Craig,

I should probably preface this by saying that in my teaching, I still
stick with the clause = DO formulation. It's easy to understand, and I
can live with the inaccuracy, since it doesn't seem to do any harm to
how students interpret constituency.

I'll defend, though, that content clauses are not direct objects.
Relative clauses are a stickier problem, since they don't all have the
same structure. I'm tempted to buy the equation DO = NP provisionally,
although there are a lot of related points to think through before
getting dogmatic about it.

For example, I know that CGEL argues that relative clauses which are not
complements of a noun (e.g., "I know _what you are thinking_.") have a
fused head construction in which the relative is both a subordinator and
a head. If we follow that logic (and I don't have the volume here to
check their arguments), that should make such relatives actually NPs (as
opposed to just filling a NP slot), so with this understanding, we could
actually claim that some relative clauses are real DOs without
falsifying the equation above. That would seem to make other relatives
(e.g., "how noun phrases work") adverbials, btw.

Karl

Karl Hagen
Mount St. Mary's College
Department of English


Craig Hancock wrote:

> Karl,
>     I am not opposed, certainly, to internally consistent variations
> in terminology.  Am I right in thinking that, in your version of it, a
> clause can never be direct object?  (Can only noun phrases fill that
> role?)
>    If I say /I know how noun phrases work/, /know/ would be an
> intrasnitive verb with complement, but if I said /I know the functions
> of noun phrase elements/, /know/ would be transitive and the noun
> phrase would be direct object?
>
> Craig
>

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