency level demanded [...]" - predicate complement of (4)

The argument, as I understood it, was then that the verb in (5) should agree with the phrase (4), which is singular. However, this analysis (and, thence, the argument based upon it) does not look valid to me, though I'm not entirely sure if that's because it is flawed, or merely because my understanding of it is.

Either way, this is how I would deconstruct the sentence in question:

• 1) "Many people" - subject
• 2) "discover" - verb
• 3) "to their dismay" - ?
• 4) "that their many years of formal study of English has not given them the proficiency level demanded [...]" - substantive clause, acting as direct object of (2) (cf. example #1 in your post above)
• 4.1) "their many years of formal study of English" - noun phrase, acting as subject of (4)
• 4.2) "has not given them the proficiency level demanded [...]" - verb phrase, acting as predicate of (4)
• 4.2.1) "has not given" - negated compound verb
• 4.2.2) "them" - pronoun, acting as indirect object of (4.2.1)
• 4.2.3) "the proficiency level demanded [...]" - noun phrase, acting as direct object of (4.2.1)

"Predicate complement", as far as I could discover, is rather loosely defined as a phrase that is necessary to complete a predicate, in addition to the "predicator" (the verb). So there are several items in the list to which the term could be applied, but the original usage, which refers to an entire predicate, is not one of them.

Finally, I'd like to offer a possible explanation for the cause of the confusion, using another of the examples (#4) from your post above: "That the accused is guilty is a foregone conclusion." This construction, as stated, can be broken down into the subject "that the accused is guilty" and the predicate "is a foregone conclusion" - which is superficially quite similar to the attempted breakdown of the "many people" sentence. The reason that it works for the former and fails for the latter rests in the fact that such a subject must be a clause, not a phrase; that is, it must in turn consist of a subject ("the accused") and a predicate ("is guilty"). For "many people" to allow this analysis, there would have to be at least two predicators in the fragment subordinate to "that", but there is only one, namely "has not given".

Am I on to something, or did I just misinterpret your earlier post?

ps: All this being said, I have no quarrel with the usage of "his" instead of "have", per se. The other line of reasoning you gave, concerning the semantically singular nature of the noun phrase "their many years of formal study of English", definitely has merit. And that battle has been fought and re-fought often enough, in any case.