The Subject

Date: 2015-10-07; view: 402.

§ 423. The subject is the independent member of a two-member predication, containing the person component of pred­icativity. Both members of the predication he sleeps contain the meaning of 'person'. But in sleeps this meaning depends on that of he and is due to grammatical combinability. This accounts for the fact that sleeps cannot make a sentence alone, though it contains all the components of predicativity. Sleeps likewise depends on he as far as the meaning of 'number' is concerned. The meanings of 'person' and 'number' in he are lexico-grammatical (see § 148) and independent.

§ 424. The subject is generally defined as a word or a group of words denoting the thing we speak about. This traditional definition is logical rather than grammatical. In the sentence This pretty girl is my sister's friend the definition can be applied to the whole group This pretty girl, to say nothing of the fact that "the thing we speak about" is so vague that it practically covers any part of the sentence expressing substantivity.

§ 425. The subject of a simple sentence can be a word, a syntactical word-morpheme or a complex.

As a word it can belong to different parts of speech, but it is mostly a noun or a pro-noun.

E.g. Fame is the thirst of youth. (Byron).

Nothing endures but personal qualities. (Whit­man). To see is to believe.

A word used as a subject combines the lexical meaning with the structural meaning of 'person'. So it is at the same time the structural and the notional subject.

The syntactical word-morphemes there and it (see § 391) are only structural subjects because as word-morphemes they have no lexical meaning. But they are usually correlated with some words or complexes in the sentence which are regarded as notional subjects. In such cases it and there are also called anticipatory or introductory subjects.

In There is somebody in the room the notional subject is somebody. In It requires no small talents to be a bore (Scott) the notional subject is to be a bore. In It is raining there is no notional subject and it is not anticipatory. In It is neces­sary for him to come the notional subject is the com­plex for him to come. But a complex may also be used as the only subject.

E. g. F о r him to come would be fatal.

§ 426. We may speak of a secondary subject within a com­plex. In the following sentence it is the noun head.

Several thousand people went to see the headless statue yesterday before it was removed for a new head to be cast from the original plaster moulds. (Daily Worker).

The syntactical word-morphemes there and it may also function as secondary subjects.

It being cold, we put on our coats. I knew of there being no one to help him.

§ 427. The analysis of sentences like He was seen to enter the house, is a point at issue. Traditionally the infinitive is said to form part of the 'complex subject' (He ...to enter). B. A. Ilyish ^l maintains that though satisfactory from the logical point of view, this interpretation seems to be artifi­cial grammatically, this splitting of the subject being alien to English. Accordingly B. A. Ilyish suggests that only he should be treated as the subject of the sentence, whereas was seen to enter represents a peculiar type of compound predicate.

The traditional analysis, however, seems preferable, for it admits of treating the sentence as a passive transform of They saw him enter the house with the 'complex object' him enter becoming a 'complex subject' he... to enter. As to the splitting of the subject, it is another device to bring the structural parts of the subject and predicate together (he was), which is so typical of English.

§ 428. Some authors as, for example, A. Smirnitsky ² M. Ganshina and N. Vasilevskaya ³ speak of definite-personal, indefinite-personal and impersonal sentences in Modern Eng­lish. We see no syntactical ground whatever for this classifi­cation since definite-personal, indefinite-personal, etc. sen­tences have no structural peculiarities typical of these class­es. It is a semantical classification of subjects, not sentences.

§ 429. If we compare the subject in English with that of Russian we shall find a considerable difference between them.

1. In Modern Russian the subject is as a rule characterized by a distinct morphological feature — the nominative case, whereas in English it is for the most part (unless it is expressed by a personal pronoun or the pronoun who in the nominative case) indicated by the position it occupies in the sentence.

2. In Modern Russian the subject is much less obligatory as a part of the sentence than in English. One-member sen­tences are numerous and of various types, among them sen­tences like Приду. Пишет. In English a finite verb (barring the 'imperative mood' finites) does not, as a rule, make a sentence without a subject.

3. In English the subject may be a syntactical word-morpheme, a gerund or a complex, which is, naturally, alien to Russian.