Strand that
Some predicators can appear with an expletive it and clausal extraposition. It used to be believed that people were born with a set number of brain cells, It is often the case that you don’t know what to write in your blog. (Some verbs (many of which also happen to be raising verbs) require it, such as seem, happen (by coincidence), appear. But I don’t care about those right now.)
Now, it seems rather odd to question the would-have-been extraposed clause: ?What is it usually said in these situations? and ?What was it believed back then? sound weird. I’m not sure why; and I’m not sure whether or not they actually occur. I couldn’t find any in any of the print corpora I have access to, and these are not trivial to search for on search engines. Maybe some others have strong intuitions.
Relatedly (and to be faithful to the title of this entry), why does it seem to me that clause-marker that can be stranded like a preposition: What did he say that?; What, exactly, was he claiming it was the case that?. Maybe it’s just a symptom of being a linguist that I think these are acceptable. I have yet to ask a layperson what they think of them (and, again, they are pretty obviously not in the BNC, nor are they easy to search for on the internet).
Comments(4)
But surely the clause is “What is it that is said?” and “What was it that was believed?” or more simply (and, I think, usually) “What is said?” and “What was believed?”
With the second set, “What was it that he is claiming was the case?” sounds much better to me. “What did he say that?” is unintelligible – given the context of this post I realize you’re turning “He said that X” into a question, but I can’t imagine asking it any other way than “What did he say?”
Your versions sound utterly broken to me.
So, the good-sounding versions that you gave are, of course, quite possible. The question, then, is “do these good-sounding forms somehow block sentences like what is it believed?” From a naive view of syntax, I see nothing that would in principle block those questions.
Someone suggested that the general fact that you can’t get “[question-word] is it [passive-predicate]?” is that the extraposition construction creates a sort of factive or positive epistemic stance. In other words, if you use extrapostion, it is because you know what the “it” is. So you wouldn’t question the content of something while simultaneously claiming that you already know that content. The result of “what is it commonly believed” would thus be what is believed? and by the way, I already know. I’m not sure if I 100% buy this account, but there it is.
(the usual sort of syntactic blockers like “islands to extraction” wouldn’t applying, AFAIK; there is supposed to be a weak “extraposition island,” that is supposed to block sentences like when is it true that he left the country?. But my sentences have extraction an entire extraposed clause, not extraction of something from within it plus, I find that sentence perfectly fine.)
The analysis of extraposition in Sag, Wasow and Bender (2003) Syntactic Theory: A Formal Introduction (Chapter 11) predicts that What was it believe back then etc. should be ungrammatical: The Extraposition Lexical Rule forces the extraposed argument to be a CP. That is, you don’t get the dummy it subject with these verbs unless the thing that would have been their subject is a CP. What, on the other hand, is an NP.
Aha, that would do it, though I guess connecting it to information structure would be cooler; but it might not be possible.
Hmm, but what about it-clefting the proposition: “It’s [that...] that it’s believed.” That sounds pretty bad, though “it’s [that...] that is believed” doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue either. I forget if “that” gets treated as a relative pronoun or not. (or, heh, if this would be rather be taken as motivation for a particular analysis of “that”)