What is a subject?

Definition
	A subject is a grammatical relation that exhibits certain independent syntactic properties, such as the following:
	The grammatical characteristics of the agent of typically transitive verbs The grammatical characteristics of the single argument of intransitive verbs A particular case marking or clause position The conditioning of an agreement affix on the verb The capability of being obligatorily or optionally deleted in certain grammatical constructions, such as the following clauses: Adverbial Complement Coordinate The conditioning of same subject markers and different subject markers in switch-reference systems The capability of coreference with reflexive pronouns
	The identification of the subject relation may be further confirmed by finding significant overlap with similar subject relations previously established in other languages. This may be done by analyzing correspondence between translation equivalents.

Generic
	A subject is a kind of
	What is a grammatical relation?

Sources
	Crystal 1985 293
	Hartmann and Stork 1972 224
	Pei and Gaynor 1954 205
	Mish 1991 1174
	Pike and Pike 1982 458–459
	Andrews, A. 1985 68–69, 103–117
	Comrie 1989 66

Context for this page:

Concept module: subject
In overview module: Glossary (Linguistics): S
In modular book: Glossary of linguistic terms, by Eugene E. Loos (general editor), Susan Anderson (editor), Dwight H., Day, Jr. (editor), Paul C. Jordan (editor), and J. Douglas Wingate (editor)
In bookshelf: Linguistics

This page is an extract from the LinguaLinks Library, Version 5.0 published on CD-ROM by SIL International, 2003. [Ordering information.]

Page content last modified: 5 January 2004

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