Delahunty and Garvey
oped—through expansion of their component phrases and/or by including
more than one clause.
In the following pages, we will consider first the subject function in ways
that will apply to all basic clause patterns. We will indicate the fundamen-
tal forms of subjects and then their meanings, stated in terms of semantic
roles.
We will then turn to the various types of predicates, pointing out their
functional and formal characteristics. Since different patterns have differing
types of objects and complements, we will describe each pattern in a way that
expands slightly on the simple subject + predicate division.
subjects
The traditional definition of subject is “what the sentence is about,” (a.k.a. the
topic of the sentence). A traditional grammarian would say that sentence (6)
is about Oscar.
(6) Oscar willed Elmer his worm-farm.What it says about him is that he willed Elmer his worm-farm. Predicates,
from a traditional point of view, complete a sentence by saying something
about its subject. This function is sometimes referred to as the comment of
the sentence.
Subjects tend to refer to entities that are assumed to be already familiar to
the hearer; they often represent what has been variously referred to as “known,”
“old,” or “given” information. Predicates generally contain the “new” informa-
tion in a sentence. The traditional definition of subject is neither a formal,
functional, nor semantic one. Rather, it defines a subject in terms of how
the sentence in which it appears relates to the ongoing play of meaning in a
discourse. Unfortunately, unless we have a way to accurately identify what a
sentence is about, this definition is unusable. And even when we can reliably
identify what a sentence is about, the definition may give incorrect results, as
in (7):
(7) And speaking of subjects, we should identify them formally.In (7), given the appropriate context, we might argue that And speaking of is
a marker of topichood and so the topic of (7) is the phrase subjects, though
subjects is not the subject of the sentence.
The shift from grammar to discourse is particularly serious when we look
at more complicated sentences, such as (8).