Subject (grammar)

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Examples

In the sentences below, the subjects are in indicated in boldface. John is a serious boy. Ice cream appeared on the table. The man that is sitting over there told me that he just bought a ticket to Tahiti. Nothing else is good enough. That nothing else is good enough shouldn't come as a surprise. To eat six different kinds of vegetables a day is healthy.

The subject of a sentence is one of the two main constituents of a sentence, the other being the predicate. In English, subjects govern agreement on the verb or auxiliary verb that carries the main tense of the sentence, as exemplified by the difference in verb forms between he eats and they eat.

The subject has the grammatical function in a sentence of relating its constituent (a noun phrase) by means of the verb to any other elements present in the sentence, i.e. objects, complements and adverbials.

The subject is a phrasal constituent, and should be distinguished from parts of speech, which, roughly, classify words within constituents.

[edit] Forms of subject

The subject is a noun phrase in the sentence and can be realised by the following forms

• A determinerless noun phrase, also called a bare noun phrase. In English, this is mostly limited to plural noun prases and noun phrases headed by a mass noun.

Builders are at work.

• A noun phrase introduced by a determiner. This complex (determiner + noun phrase) is usually called a determiner phrase:

The large car stopped outside our house.

• A gerund. These can be shown to behave as noun phrases in many respects, for example, in being able to form determiner phrases

Eating is a pleasure.

His constant hammering was very annoying.

• An infinitive. These can be shown to behave in many respect as embedded clauses, for example in allowing question words like "who."

To read is easier than to write

Who to hire is a difficult question.

• A full clause, introduced by the complementizer that, itself containing a subject and a predicate.

That he had travelled the world was known by everyone.

• A direct quotation:

I love you is often heard these days.

• The subject can also be implied. In the following imperative sentence, the subject is the implied "you" that is the recipient of the imperative.

Take out the trash!

• An expletive. These are words like it or there when they don't refer to any thing or place. For example in the following sentences "it" doesn't refer to anything, and "there" doesn't refer to any particular place.

It rains.

There is no solution to this problem.

[edit] Definitions of subject

The subject of a sentence is sometimes defined as the argument that generally refers to the origin of the action or the undergoer of the state shown by the predicate. This is a semantic definition. Such a definition is problematic for several reasons. In languages where a passive voice exists, the subject of a passive verb may be the target or result of the action. For example:

John was arrested.

The police arrested John.

In the first sentence (which is in the passive voice), John is the subject, while in the second sentence (active voice) the police is the subject and John is the object. Similarly, some verbs can be used both as transitive and as intransitive. An example is the English verb break:

John broke the chain.

The chain broke.

In the first sentence, the chain is the object, while in the second, it is the subject. But the relation of the chain to the event described by the sentence is the same in the two cases. This can be seen by considering the fact that the two sentences can be used to describe the same situation: Whenever the first sentence is true, the second one will be true, as well.

Some linguistic theories require every language to have a category of subject. However, there is no such category that is consistent for all languages.

In many languages, the subject triggers agreement morphology on the verb or auxiliary of a sentence. For example, in English one uses the form has for sentences with a singular subject, and have in sentences with a plural subject. This is a morphosyntactic definition.

She has left.

They have left.

This definition works fairly well for English, except in the case of verbs that do not agree. Examples of English verbs that never carry agreement include the modals must, can, will, might, may.

In many languages that mark case on the arguments of a verb, the topic of the conversation tends to be placed in the nominative case, and this combination is termed the subject. Such a morphological definition is inherited from classical times. However, sometimes the subject may carry other cases, like the dative, so this definition is not perfect. Not all languages have a nominative case, and for many of these this concept of subject does not work at all: in ergative-absolutive languages neither core case, absolutive or ergative, carries the topic the way the nominative does in many nominative-accusative languages. Different theoretical traditions have treated both as subject at different times, but with no agreement.

In languages that lack verb agreement and morphological case marking, one must define the nominative case (if there is one) in terms of word order. For example, in Mainland Scandinavian (Norwegian, Swedish and Danish) the subject occurs either right in front of the tensed verb of a sentence, or follows the verb but precedes the object.

Finally, the subject tends to be the topic of the proposition. In languages with no other means to mark a topic, making an object into a subject by using passivization (I did it → it was done) is a way to topicalize said object. (See also topic-prominent languages.)

Some languages can omit the subject if it is recoverable from the context of utterance (null subject language). Many of these languages have rich subject-verb agreement (e. g. Italian) while others have no subject-verb agreement at all (Mandarin Chinese). The term pro-drop language is used for languages where pronouns can be omitted more generally, i.e. even when they are not a subject.

In some languages, like English or French, sentences must always have a syntactical subject, either a noun or noun phrase, or a pronoun, even if there is no semantic subject. This is why verbs like rain must carry a "subject" such as it, even if nothing is actually "doing" the raining. It is in this case an expletive and a dummy pronoun.

[edit] Subject orientation

The subject of a sentence is often privileged in various ways pertaining to its relation to other expressions in the sentence. One says that these other expressions are "subject-oriented". Examples of subject-oriented expressions include subject-oriented adverbs. Compare the following two sentences:

Clumsily, Al sat down.

Al sat down clumsily.

The first sentence means that it was clumsy of Al to sit down (though the manner in which he did so may have been elegant). The second can also mean that the manner in which Al sat down was clumsy (while it may have been highly appropriate to sit down in the first place).

Reflexive pronouns are sometimes subject-oriented. In the following sentence herself is a reflexive pronoun.

Sue assigned the best student to herself.

This sentence can only mean that Sue assigned the best student to Sue, not that she assigned the best student to the best student.