The English Language english language

Basic Clause Patterns

native case form will be the subject. Thus:

(14) a. The man handed the child to the girl.

When we replace each NP with an appropriate pronoun we get:

(14) b. He handed him to her.

The only nominative pronoun is he, which replaced the man, so the man must
be the subject of (14a).

Exercise
Using only the case of pronouns, identify the whole subject of each of
the following sentences:
a. Oscar lies beautifully.
b. Oscar wrote searingly witty plays.
c. Mary sent her sister to the movies.
d. The books, Mary put on the shelves.
e. Our bikes were stolen by the Over-the-Hill Gang.
f. It is raining.
What problems did you encounter? How did you solve them?

It is important to have a variety of ways of identifying subjects, because it
is not always easy to identify them in a specific sentence. For example, more
than one NP may occur before the verb in a sentence:

(15) Bill, Fred likes.

This is called a topicalized sentence. The first NP, Bill, is not the subject,
as we can see by substituting pronouns and observing their case markings:

(16) a. Him, he likes.
b. He, he likes.
c. He, him likes.
d. *Him, him likes.

(16a) is the only grammatical reformulation of (15), and as he is the only
nominative pronoun, it must be the subject of (16a); and as it is Fred that is