An English teacher was reviewing embedded clauses with her advanced class when she wrote the sentence: "What the committee decided remains confidential." She asked students to analyze the underlined clause, noting that it cannot stand alone as a complete sentence, that it occupies the position typically filled by a noun phrase, and that "what" functions here not as an interrogative pronoun but as a clause introducer subordinating the entire embedded clause to the main verb "remains." Students correctly identified the syntactic function of this clause as: