Natalie,
You can tell you've asked a great question when it triggers this sort of discussion. Let me suggest a couple of more general problems your example leads us into, questions of what's a category and how discrete they are from each other, and the always current question of what we teach children.
Another anaylsis of "worried" would be to class it with symmetric predicates, verbs like "meet," "marry," and "resemble." What these all share is that the subject and object can change places with no other changes to the sentence:
John met Mary.
married
resembled
Mary met John.
married
resembled
Similarly,
Wemberly worried that she might drip on her new dress.
That she might drip on her new dress worried Wemberly.
As with the three verbs above, switching subject and object has largely a pragmatic effect. On the other hand, not all symmetric predicates are alike. "meet" and "married" can also take passives, but "resembled" is decidedly odd in the passive. Also, the three verbs above work with human arguments. "worried" doesn't:
Wemberly worried her parents.
Wemberly's parents worried her. (with apologies to those who don't like possessive antecedents.)
What Levin shows very well in her book is that these various tests define properties of verbs, and categories of verbs are simply clusters of common properties. So we can't expect all verbs of a category to behave alike in all ways.
Brett and Huddleston&Pullum are right that content clauses are distinct from NPs in a number of ways. However, that's a pretty sophisticated statement, and one that I've tried to teach to undergraduates in a grammar class without much success. I think part of the problem is that the issues involved are not relevant to the questions that teacher prep students are prepared to ask. Whether S and NP are alike is a serious linguistic question but probably not one to be addressed outside of linguistic contexts. The problem reminds of a line Jerry Saddock wrote in a review of Ronald Langacker's introductory text _Language and its Structure_. He was lamenting the difficulty of presenting linguistic concepts to students who haven't yet gained the linguistic sophistication to handle them. What he wrote was, as I can only paraphrase it forty years later: It's unfortunate the linguists don't have a well-accepted set of lies to teach introductory students, like f=ma in physics, until they know enough to understand why the lies were necessary.
Herb
-----Original Message-----
From: Assembly for the Teaching of English Grammar [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Edmond Wright
Sent: Friday, March 12, 2010 11:44 AM
To: [log in to unmask]
Subject: Re: a query
Dear All,
On a different aspect of Natalie's original sentence (' Wemberly worried
that she might drip on her new dress').
Am I alone in finding the use of 'drip' with a person as subject odd? It
would seem more natural to my English ear to say
Wemberly worried that she might allow a drip to fall on her new dress.
>
One could, of course, say
Wemberly worried that she might splash/splatter/stain/blotch her new dress.
Edmond
Dr. Edmond Wright
3 Boathouse Court
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Cambridge
CB4 1DU
England
Email: [log in to unmask]
Website: http://people.pwf.cam.ac.uk/elw33/
Phone [00 44] (0)1223 350256
>
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