1. A highly respected book gives this sentence: "It doesn't matter when we arrive." ("When we arrive doesn't matter.") He parses "When we arrive" in that sentence as a noun clause.
Those two sentences work beautifully. Many would say they are even formally (generatively, transformationally) related, "It doesn't matter when we arrive"
deriving from "When we arrive doesn't matter" by way of
extraposition.
According to this way of viewing things, dummy/expletive/anticipatory
it steps in as subject, while the
when-clause gets bumped, or extraposed, to the position following the predicate of the clause (
doesn't matter).
If I am not mistaken, the only
when-clauses with which extraposition is grammatically acceptable are interrogative
when-clauses, that is to say,
when-clauses that function syntactically as embedded questions. I understand
when we arrive in TheParser's
Longman example as interrogative.
A: When will we arrive?
B: It doesn't matter.
Another way to tease out the interrogativity of the sentence
When we arrive doesn't matter is to see that it might be paraphrased as
The answer to the question of when we will arrive doesn't matter. Now, let's see what happens when we put the same
when-clause in a non-interrogative syntactic context:
(a) *? When we arrive will be too late.
(b) It will be too late when we arrive.
I trust that other native speakers will find (a) to be of highly questionable grammaticality. I have the same reaction to the sentence
?* When she tries to affect a British accent is annoying, though I respect the (to me, amazing) fact that TheParser seems to find it acceptable.
Why, then, is (b) acceptable? I wish to maintain that the reason (b) is acceptable is that it does not involve extraposition. Its
it is not anticipatory
it, and it has not displaced the
when-clause from subject position. It is simply the dummy found in time sentences like
It is too late. Notice that
when-clause fronting works in (b):
(b') When we arrive, it will be too late.
However,
when-clause fronting does not work (at least, does not work well) in the
Longman example:
*? When we arrive, it doesn't matter.
a. Another source reminds us that a wh-clause can be used as the subject of a sentence.
The question which I think is before us is whether a
non-interrogative when-clause can be extraposed. For example, in a perfectly well-formed sentence like "When I get home is my own business" (Kolln and Funk,
Understanding English Grammar, 9th ed., 2012, p. 182), there is no doubt that the
when-clause is functioning as subject, but it appears to be interrogative.
A: When will you get home?
B: That is my own business.
Given that
when you will get home in Kolln and Funk's example appears to be interrogative (for them, it is simply "nominal"; they do not differentiate between interrogative and non-interrogative
wh-clauses in declarative sentences), it is not surprising that it works well with extraposition:
It is my own business when I get home.
I have found confirmation for my sense that only interrogative wh-clauses can be extraposed in the revered tome
The Syntactic Phenomena of English (2nd ed., 1998), by the late James D. McCawley, one of the greatest syntacticians the world has ever known. He writes:
"Interrogative complements can be extraposed, while free relatives cannot (10) . . ." (p. 456).
(10) a. *[strike]It's still in the car what(ever) you bought.[/strike]
(10) b. It isn't important how much he bought.
Before I bring this lengthy post to a close, I should like to share another quote I found, this one from
The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (Huddleston and Pullum, 2002). Another way sitifan's example (
It is annoying when she tries to affect a British accent) may be written is:
I hate it when she tries to affect a British accent.
Huddleston and Pullum have the following to say about the related example
I don't like it when you behave like this. This is the eighth example in those they label (57) on page 1482:
The last three examples . . . bear some resemblance to extraposition insasmuch as . . . what I don't like is your behaving like this. But they differ from extraposition in that the final elements are not content clauses, not potential replacements for it, and it is for that reason that we include them under the present heading [namely 'Special Uses of 'It' - Weather, time, place, condition']" (CGEL, p. 1482).
