Grammatical FunctionsIn (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:
(51) Simon 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:
(52) a as for your claim that you are Superman, I don’t believe it
b Q: what’s up with Amanda?
A: the teacher just failed her
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:
(53) Henry hit Thomas
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 -role for
a subject to have. Experiencer is also a typical subject -role:
(54) Simone sensed a problem
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:
(55) a the letter arrived late
b a problem was sensed