Subjects

How do we define the notion of ‘Subject’ in grammar?

First of all, as we saw in an earlier post, ‘Subject’ is a grammatical function label, and as such it is a relational concept: in clause structure a unit functions as the Subject of something, typically a clause.¹

From the point of view of meaning, many units that function as Subject in a clause refer to a person, or other Agent, who instigates an action expressed by a verb, as in Iris took her cat to work last Friday. However, this is by no means always the case. In the sentence Melissa seems distracted this morning the person referred to as Melissa is not engaged in any kind of activity. So we should not define Subjects by exclusively referring to meaning.

Although not all linguists agree, in my view the notion of Subject should principally be defined by making reference to the distributional properties of any unit that might qualify as a Subject.²

So let’s look at the distributional properties of Subjects.

In declarative clauses Subjects usually occur in initial position.

The addition ‘in declarative clauses’ is important here, because the Subject does not always come first. In interrogative clauses the Subject (in bold) is positioned after an auxiliary verb, in this case the past tense of do:

Did Iris take her cat to work last week?

In a clause where we have a fronted Adjunct (Adverbial if you prefer), or indeed any other fronted unit, the Subject is also not the initial element :

Last week, Iris took her cat to work.

Her cat, Iris took to work last week.

Subjects are overwhelmingly realised as noun phrases.

But this is not always the case. There are other possibilities. Subjects can also be realised as prepositional phrases or as clauses, though not as adverb phrases or adjective phrases.

In typical declarative clauses the Subject is obligatory.

This explains why saying *took her cat to work last week is not grammatical in English. This clause requires the specification of an Agent.

There are some exceptions to the rule that a clause must have a Subject. One of these concerns imperative clauses:

Close the door, please.

Stop moaning about everything.

Here the omitted Subject is typically the person who is being addressed, i.e. you. Writers of diary entries and text messages also often leave out Subjects, when it is obvious who is the Agent of the action:

Went to school. Then left for my dance class. Came home at 8.

Another exception concerns certain nonfinite clauses, where the Subject can be inferred from a higher clause:

Salma wanted [to leave the restaurant early].

The bracketed portion in the sentence is a nonfinite subordinate clause which functions as the Direct Object of the verb want, but does not have an overt Subject of its own. We nevertheless interpret the Subject of leave to refer to the same individual as Salma in the main clause.

Subjects carry nominative case in finite clauses.

English does not have a rich system of case, but it does show up on pronouns:

She wanted [to leave the restaurant early].

*Her wanted [to leave the restaurant early].

I explicitly mentioned finite clauses above because in nonfinite subordinate clauses the Subject can carry accusative case:

Salma wanted [him to leave the restaurant early].

A semantically ‘empty’ word can function as Subject.

English has two semantically empty words: dummy it and existential there. These are said to be empty because they have no referential meaning. They typically occur with so-called ‘weather verbs’, or in existential statements:

It is snowing.

It was raining.

There is a spider in the bedroom.

Dummy it and existential there cannot function as Direct Object.

Subjects invert with an auxiliary verb in interrogative clauses.

As we saw earlier, in interrogative clauses, i.e. clauses that are typically used to ask questions, the Subject exchanges places with an auxiliary verb:

Did Salma want to leave the restaurant early?

Subjects grammatically overtly agree with a verb in the present tense singular, and with be in the past tense.

English lost many of its verbal inflections over time, but we do have still have a clear overt inflection on third person singular present tense verbs, and the verb be also has special forms in the past tense, namely was for the first and third person singular, and were elsewhere:

Salma wants to leave the restaurant early.

Salma was tired, and so were her friends.

Subjects can be the antecedents of pronouns in interrogative tags.

When we add an interrogative tag to a statement, the pronoun in that tag typically refers back to the Subject:

Salma wants to leave the restaurant early, doesn’t she?

Not all Subjects meet all the criteria above. We’ll see in a later post that in the sentences below a finite and a nonfinite clause function as Subject:

[That Friday is the best day of the week] is beyond dispute.

[To be in Rome in the spring] is very pleasant.

The bracketed units above function as Subject, despite the fact that inversion is impossible:

*Is [that Friday is the best day of the week] beyond dispute?

*Is [to be in Rome in the spring] very pleasant?

As a final point, we should ask whether Subjects can be regarded as Complements of the verb they go with or not. For many grammarians, e.g. Quirk et al. (1985: 65), Subjects are not Complements, because the choice of Subject with many verbs is relatively free, but for Huddleston and Pullum (2002: 216) Subjects are always licensed by verbs, and hence Complements.

References

Aarts, Bas (2007) In defence of distributional analysis, pace Croft. Studies in Language 31.2. 431–443. [Available here.]

Huddleston, Rodney, Geoffrey Pullum et al. (2002) The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Quirk, Randolph, Sidney Greenbaum, Geoffrey Leech and Jan Svartvik (1985) A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman.

1. Though it may surprise you to hear that other kinds of units, e.g. noun phrases, can also have Subjects. I’ll devote a later post to this phenomenon.

2. On distribution, see Aarts (2007).