What is unusual about Angkor Wat?
What is the real subject of this sentence?
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Sign up to join this communityWhat is unusual about Angkor Wat?
What is the real subject of this sentence?
Consider the following sentences:
These sentences all start with noun phrases. These particular noun phrases all have something in common. They all have a preposition phrase following the noun:
Now these sentences are maybe a little bit clunky. Where these noun phrases are Subject, for instance, the preposition phrases mean that the head noun in the noun phrase is quite a long way away from the verb.
Lets look at the Subjects of these sentences:
In the first two sentences, the noun phrases are Direct Objects of the verbs like and meet:
Now one thing that tends to happen to preposition phrases inside noun phrases like these, is that they can break away from the noun phrase and appear at the end of the clause. This is sometimes called postposing. Sometimes writers call it extraposition from noun phrase movement. So in the following sentences part of the Subject noun phrase has broken off and moved to the end of the sentence:
This doesn't only happen with Subject noun phrases. We can do it with the first two examples where the preposition phrases are part of a Direct Object:
The Original Poster's example
What is unusual about Angkor Wat?
This sentence is a non-canonical version (one where the normal order of the phrases has been changed) of this sentence:
The Subject of the sentence is in brackets below:
In the Original Poster's version of the sentence, part of the Subject has been moved to the end of the sentence:
Note: The Italy example is from this book here
Syntactically every sentence has a complete subject and complete predicate.
The complete subject of the sentence in question is what about Angkor Wat.
"What".
"is" is a form of "be", an intransitive verb, which only takes a subject. i.e. the "what" that "is" unusual about Angkor Wat.
Remember that "what" can also serve as an interrogative pronoun.