Proposals As Embedded Fact Clauses

Halliday & Matthiessen (2014: 546):

Finally, as may be expected an embedded projection may belong to the class of proposals rather than propositions, as in

The thorniest problem for next week’s conference is [[to settle the relationships between them and the rest of the country]]. 

The surprise was [[to meet Russians (not intellectuals, but common folk) [[who took a contrary view ]] ]]. 

You mentioned the need of the artist and the right of the artist [[to withdraw]] and yet you have lived consistently a public life. 

if I had not been asked to terminate a life, I would not be so vehement about the need [[to help people who are begging for death]] 

The two-year study by Amnesty International, its first comprehensive analysis of North America, accuses Washington of failing in its duty [[to provide a moral lead to the rest of the free world]].

This defines the fourth category of ‘fact’ nouns referred to earlier:

(4) needs (nouns of modulation) relate to proposals, which are inherently modulated – e.g. ‘it is necessary for ... to ...’.

These, again, have no corresponding mental process verbs; they differ from nouns like order (the name of a verbal process) and insistence (the name of a mental process) in the same way that fact differs from thought and statement — they do not imply a Sayer or a Senser.