Towards a speaker model of FG 349(16) NODE 1 (uninstantiated)
Lab: sentence
Config: [ILLOC PS PA CONTENT], TENSE [PRED CAT ARG1]
FncFtrs: ILLOC, TENSE, ASPECT, CAT, NUMBER.SUBJECT,
PERSON.SUBJECT
FrmFtrs: VARIABLE.SUBJECT
After unification with the structures in (14) and (15) we get the node in
(17).
(17) NODE 1 (partially instantiated)
Lab: sentence
Config: [decl (P 1 )S (P 2 )A (C 6 : [(x 1 )TOP (x 8 )FOC (f 1 )])],
[ [(past e 1 : [hab f 1 : come [V] (def x 1 )AG ]
(gen sg x 8 : class [N])ILLAT ) ] )
FncFtrs: decl, past, hab, [V], NUMBER.SUBJECT, PERSON.SUBJECT
FrmFtrs: VARIABLE.SUBJECT
Note that the values for number, person and the variable of the Subject
have not been bound. This was not possible because no Subject has yet
been assigned. In contrast to the position taken in the standard theory of
FG, we think that grammatical functions should not be assigned to underly-
ing representations, but by the expression rules themselves. Like many
authors, we see the phenomenon of Subject as the outcome of a grammati-
calization process, arguably involving left-dislocated topics. The result of
this process is a set of formal relations in morphosyntax, a subset of which
is obligatory for those languages which have Subject. Therefore, syntax
seems to be the right place for assigning this function to one of the con-
stituents that qualify for it. The choice is typically restricted to arguments
of the main predicate, and motivated on the basis of a language-dependent
set of aspects of constituents, such as their semantic function and a number
of other properties, e.g. animateness or person. However, cross-
linguistically, and maybe not surprisingly, it seems to be the case that in
the great majority of utterances in spoken discourse, Subject is assigned to
the constituent which is also the Topic.^20 Subject assignment tends to have
effects at the highest level of the sentence: among these are constituent or-
der, agreement and several types of Same-Subject marking or non-
expression in coordinated and subordinated clauses. Therefore, the relevant
choices are necessarily made at the highest level of the syntactic structure,
i.e. at the top node of the expression. For the English example in (17), in
fact only one constituent is available for the assignment of Subject func-