Questions tagged [grammatical-subject]
The grammatical-subject tag has no usage guidance.
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"Typically, the subject has the agent role" -- how frequent is this, really?
In introductory books or reference works, this kind of statement recurs over and over: "In the active voice, the subject is typically an agent". However, it is obvious that many verbs have ...
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what's this linguistic phenomenon?
I am currently working on coding and standardizing the language of my community.
There is something we do when we speak, that so far I haven't encountered in the other languages that I've delved into, ...
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What do you call the range of possible subjects a word can be predicated of
What do you call the range of possible subjects a word can be predicated of?
i.e., brown can be predicated of furniture but not numbers; running can be predicated of people but not rocks; fruitless ...
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Help with syntax analysis
Good day to everyone! Could somebody explain me why in the following sentence "that he was disappointed" is S (subject)?
(It)-S (must be confessed)-V (that he was disappointed)-S.
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Raised object vs. Subordinate subject (I didn't want 'Kim' mistreating my cat)
(1) I didn't want Kim mistreating my cat.
(2) I didn't want Kim to mistreat my cat.
Semantically, Kim is not the object of want but the subject of the respective subordinate clauses mistreating my ...
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Substituting prepositional phrases
In English, if you take the sentence behind the house was untidy, what is untidy is really an area behind the house – so assuming for now that behind the house can be regarded as the subject of the ...
user23078
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Misunderstanding quantifier floats
I'm reading Core Syntax by Adger and there is an exercise to analyze the following data.
*The dragons were slain all.
*The Greeks arrived all.
Now I know the phenomena of floating quantifiers comes ...
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Is a language without inflection a language without subject?
Subject is defined as the argument which agrees with the affixes of the verb. But if a language does not have inflectional affixes, can you state that this particular language does not have syntactic ...
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Instrumental - nominative inversion in Polish
While scrolling through a course in Polish, I saw the following sentence:
Wynikiem wyrażenia jest nowa relacja. -- *resultant (of the) expression is (a) new relation
This is not the first time I ...
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What is ''syntactic behavior"?
According to my professor's notes, we have syntactic ergativity when the arguments P and S display the same syntactic behavior. But how is the term "syntactic behavior" defined?
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About the universality of the notion of subject and the description of ergativity
A very common description of ergativity defines it as a morphosyntactic alignment where the intransitive subject follows a pattern similar to the object and dissimilar from the transitive subject --- ...
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Relationship between "subject-targeting syntactic phenomena" and "subjecthood tests"?
TL;DR: How can we use syntactic phenomena that target subject to design tests for subjecthood (or even possibly derive a cross-linguistic definition of subject)?
I am reading Van Valin's An ...
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Why does 'seem' behave differently?
Mary seems[ t to be here]
Mary tried [PRO to be here]
Why can't Mary be generated in spec VP of 'seems' but can in 'tried'?
Instead it looks like it works more like a passive verb:
Mary is believed ...
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Looking for the name of research area *my brother helps me (to) translate*
In the sentence:
my brother helps me translate
the subject of the dependent clause surfaces as an object pronoun. In generative grammar there have been several approaches to analyzing this ...
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Why do so many grammars divide a clause into Subject and Verb instead of Subject and Predicative?
I used to start learning a few languages, admittingly my interest ,stamina and brain force didn't last for more than a couple of days each.
Nethertheless, I noticed , that the different grammars ...
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Do all languages have the same set of grammatical relations?
As for parts of speech, I am quite sure it is not the case.
For instance, some languages are problematic in separating clearly verbs from adjectives like Japanese and Korean, some native American ...
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What is the subject of a passive sentence?
Sentences in the active voice can be converted to the passive voice by - amongst other maneuvers - moving the direct object into the position originally occupied by the grammatical subject.
Does this ...
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how do SOV langues mark Subject?
I'm making a conlang and right now it is SVO. I want to make it more in line with an SOV language. Currently Nominatives are unmarked while only 1 Accusatives is marked in a group. So it reads "Bob ...
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What is the difference between 'actor' and 'subject' in systemic functional grammar?
What is the difference between 'actor' and 'subject' in systemic functional grammar? Sometimes in a functional grammar, 'actor' has a different meaning
Aldhi Rengga Saputra
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On the Predicate Internal Subject Hypothesis and DP Predicates
One standard assumption is that the subject of a clause originates from the specifier of its predicate, following the predicate internal subject hypothesis. For example, the subject of a simple ...
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Asking for analysis of sentences [closed]
Could you tell me what the difference nominal WH clause and nominal relative clause is ? For example, nominal WH clause : no one knows what caused the accident. Nominal Relative clause: You call ...
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Identifying core arguments, constituents? [closed]
In the sentence, 'It was raining' what are the core arguments?
I think [It] is a core argument and [was raining] is another. This would mean that it is a NP and was raining is a VP. But if this is ...
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Second Person Inanimates in Swahili
I know what when making verbs about people I can use an object placeholder in order to indicate the difference between the first, second and third persons.
So if I'm talking to my daughters I might ...
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Alternative subject positions in Spanish questions, economy and markedness
The following six Spanish sentences are different versions of the question/different questions corresponding to the unmarked declarative sentence Alguien más podría haber estado usando su ordenador (= ...
user6814
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Is the agent in an ergative language a subject or an object?
Imagine a language with PVA/APV dominant word order and SV in intransitive clauses. We see that it's tightly PV and SV whereas both VA and AV are possible. We also know that P and S are both ...
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What thematic roles are played by the subject of an intransitive verb?
I am not familiar with the concept of thematic roles, just what is on wikipedia. Here is what I have come up with.
agent: The man runs
patient: The man was tripped.
experiencer: The man falls.
My ...
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definition of subject [duplicate]
In Linguistics, there is a lot of talk about 'subject' (and many other things). A Linguist will say, "This is the subject of this sentence."
In fact, as far as I can see, neither subject, nor ...
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How do linguists define the idea of a grammatical subject?
How do linguists define the idea of a grammatical subject?
The only place I could find on the Internet about linguists' definition of a grammatical subject was at the SIL glossary, here. (http://www-...
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Which languages have Subject-object agreement in relative clauses?
I am working on relative clauses in Kyrgyz. Kyrgyz and some other Turkic languages show agreement of subject with object in relative clauses, instead of the verb. It is an SVO language.
Menin okugan ...
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