Grammatical Relations Subjects and objects
المؤلف:
PAUL R. KROEGER
المصدر:
Analyzing Grammar An Introduction
الجزء والصفحة:
P54-C4
2025-12-13
34
Grammatical Relations
Subjects and objects
The terms “subject” and “object” are very familiar, but it may be helpful to clarify what they actually mean. English-speaking school children are often told that the subject of a sentence is the doer of the action, while the object is the person or thing acted upon by the doer. This definition seems to work for sentences like (8a,b), but is clearly wrong in examples like(8c,d):
(8) a Mary slapped John.
b A dog bit John.
c John was bitten by a dog.
d John underwent major heart surgery.
Phrases like “the doer of the action” or “the person or thing acted upon” identify particular semantic roles, namely agent and patient. But, as we can see in example (8), the subject is not always an agent, and the patient is not always an object. John is “acted upon” in all four of these sentences; but the word John appears as the object in (8a,b) and the subject in(8c,d).
Another traditional definition of the subject is “what the sentence is about. ”Again, this definition seems to work for many sentences (such as 9a), but fails in others (such as 9b, c). All three of these sentences seem to be “about” Bill; thus we could say that Bill is the TOPIC of all three sentences. But Bill is the subject in (9a), the object in (9b), and neither subject nor object in (9c). These sentences make it clear that the topic is not always the grammatical subject.
(9) a Bill is a very crafty fellow.
b (Jack is pretty reliable, but) Bill I don’t trust.
c As for Bill, I wouldn’t take his promises very seriously.
It seems that we cannot reliably identify the subject of a sentence with either the agent or the topic. Rather, we must use grammatical criteria to develop a workable definition. What grammatical properties do subjects have that other elements of the sentence do not share? Bickford (1998:43) notes the following properties of subjects in English:
a Word order: In a basic English sentence, the subject normally comes before the verb, while the object and other parts of the sentence follow the verb.
b Pronoun forms: The first and third person pronouns in English appear in a special form when the pronoun is a subject, as illustrated in (10). This form is not used when the pronoun occurs in other positions:1
(10) a She loves me.
b I love her.
c We threw stones at them.
d They threw stones at us.
c Agreement with verb: In the simple present tense, an-s is added to the verb when a third person subject is singular. However, the number and person of the object or any other element in the sentence has no effect at all on the form of the verb:
(11) a She angers him.
b They anger him.
c She angers them.
d Content questions: If the subject is replaced by a question word (who or what), the rest of the sentence remains unchanged, as in (12b). But when any other element of the sentence is replaced by a question word, an auxiliary verb must appear before the subject. If the basic sentence does not contain an auxiliary verb, we must insert did or do(es) immediately after the question word, as in (12d,e):
(12) a John stole/would steal Mrs. Thatcher’s picture from the British Council.
b Who stole/would steal Mrs. Thatcher’s picture from the British Council?
c What would John steal, if he had the chance?
d What did John steal from the British Council?
e Where did John steal Mrs. Thatcher’s picture from?
Tag questions: A “tag question” is used to seek confirmation of a statement. It always contains a pronoun which refers back to the subject, and never to any other element in the sentence.
(13) a John loves Mary, doesn’t he?
b Mary loves John, doesn’t she?
c *John loves Mary, doesn’t she?
A number of other properties could be added here, but many of them cannot be understood without a much deeper knowledge of English syntax than we can assume at this stage. The main point is that these are grammatical properties which uniquely identify the subject of an English sentence. Of course, for another language the list of specific properties would be different. We will not try to define SUBJECTHOOD as an abstract concept, but will assume that for each language there will be a set of grammatical criteria which allows us to identify subjects in that language.
The same considerations apply for objects: we cannot in general identify them on the basis of semantic roles or discourse functions. Rather, we need to find a set of grammatical properties which are characteristic of objects in a particular language. However, since subjects are in some sense more “prominent” than objects, there are (in many languages) fewer grammatical properties which are unique to objects; so, it is sometimes more difficult to find objecthood tests than subjecthood tests.
1. We are ignoring for now the use of nominative pronouns as predicate complements, especially in relatively formal speech, e.g. It is she.
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