Grammatical FunctionsWe 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:
(39) a I/you eat breakfast at 6.30
b we/they eat breakfast at 8
c he/she/Ernie eats breakfast at 9.15
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:
(40) a I am ready
b you/we/they are ready
c he/she/Iggy is ready
d I/he/she/Wanda was ready
e you/we/they were ready
Other languages, however, show a good deal more, as the following Hungarian
examples show:
(41) a (én) 6-kor reggelizek (I eat breakfast at 6)
b (te) 6-kor reggelizel (you eat breakfast at 6)
c () 6-kor reggelizik (he/she eats breakfast at 6)
d (mi) 6-kor reggelizünk (we eat breakfast at 6)
e (ti) 6-kor reggeliztek (you(plural) eat breakfast at 6)
f (k) 6-kor reggeliznek (they eat breakfast at 6)
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:
(42) TV bores me/you/him/...
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