[Attempto] Can subordinate sentences be subjects?

[Joshua TAYLOR]

On Wed, Jan 12, 2011 at 9:45 AM, Kaarel Kaljurand <kaljurand at gmail.com> wrote:
> Hi,
>
> On Mon, Jan 10, 2011 at 18:21, Joshua TAYLOR <tayloj at cs.rpi.edu> wrote:
>>
>> Is there a way in ACE to have a subordinate sentence be the subject of
>> a sentence?
>
> No, there is no such construct in ACE.
>
>> One can easily be made the object, as in
>>
>> "John believes that Mary likes John." ==>
>> [A,B]
>> predicate(A,believe,named(John),B)-1/2
>>   B
>>   [C]
>>   predicate(C,like,named(Mary),named(John))-1/5
>
> Yes.
>
>> but I'm wondering if there's any way to achieve something like this:
>>
>> "That Mary likes John happens." ==>
>> [A,B]
>> predicate(A,happen,B)
>>   B
>>   [C]
>>   predicate(C,like,named(Mary),named(John))
>
> No, this DRS cannot be expressed in ACE.
>
>> By my reading of the Syntax Report, I don't see anything like this, so
>> I expect that the answer is "no", but I'd be delighted to learn that
>> there is.
>
> I guess we never considered it to be an important feature. Also, it
> doesn't seem to have a simple and stable expression in natural
> English.

Thanks for the response.  I agree on this count that there doesn't
seem to be a simple/consistent linguistic construct for this.  For
certain intransitive verbs, e.g., "happens", "occurs", and the like,
the pattern

"It <verb>s that …"

would be a candidate, but of course that wouldn't cover every case
wherein a subordinate sentence might be a subject.

Thanks again,
Joshua

-- 
Joshua Taylor, http://www.cs.rpi.edu/~tayloj/