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I'm in the middle of writing the latest email in a long-running debate with my best friend from high school (and yes, that's about how long-running it is), and paused while rereading something I wrote. We're talking about climate change just now, and I wrote "What I'm skeptical about is not that we're seeing the climate change". The second time around, I thought for a moment that "the" was extraneous and should be removed; then I realized what I'd been saying and left it in. I could equally well have said "...not that we're seeing it change". I thought about adding a word to make it clearer, and that's where I paused.
How would you diagram that sentence. Had I written "I'm not skeptical that we're seeing climate change", it would have been clear enough that "change" is the object of "are seeing", and "climate" modifies change. But when I write "I'm not skeptical that we're seeing it change", "it" is the object and change is...what?
Is this a shortened form of a now-unrecognized subjunctive? Would the original form have been "I'm not skeptical that we're seeing that the climate change"? That would be grammatical, but I'm not convinced. Maybe there's something simpler going on.
Studying grammar, I was taught that for stating an action as a whole we use the to-less infinitive, and not gerund. Getting the meaning of a verb used in this way is not hard for me because the structure almost matches its equivalent in Farsi. But I hadn't paid attention to its 'what-ness', and that what we call it.
Also,I understand these two as completely equal, and maybe the second as the original of the first (as you've mentioned):
"… is not that we're seeing the climate change."
… is not that we're seeing that the climate change.
(The second one, when I think, strikes me as odd though!! Maybe because it's the first time I encounter it.)
No, no, the second one is odd; I'm sure most modern English speakers would say it's even incorrect. But that's because the subjunctive has almost died out in modern English, though we used it more a century or two ago.