2.2.1 The subject

In all the sentences we have looked at so far, there has been an argument of the verb which appears to its left. All of the other arguments have appeared after the verb. As we see by the following sentences, this is an essential fact about grammatical English sentences:

While there is a special way to pronounce these words in the order in (37c) that would make it grammatical (with a pause after Victor), this would have a special interpretation in which Victor is singled out from a set of possible referents and the rest of the sentence is taken to be something said particularly about him. However, without this special intonation and meaning the sentence is just as ungrammatical as the others: the ‘normal’ word order of English is as in (37a). Thus the basic word order of English has one and only one argument of the verb to its left and all the others to its right.

From a structural point of view, the argument that precedes the verb also differs from the other arguments. This argument is an immediate constituent of the sentence, whereas all other arguments are inside the verb phrase:

We call the argument that precedes the VP in the sentence the subject. Besides its privileged position in the sentence, the subject also plays an important role in a number of different phenomena. In a finite sentence, the verb may have a different form depending on properties of the subject:

When the subject refers to either the speaker or the addressee, what we call first and second person, the finite verb in present tense shows no overt morphology. The same is true when the subject is plural. However, when the subject is third person (referring neither to the speaker nor the addressee) and singular the present tense verb inflects with an ‘s’. This morpheme not only shows the tense therefore, but also the nature of the subject: that it is third person singular. This phenomenon is known as agreement: we say that the verb agrees with the subject.

Clearly English does not have much in the way of agreement morphology, usually distinguishing just the two cases given above, though the verb be has three agreement forms in the present tense and two in the past tense:

Other languages, however, show a good deal more, as the following Hungarian examples show:

Hungarian verbal morphology is a good deal more complex than this, though it is not my intention to go into it here. The point is that although English has less agreement morphology than Hungarian, the phenomenon is the same in that the form of the verb reflects person and number properties of the subject. In English, the other arguments have no effect on the form of the verb:

Thus agreement is a relationship that holds between the subject and the finite verb.

Another aspect of the subject that shows up in finite clauses concerns the form of the subject itself. Previously we introduced the notion of Case, which is morphologically apparent only on pronouns in English. The subject of the finite clause is the only position where a nominative pronoun (I, he, she, we, they) can appear. In all other positions English pronouns have the accusative form (me, him, her, us, them – you and it are the same in nominative and accusative):

In (43a) the pronouns are the subject of the finite clause and are in their nominative forms, in (43b) they act as the complement of the verb (a position which we will return to), in (43c), complement of a preposition and in (43d) subject of a non-finite clause containing the infinitive marker to, and they are in their accusative forms.

A further grammatical fact about the subject of the finite clause is that it is always present. That this is a grammatical fact is most clearly shown by the fact that if there is no need for a subject semantically, a grammatical subject which has no meaning has to appear:

The verb seem has just one argument, the clause that Roger ran away, which acts as its complement. Thus from a semantic point of view there is no subject argument here. Yet there is a subject, the pronoun it, which in this case has no meaning. Note that this it is not the same as the one that refers to a third person non-human, as in the following:

With (45) one could question the pronoun subject and expect to get an answer:

With (44) however, this is not possible because the pronoun does not refer to anything:

These meaningless subjects are often called expletive or pleonastic subjects, both terms meaning meaningless.

The appearance of an expletive element is restricted to the subject position. We do not get an expletive in a complement position of intransitive verbs, which do not subcategorise for a complement:

The subject of non-finite clauses is a little more complex as there are occasions where they are necessary and hence an expletive must appear if there is no semantic subject, and there are other cases where the position must be left empty, even though there is semantic interpretation for it:

In (49) the situation is exactly like the subject of the finite clause and the expletive subject must be present. In (50) however, the subject is obligatorily absent, though it is clear that the clause is interpreted as though Terry is the subject: the one who is escaping. We will investigate these observations later in this book. For now, however, what all this shows is that subjects are treated rather differently from other arguments from a grammatical point of view.

Semantically, the treatment of subjects is not quite so clear-cut. It is a traditional point of view that the subject names what the sentence is about, with the rest of the sentence (traditionally called the predicate) saying something about the subject. So it is claimed that a sentence such as (51) is about Simon and what is said about him is that he ate the sandwich:

However, although this may be true for a lot of sentences, there are many occasions when it is not so. For example, sentences with expletive subjects could hardly be claimed to be about the subject as otherwise they would not be about anything at all. Moreover, other sentences can just as easily be said to be about arguments other than the subject:

In (52a) the subject is I, but it is clear that the sentence is not about me but the dubious claim. The answer given in (52b) has the teacher as the subject, but given the context of the question, we see that the sentence is about Amanda, the referent of her, which is a complement. Therefore the traditional approach to the subject is highly problematic and will not be adopted here.

The other semantic aspect of the subject concerns its interpretation as an argument of the verb. This is also very complex, but less doubtful than the claim that the subject is what the sentence is about. When there is a meaningful subject of a verb with two or more arguments, the subject is interpreted as a specific argument, and we do not just interpret it as any one of the possible arguments:

The verb hit has two arguments: the one who does the hitting, the agent, and the one who gets hit, the patient. But (53) is unambiguous: it must be interpreted with Henry as the agent and Thomas as the patient. Indeed, agent is a very typical Θ-role for a subject to have. Experiencer is also a typical subject Θ-role:

This does not mean to say that we never have any other kind of subject however, as it is possible to have patient and theme subjects:

However, it might be claimed that these are special cases (the nature of their status will be discussed in a later chapter) and that the typical position for such arguments is not the subject.

Further problems for a simple relationship between subjects and thematic interpretation can be seen in examples such as the following:

In both these cases, the argument Fred is interpreted as experiencer and in (56a) the experiencer is the subject, as would be expected. However, this is not the case in (56b). We see then that the relationship between thematic interpretation and grammatical position is a complex business. We will not go into the matter here as we lack the means to do so. We will return to the issue in a subsequent chapter.

One last point to mention about subjects is that although all the cases we have so far dealt with have involved a DP subject, it is possible to find other kinds of phrases and even clauses in subject positions:

Clearly some of these sentences have a special status in one sense or another and it is certainly not typical to find AP or VP subjects. They are included here however to provide a fuller picture of the set of possibilities.