(^70) Chapter 4 Clause structure, complements and adjuncts
(b) Subject and topic
In Pa ris is lovely in the spring it is natural to take the subject as expressing the topic,
and in Spring is a great time to visit Pa ris we would be inclined to say that spring is
the topic; but it is easy to find examples where it would be completely implausible
to take the subject to be a topic:
[ 12] i Something is wrong with this disk drive.
ii In space, nobody can hear you scream. I
iii Il s time these kids were in bed.In [i], the subject NP is something, but it would be nonsensical to suggest that
something tells us what the topic is. The topic is obviously the disk drive, and the
comment is that it has a fault.
In [ii], the topic is obviously not expressed by the subject nobody. The clause is
about what it's like in the airless void of space, and if any phrase identifies that
topic it's the preposed adjunct in space.
And in [iii], the subject it is a dummy pronoun with no identifiable meaning. It
can't possibly pick out a topic. In fact this kind of main clause isn't properly
described in terms of a distinction between a topic and a comment at all. Not all
clauses have topic phrases.English does not indicate the topic of a clause by any grammatical marker (though
some languages do), and it certainly does not always make topics subjects. There is
very often no clear-cut single answer to the question of what the topic of a clause is:
it will depend very much on the context.
In English, then, there is nothing like a one-to-one relation either between subject
and actor or between subject and topic. The lesson is that, at the language-particu
lar level, we cannot define the syntactic term 'subject' in terms of the partially cor
related semantic concepts 'performer of the action' or 'topic of the clause'.
3 The object
3.1 Distinctive syntactic properties of the object in English
The object in a clause almost always has the form of an NP. Unlike the
subject, it is normally located within the VP, and is not so sharply distinguished
from other dependents as is the subject. Nevertheless, there are a number of syntac
tic properties that make it fairly easy to identify in all but a small minority of cases.
We summarise them in [13]:
[13] An object is a special case of a complement, so it must be licensed by the
verb.
11 With some verbs, the object is obligatory.I This may look familiar: it's a famous film slogan, from the posters for Alien (1979).