I’m trying to find an exhaustive-ish list of predicates with quirky subjects (Lexikalischer Kasus) to get a better idea of how many of these there are (a dozen, a hundred?), how common they are, and whether there is any sort of sub-type structure.
An object is called a quirky subject if it is an object only grammatically due to a predicate having a ”quirky“ grammatical behaviour and, weren’t it for these grammatical specialities, you would make it the subject of the sentence. Such predicates don’t take a nominative complement (or at least resist it, at least for some speakers). For example:
Mir ist kalt.
Es ist mir kalt.Mich friert.
Es friert mich.
Non-quirky:
Ich friere.
Mich friert.
is outdated. Apart fromich friere
, it's more common to sayMich friert es.
, which has a subject.