Delahunty and Garvey
by applying the usual tests—Pro-Sub and passive:
(19) a. We gave him a French pastry.
b. Whoever was there was given a French pastry.
IO clauses are much more restricted than subject or direct object clauses.
They seem to be restricted to clauses that refer to animate entities, which is
not altogether surprising when we consider the typical semantic roles of the
IO phrase, namely, Recipient or Beneficiary.
Exercise
- Make up five new complex sentences with finite subordinate clauses
as their IOs. - For each of the sentences you constructed in Exercise (1) show that
the embedded clause is in fact an IO.
Clauses that function as objects of prepositions
Prepositions also may take sentential objects, most readily when they begin
with who(ever) and similar words (20a-c). The following italicized clauses
are the objects of the prepositions that precede them:
(20) a. We gave the pastry to whoever would eat it.
b. We left the crumbs for whichever birds came by.
c. We slept in what we had worn all day.
We know that the clause is the object of the preposition that precedes
it because if we substitute a pronoun for the clause it must be in its object
form:
(21) a. We gave the pastry to her.
b. We left the crumbs for them.
We can also isolate the entire prepositional phrase:
(22) a. It was to whoever would eat them that we gave the pastries.
b. It was to her that we gave the pastries.