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Subject and Predicative Clauses
s entence that might be termed a main clause.
What I am positive about is that he never expected a wife who would please the family. (SNOW) As is the rule with
that-clauses of this kind, the predicative clause gives a precise definition of the idea vaguely hinted at in the subject clause. Another example of this type of sentence is taken from another modern novel:
What she did not know was that in addition to liking things nice she infallibly, by her presence alone, tended to make them so. (BUECHNER) The following example is of a somewhat different kind.
What I think is, you're supposed to leave somebody alone if he's at least being interesting and he's getting all excited about something. (SALINGER) The subject clause here is exactly the same type as in the preceding examples, but the predicative clause is not introduced by
that, or by any subordinating conjunction, for that matter, and that may give rise to doubts about its syntactical status. It will probably be right to say that this absence of a conjunction does not basically alter the character of the clause, and it may even be taken as a stylistic variant of a syndetic predicative clause:
What I think is that you are supposed. .. The semantic ties are quite obviously the same as with
thai-clauses, and the difference lies in the stylistic colouring of the text.
Similar questions may also arise with other kinds of asyndetic clauses. Let us, for instance, consider the following example.
"I'm so hungry I could eat anything," said Prue. "Even the sternal gulf fish." (A. WILSON) If the text ran,
I'm so hungry that I could eat anything, there would quite evidently be a clause of result, namely one of the type described on p. 395, introduced by the conjunction
that, with the correlative adverb so in the main clause. As it is, there are no grammatical reasons to term the clause a subordinate one. Indeed,
if there were a comma after hungry it would be an argument against subordination, and the clauses would look quite independent of each other. With no comma, the definition of the clause and of the sentence as a whole must necessarily remain either vague or arbitrary: the usual distinctions are neutralised here.