Source: "A Cmmunicative Grammar of English" by Geoffrey Leech and Jan Svartvik (p.328-329)
As you can see, the book says:
● Nominal to-fininitive clause as subject:
To say there is no afterlife would mean a rejection of religion.
● Nominal to-fininitive clause as direct object:
We want everyone to be happy.
● Nominal to-infinitive clause as subject complement:
The minister's first duty will be to stop inflation.
● Nominal to-infinitive clause as complement of an adjective:
I was very glad to help in this way.
The subject of a to-fininitive is normally introduced by for. A
pronoun subject here has the objective form:What I wanted waas for them to advance me the money.
Is it persuasive for an adjective to take a nominal complement directly? I thought the infinitive clause seems to be an adverbial, not a nominal because It seems to postmodify glad. I'm not sure of it, though. Is it like "worth" in the clause of "the view was worth
it"?
Best Answer
Numerous adjectives like “glad”, “anxious”, “sure”, “amazed” etc. license infinitivals, and hence such clauses are complements. By contrast, adjuncts (your adverbials) do not have to be licensed by the head.
I don't know why the authors talk of 'nominal to-infinitive clauses. Infinitivals are not nominals; they are clauses, not noun-like expressions.
Consequently, they don't functioning as direct objects. Take the cited example:
"Everyone to be happy" is not direct object of "want". “Want” is a catenative verb and “to be happy” is its catenative complement. The intervening NP “everyone” is the syntactic object of “want”, but only the understood subject of “to be happy”. “Everyone” is called a ‘raised’ object because the verb that it relates to syntactically is higher in the constituent structure than the one it relates to semantically.
"Worth" is often called a transitive adjective because in addition to clauses, it licenses NP complements: "It's not worth the money".