A Student's Introduction to English Grammar

§2.1 Distinctive syntactic properties of the subject in English^67

Subjects do satisfy the condition for being complements, therefore. But they are

different from other types of complement in an obvious way: they are positioned out­

side the VP. We will refer to the subject as an external complement. The other com­

plements that are internal to the VP will be referred to as internal complements.

2 The subject

2.1 Distinctive syntactic properties of the subject in English

It is typical for the subject of a clause to be an NP. The only other form

of subject common enough to merit mention here is a subordinate clause, as illus­

trated in [Si].

The subject is sharply distinguished from other elements in clause structure by

the combination of a number of syntactic properties. The following survey covers

four particularly important ones.

(a) Basic position before the verb

The basic position of the subject - the position it occupies in canonical clauses - is

before the V (and the whole VP). This is the most obvious feature that distinguishes

the subject from the object in English:

[ 6 ] a. Sue loved Max. b. Max loved Sue.

Only the conventional English order of elements tells us that Sue is subject in [a],

while Max is subject in [b] -and thus that in [a] we are talking about Sue's feelings,

and in [b] we are talking about Max's. There are non-canonical constructions where

the subject does not occur in this position but, overall, location before the verb is the

major overt property that picks out the subject.

(b) Case

For just a handful of NPs, there is an inflectional distinction of case that separates
subjects from most non-subjects. The NPs concerned are mainly those consisting of
the pronouns listed in [7].

[7] NOMINATIVE

11 ACCUSATIVE

I

me

he

him

she

her

we

us

they

them

As subjects of finite clauses, these pronouns have to appear in the nominative case­

form, while in object function they appear in the accusative case-form:

[8] a. She loved him. b. He loved her.

She and he are marked as subjects by having nominative form, while accusative him

and her are objects.

With NPs that don't themselves have a contrast between nominative and accusa­

tive forms, we can generally use the case property indirectly by asking which form