Generally speaking, subject clauses do not occur with intransitive and transitive verbs. The reason is that such verbs usually take an external argument with the function of agent. Since clauses refer to propositions/questions/etc. and not to agentive entities, it is expected on semantic grounds that subject clauses cannot occur with such verbs. The examples in (221) show that the use of subject clauses with (in)transitive verbs does indeed lead to gibberish.

There are possible counterexamples to the claim that transitive verbs do not take subject clauses. For instance, example (222a) shows that the transitive verb bewijzento prove can easily be combined with a clausal subject. However, such cases are special in that they involve factive clauses, i.e. clauses whose truth is presupposed by the speaker. Section 5.1.2.3 has shown that such clauses can usually be paraphrased by the noun phrase het feit dat ...the fact that ..., as in (222b), and that they exhibit a number of nominal properties.

Subject clauses are possible if they are internal arguments of the verb, as shown by the fact that a transitive sentence such as (223a) is easy to passivize. The (b)-examples show that the passive counterpart of this sentence can contain either the expletive er or the anticipatory pronoun het: this may be a reflex of the fact that the anticipatory pronoun is optional in (223a).

Since the (b)-examples in (223) show that theme-subjects can be clausal, it should not come as a surprise that we also find subject clauses with unaccusative verbs. The examples in (224) show that this is quite common with nom-dat verbs; cf. Section 2.1.3. We illustrate this in the (a)-examples with a nom-dat verb taking zijn in the perfect tense, and in the (b)-examples with a nom-dat verb taking hebben.

Subject clauses are also common with psychological predicates with an object experiencer; cf. Section 2.5.1.3. This holds both for (225a) with the psych-verb ergerento annoy as well as for (225b) with the periphrastic expression kwaad makento make angry.

Note in passing that psych-verbs such as ergerento annoy and many nom-dat verbs are object-experiencer verbs; consequently, they can be successfully combined with als-clauses, as shown in (226). However, there are reasons to assume that we are not dealing with object clauses; cf. the discussion in 5.1.2.1, sub VI, on similar examples with subject-experiencer verbs. For instance, the primed examples show that preposed als-phrases can be followed by the resumptive element danthen, which suggests that they are conditional adverbial clauses.

A conclusive argument for assuming that the als-clauses in (226) are not subject clauses is that the subject pronoun dat must be present in the primed examples when these clauses occupy the main-clause initial position (i.e. when danthen is not present). The examples in (227) show that dat cannot be present when ordinary subject clauses with the complementizer datthat occupy this position, for the simple reason that the inclusion of the pronoun dat would lead to a clause with two subjects.

Subject clauses are also very common when they function as the subject of copular constructions, as in (228a). This is to be expected, because such subjects are not the external arguments of the copular, for the same reason that the direct object in the vinden-construction in (228b) is not an internal argument of the verb vindento consider; we are dealing with logical subjects of the complementive adjective vreemdstrange; cf. Section 2.2.2.

The copular constructions in (229) show that the adjective bekendknown can take either a declarative or an interrogative subject clause. The former is always possible, while the latter only occurs if the matrix clause is negative and/or interrogative. The complementizer of is used in the (b)-examples when the relevant decision has not yet been made (public), the complementizer dat when the decision has been made but has not (yet) reached the intended public.

Again, it should be noted that we occasionally encounter als-clauses; that we are not dealing with subject clauses here is again clear from the fact, illustrated in (230), that such als-clauses differ from uncontroversial subject clauses introduced by the complementizer datthat in that a subject pronoun must be present if the als-clause occupies the main-clause initial position; we are dealing with conditional clauses.

Finally, we will point out that subject clauses are possible with epistemic modal verbs; we will return to this in Sections 5.2.2.2 and 5.2.3.2.

Subject clauses usually follow the clause-final verbs, as shown by the primed examples in (224), repeated here as (232) for convenience.

Subject clauses may also occur in main-clause initial position, in which case they are optionally followed by the resumptive demonstrative pronoun datthat; we will return to this shortly.

The examples in (234) show that it is not possible to have the subject clause in the middle field of the clause (i.e. in the regular subject position); cf. De Haan (1974) and Koster (1978b). The main clauses in the primeless examples have a non-subject in sentence-initial position and the subject clauses of (232) and (233) in the middle field; the primed examples provide the corresponding embedded clauses. Such examples are generally deemed to be ungrammatical.

Note, however, that the examples seem at least marginally acceptable if the clause is interpreted as factive: (het feit) dat Jan erover klaagde. It would not be surprising if this were indeed the case, considering that Section 5.1.2.3 has shown that factive clauses are more common in nominal argument positions. Example (235) provides cases in which the subject clause is more clearly factive, and we think that these cases are indeed possible (provided that the clause does not become too long).

Koster (1978b) concludes from the fact that subject clauses cannot occur in the regular subject position in the middle field of the clause that subject clauses do not exist. Koster also proposes that the clauses in (233) are not sentence-internal, but function as main-clause external satellites that bind a (possibly phonetically empty) subject pronoun; actually, according to Koster, we are dealing with a kind of left-dislocation constructions. Assuming that the subject pronouns are moved from the regular subject position into the main-clause initial position, examples such as (233a) are analyzed as in (236a) if the demonstrative pronoun is overt, and as in (236b) if it is not; movement of the subject pronoun leaves a trace ti in the regular subject position.

Koster’s analysis has been challenged in Klein (1979). An important argument is that the prosody of the examples with and without the resumptive pronoun dat differs markedly: while in the former case the clause is normally separated from the sentence by an intonation break, in the latter case the clause can be prosodically integrated into the sentence; this is indicated in (237), where the comma indicates the obligatory intonation break.

If Klein’s conclusion that the clause in (237b) is sentence-internal is correct, we should account for the fact that the clause cannot occur in the regular subject position in the examples in (234) by claiming that clauses cannot occur in nominal argument positions. This is in fact the same conclusion drawn for object clauses in Section 5.1.2.2, sub III, to which we refer the reader for further discussion. The pros and cons of Koster’s analysis will be examined in more detail in our discussion of topicalization in Section 11.3.2, but we will also return to it occasionally below.

The examples in (238) show that subject clauses are like object clauses in that they cannot be preposed in sentences containing the anticipatory pronoun het. This would follow directly from Koster’s left-dislocation hypothesis; the anticipatory resumptive pronoun het in (238a) is replaced by the resumptive pronoun dat or its phonetically empty counterpart pro. This means that the pronoun het in (238b) is illicitly inserted into the regular subject position occupied by the trace in structure (236b), as a result of which the clause contains two subjects (viz. pro and het).

The analysis must be slightly different if we accept Klein’s conclusion that the subject clause occupies the main-clause initial position when the demonstrative pronoun dat is absent. We must then assume that the subject clause has not been moved into the main-clause initial position in one fell swoop, but has moved via the regular subject position; the anticipatory pronoun is then blocked, since the subject position is occupied by a trace of the clause. See Section 5.1.2.2, sub III, for a more detailed discussion of this possibility.

The (b)-examples in (239) show that subject clauses cannot be preposed in clauses containing the expletive er either; er can only be interpreted as an adverbial phrase of place in these examples. However, the reason for this is different from that for het; the expletive er can only be used when the subject is part of the focus (new information) of the clause, whereas preposed subject clauses are usually interpreted as being part of the presupposition of the clause.

The option of having the anticipatory pronoun het or the expletive er is not only affected by the position of the subject clause. In examples with a complementive, the position of the secondary predicate may also be relevant; the (b)-examples in (240) show that with a sentence-initial predicate, het is preferably omitted and er becomes completely impossible.

The examples in (241) show that we can find the same phenomenon in perfect-tense constructions with monadic unaccusative verbs taking subject clauses like blijkento turn out. With topicalized participles, het and er cannot easily be realized; examples with het and er can be found on the internet, but they are very rare.

Although we are not aware of any theoretical account of the markedness of the primeless (b)-examples in (240) and (241), we would like to suggest that such examples involve locative inversion of the kind we find in English. Den Dikken and Næss (1993) have argued that in examples such as Down the hill rolled a baby carriage the predicative PP down the hill has been topicalized via the regular subject position, and that the subject occupies its base position in the small clause headed by the moved predicate; [CP Down the hilli [TP t'i rolled [SC the baby carriage ti]]]. If we assume something similar for examples such as (240b), the use of het may be blocked because the regular subject position is occupied by a trace of the moved predicate. Potential problems with this analysis are (i) that it does not say anything about the fact that the insertion of het seems to be marginally possible, and (ii) it is not clear whether this analysis can be extended to examples such as (241b), because the literature has hardly discussed the question whether participle phrases can undergo this kind of predicate movement (but see Broekhuis, 2008: §5, for several arguments in favor of it). The degraded status of the primed (b)-examples may again be related to the information structure of the clause, if left dislocation/topicalization of the predicate is only possible if it is part of the presupposition of the clause. We leave it to future research to investigate whether proposals along these lines are viable.

Example (223) in Subsection I has shown that the choice between het and er in passive constructions is related to the question as to whether the object clause in the corresponding active constructions can be combined with the anticipatory pronoun het. It seems that, as in English, clause-final subject clauses in active sentences can always be introduced by the anticipatory pronoun het, and that in many cases they can also be combined with the expletive er. The semantic difference between the two options is not always clear, but we can assume that the choice between the two options depends on whether the subject clause is presented as part of the presupposition or as the focus of the sentence.

An appeal to the information structure of the sentence can be supported by example (244). Because interrogative clauses are less likely to be interpreted as presuppositional than declarative clauses, we expect examples such as (244a) to be extremely rare on the internet (though clearly grammatical). A Google search (September 14, 2023) confirms this: it returns many results for the string with er in (244b) but few for the string with het in (244a). A similar search for the strings in (243) gives the opposite result.

Given this outcome, one would also expect the frequency of examples such as (245a) to be much lower than that of examples such as (245b). However, this expectation is not met: the strings in (245a) seem to be more common than those in (245b).

The results of our Google searches on the examples in (245) show that there must be other, as yet unidentified, factors that must be involved in the choice between het and er. One factor that comes to mind is that the choice is related to the type of predicate, but we leave that to future research.