seems and sentential complement

[Roger Levy]

Robert Levine <levine at ling.ohio-state.edu> writes:

> >
> > "Tibor Kiss" <afelpado at compuserve.de> writes:
> >
> > > Hi,
> > >
> > > since I was so successful recently in asking questions about English, I try
> > > again. Very simple question this time: Is it correct that 'seem' requires
> > > a that-complement if its complement is finite, i.e. is the following
> > > distribution correct?
> > >
> > > (1) John seems to be certain to leave.
> > > (2) It seems that John is certain to leave.
> > > (3) *It seems John is certain to leave.
> >
> > Hi Tibor,
> >
> >
> > All these seem amply natural to me.  I wonder why (3) seems more
> > awkward than (2) to me.
> >
>
>
> I agree with both Shalom and Roger's judgments. I wonder if the
> discrepancy between (2) and the corpus examples that Roger notes has
> something to do with stress. When stress falls on the syllable
> directly following `seems' the result tends to be somewhat awkward, or
> worse. So maybe it's all prosody?

Seems like it must be stress, but it's not so simple [disclaimer: I'm
a prosody novice].  The following variant of (1) is fine:

  (1') John seems certain to leave.

Stress _does_ fall on the syllable directly following `seems' here,
but now `seems' itself is not stressed.  So perhaps the problem with
(3) is that one stress needs to fall on the main verb or somewhere to
its left; the expletive pronoun can't take stress so `seems' must, and
it's awkward to have adjacent stressed syllables.

But the following corpus examples seem to me to have unawkward
readings with stress on `seems' and also immediately following it:

  (4) To a fevered imagination, it seems no one can turn a corner in the
  crowded conference complex without running into a mug shot of one or
  other high-theoretician leering pensively from a wall of hardback
  dust covers.

  (5) Just when it seems baseball might be losing its grip on the masses
  up pops heroics to start millions of tongues to wagging.

Maybe someone more knowledgable on prosody has thoughts?

Roger