As it resurges across the country, the coronavirus is forcing universities large and small to make deep and possibly lasting cuts to close widening budget shortfalls.
Main verbs: (1 per clause) resurge, force, make, close
(we're not counting nominalizations like shortfall and cut here)
Major constituents:
- As it resurges across the country,
intransitive adverbial clause introduced by as
- the coronavirus is forcing
S
transitive main clause with direct object complement clause S
- universities large and small to make deep and possibly lasting cuts
S, resultative complement clause of force
- to close widening budget shortfalls
purpose infinitive clause (same subject as make cuts)
(1) is trivial; (2) is where the problem starts. Is S (the rest of the sentence) the object of force, or is the subject of S (the noun phrase universities large and small) really the object? That would be an indirect object, with the clause as its direct object.
That noun phrase universities large and small is sitting in exactly the right place to be either indirect object of forcing or subject of to make -- right between the verbs, where it could be both. Certainly it is the subject noun phrase of to make; but is it also the object of force?
In other words, are you forcing the universities, or are you forcing a set of circumstances in which the universities do certain things? Both situations involve the same constructions:
- Mary told Frank to edit his script.
(Frank is clearly the indirect object of tell, which requires one;
Frank is also clearly the subject of edit.)
Here there are two propositions: Mary telling Frank something, which is reported to have happened, and Frank editing his script, which is described as the content of the telling. Frank is involved in both propositions, with different roles -- addressee in one, agent in the other. In effect, Frank appears twice in the sentence.
- Mary wanted Frank to edit his script.
(*As before, Frank is the subject of edit, but is it the object of want?.
Here what Mary wants is not Frank, but rather his future event of script editing. In effect, Frank is not a part of the main clause, but rather functions only as subject of the subordinate clause. In effect, the clause itself (for Frank to edit his script) is the object of want.
Which makes sense, since want doesn't take an indirect object the way tell does. This difference goes by many names, but one such distinction is between two rules of English syntax called Subject-Raising ("Raising" for short, which applies to want but not to tell) and Equivalent Noun Phrase Deletion ("Equi" for short, which applies to tell but not to want).
And the question then is whether force takes an indirect object (hence, Equi) or whether it has a Raised object (hence, Raising). There are syntactic tests for this condition.
