firm believer that

[Neal Whitman]

My blog post response to the thread that began at http://listserv.linguistlist.org/cgi-bin/wa?A2=ADS-L;f9bd41fb.1109C, with Benjamin Barrett's query:

  A non-native speaker of English asks me whether the following is grammatical:

  "I'm a firm believer that anyone can have a breakthrough right in her own backyard."

  It's from an essay of Oprah in the current issue of O Magazine.

  It took me about five reads before I spotted anything possibly amiss, but "a firm believer that." definitely appears wrong now that I see it.

  I think this must come from a cross of "I'm a firm believer in the idea that." and  "I firmly believe that."

  Is that correct?

  Benjamin Barrett
  Seattle, WA

http://literalminded.wordpress.com/2011/12/22/im-a-believer-that/
My tentative conclusion is that prepositional phrase complements (but not adjuncts) are OK with agent nominalizations ("listener to the program", *"washer with soap"); infinitival complements are not (*"attempter to VP"); and clausal complements are, at least with some verbs (many COCA attestations of "believer(s) that" and "indicator that").

Neal Whitman

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