There seems to have been a mistake.

[giddyman]

Hello, teachers.

Please help me with the following sentence. Thank you.

There seems to have been a mistake.

In the sentence above, which is the subject?

(1) "a mistake" or
(2) "to have been a mistake"

It's from a grammar book and has no context.

 

[jutfrank]

The grammatical subject is There.

 

[giddyman]

Thank you for the reply, but I want to know the element that decides the verb form.

 

[GoesStation]

Thank you for the reply, but I want to know the element that decides the verb form.

It's the phrase after the final verb: There seems to be some confusion; there seem to be several mistakes. "There" refers to that phrase and takes its grammatical number from it.

 

[jutfrank]

Look at it like this:

There is a mistake.
There seems to be a mistake.

There are some mistakes.
There seem to be some mistakes.

 

[jutfrank]

That seems to present a reasonable case for the subject being a mistake/some mistakes.

Agreed.

As you well know, I'm not a grammar expert but I'm pretty confident that standard analysis would view the grammatical subject as being There, since this is the word which connects to the predicate. (It would be nice to get a definitive answer on this.)

However, I think that there is an argument to be made for a mistake to be considered a different kind of subject, since it clearly determines the number of the copula seem. I don't really know what to call it, though. Possibly, a 'logical subject'?

 

[Phaedrus]

In classic transformational grammar, it works like this:

1. Deep Structure: "seems for a mistake to have been"
2. There Insertion: "seems for there to have been a mistake"
3. Complementizer Deletion: "seems there to have been a mistake"
3. Subject Raising: "There seems to have been a mistake"

There are two clauses: one finite and one nonfinite. In deep structure, the finite clause, with "seem" (a raising verb), has no subject, but the subject of the nonfinite clause ("for a mistake to have been") is "a mistake." That noun phrase then gets pushed to the end of the clause by the insertion of "there," which in turn raises to become the subject of "seems." So we can say that the deep subject is "a mistake" and the surface subject "There." Note that the sentence is equivalent in meaning to "It seems that there has been a mistake," in which neither "it" nor "there" has meaning.

Wasn't that fun?

 

[jutfrank]

In classic transformational grammar, it works like this:

...

Thanks, Phaedrus.

I like your deep subject analysis, but would you mind helping me understand how you get to the deep structure of step 1. in the first place? Where does for come from?

 

[Phaedrus]

Where does for come from?

It comes from theory.

You might (conceivably) ask the same type of thing if I told you that "She said she cooked" derived from "She said that she cooked."

"That" in that context is a complementizer; it introduces a finite clause. "For" functions similarly: it is the complementizer that introduces infinitival clauses.

I think it's possible to suppose that "for" isn't in deep structure, just as it's possible to suppose that "that" isn't in deep structure in examples like the one above.

That analysis would simply change the picture. The verb in each case would be followed directly by a TP/IP (a sentence) rather than a CP (complementizer phrase).

Either way the deep structure will (ironically) be ungrammatical. Almost all deep structures are ungrammatical! They're theoretical constructs.