I've recently been having trouble with constructions that seem to mark two subjects in the same clause. I've only encountered them in ~の方が... constructions, but I can't seem to make sense of them grammatically. Here are some examples:
- 当然、都心より郊外のほうが家賃が安い。 (from a vocabulary book)
- (人)よりも自分の方が知識があると思う (from アルク)
My questions are: why are two subjects allowed here, and are there other constructions in which this happens? So far my thoughts on this are:
(a) 方 seems to be a subject, but not have a verb. So maybe this is simply be some kind of relative-clause-like construction with the noun elided away, e.g. 家賃が安い[ところだ] and 知識がある[人だ]. But this seems a little odd - I don't know of anywhere else where this is possible.
(b) The second sentence might bracket as (人)よりも自分の方が([blah]と思う), rather than ((人)よりも自分の方が[blah])と思う. This makes perfect sense, but I suspect that the と思う could be removed to leave a valid sentence, so this explanation seems a little spurious. In any case this doesn't explain the first sentence.
So I'm a little confused. Any light anyone can shed on this would be great. Thanks!