Delahunty and Garvey
replaced by the nominative pronoun, Fred must be the subject of (15).
Fred is also the subject by the agreement test. If we replace Fred by a first
person form, we are forced to change the verb to like. This does not happen if
we change Bill to a first person form.
(17) a. Bill, I like.
b. *Bill, I likes.
(18) a. Me, Fred likes.
b. *Me, Fred like.As we noted elsewhere, the more tests we have to support an analysis, the
more confident we can be in that analysis, and it is especially satisfying when
all the tests give the same result.
Exercise
For each of the following sentences, identify its (entire) subject, using
whichever of our criteria are most appropriate and convincing:
a An afternoon nap is a must.
b. My bookstore just ran out of comics.
c. In the beginning, there was chaos.
d. Things aren’t any better now.
e. Bill seems to have gone ahead.
f. Margaret has been awarded a fellowship.
g. There is a house in New Orleans.
h. It was a blast.
i. It was Jack that built the house.
What criteria did you use in each case? What problems did you encoun-
ter? How did you solve them?
semantic roles.
Now that we have developed ways to identify the subject of a clause, let’s
examine another traditional definition of subject: the subject represents the
doer of the action. This characterization sometimes helps:
(19) a. The eagle swallowed a trout.
b. Jesse dismissed her campaign manager.
c. Abercrombie embezzled $1,000,000.