Chapter 2 - Grammatical Foundations: StructureHowever, 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:
(56) a Fred fears heights
b heights frighten Fred
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:
(57) a [PP down there] would be a good place to hide
b [S that I don’t know the answer] should not be surprising
c [AP ill] was how I was feeling at the time
d [VP run away] is what I advise you to do
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.
2.2 The object
So far we have concentrated on the subject, but what about any other argument: do
they have special statuses? One other argument, known as the object, might be
claimed to have special features with regard to all other types of complement.
The object is a DP complement and like other complements it follows the verb:
(58) a Peter put [DP the bike] [PP in the shed]
c Gary gave [DP the voucher] [PP to the attendant]
Note that the object has a privileged position in relation to the other complements
in that it must immediately follow the verb:
(59) a Peter put [PP in the shed] [DP the bike]
c Gary gave [PP to the attendant] [DP the voucher]
Another fact about objects is that they are arguments which may undergo certain
syntactic processes and so seem to be singled out by these. For example, in a passive
sentence, the subject may go missing (it may be present inside a by-phrase, but we will
not deal with this at the moment). In this case, the argument which would normally be
interpreted as the object appears in the subject position. We may interpret this as a
process which ‘moves’ the object into subject position: