English Language & Usage Asked by Timmy Han on October 3, 2021
fellow grammarians.
When it comes to a clause, we’d naturally understand that each of them has a lexical class to it, and, the part of speech they serve as in a sentence.
Adjective + that clause has never been a rare usage. It’s rather easy to get right the that clause in sentence ‘It’s important that this will be done’ for example. The ‘it’ here is a formal subject, hence the that clause being the true subject. And the lexical class of this that clause is noun. Therefore, it is both a subject clause, and a noun clause.
But in the case of ‘I’m sure + that clause’, this gets me confused. ‘I am sure’ being a complete sentence which ends with a predicative, I don’t know what the that clause after the predicative ‘sure’ serves to be in terms of part of speech. Sure, it should be a noun clause as always, but, what part of speech is it?
Thanks in advance!
[1] It's important [that this is done].
[2] I'm sure [that this will be done].
The lexical class of the bracketed elements is 'declarative content clause'.
In [2] The subordinate clauses combines with the adjective it complements to form a larger adjective phrases functioning as predicative complement of "be". By contrast, in [1] (an extraposed construction) the predicative complement is just "important", just as it is in the basic, non-extraposed, version (see below).
I would strongly recommend dropping the term 'noun clause'. The classification of finite subordinate clauses is based on their internal form rather than spurious analogies with the parts of speech.
Note that in the extrapostion constuction in [1], the subject is the dummy pronoun "it". The that clause is an extraposed subject, but that doesn't mean it's a kind of subject -- it's an element in extraposed position, outside the verb phrase corresponding to the subject of the basic version:
[That this is done] is important.
Answered by BillJ on October 3, 2021
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