Last Updated 6/18/01
   
 The Eight Other Constructions

# 5 Delayed, or Postponed Subjects


      The traditional focus on individual words has almost totally obscured what I call the "delayed subject." I took the liberty of naming it because I couldn’t find it in the grammar books. Having named it and prepared materials about it for my students, I found it in Christensen: he calls it a "postponed subject." It is a modification of the basic sentence pattern in which the subject position is filled by an anticipatory "it" and the true, delayed subject appears later in the sentence:

It is easy to fall in love. 
It is true that syntax is simple.

Although the construction usually appears with a noun clause or infinitive, other constructions or even nouns themselves may act as delayed subjects:

Gerund: It is difficult, waiting for your wife to have a baby.

Noun Absolute: It was foolish, people of their age trying to climb a mountain.

Noun: It was fortunate, the trip he took.

In delayed subjects, the idea to which the pronoun refers comes after the pronoun. (The pronoun is usually "it," but not necessarily.) If that idea is not supplied, the pronoun remains meaningless. As with all the constructions, delayed subjects can be embedded in other subordinate constructions. The following sentence was written by a seventh grade student:
 

The old man thought it funny that the trees, now strong and stable as he once was, still grew and became mightier, while he grew weaker and less sure-footed, swaying in the wind.

The sentence is remarkable for the level of its embeddings, and especially for the reduction of "*which were* now strong and stable" to the simpler "now strong and stable." Everything after the "that" is easily analyzed in terms of clauses and the single gerundive "swaying," but what is the function of the "that" clause? It is a delayed subject to "it" in the infinitive construction "it *to be* funny," "funny" thus functioning as a predicate adjective after the ellipsed infinitive, and the infinitive, with, of course, everything that "goes to" it, functioning as the direct object of "thought." (I explain the ellipsed word as the infinitive "to be" by analogy with the "They made him captain" construction. You could justifiably say that the ellipsed word is "was.")


Another example of a delayed subject, this time from a joke:
It is reported that Dorothy Parker was once asked to use the word horticulture in a sentence and promptly said: "You can lead a horticulture but you cannot make her think."-- from Isaac Asimov's Treasury of Humor. Houghton Mifflin, 1971. p. 413. 

Although "it" is the pronoun most commonly found in the delayed subject construction, the following passage, written by a seventh grader, indicates that "that" is also possible:
There wasn't any woods to go in when I got hot  no places to go sleigh riding and that is boring not to be able to do any of these things.
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