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Subjecthood and Subject Positions

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Elements of Grammar

Part of the book series: Kluwer International Handbooks of Linguistics ((KIHL))

Abstract

The notion of “subject” is fundamental in Aristotelian logic and in almost all Western traditions of thinking about philology and grammar.* It is also fundamental to certain strands of thought within the broad tradition of generative grammar – notably Relational Grammar and Lexical Functional Grammar. However, in the tradition which extends from the “Standard Theory” through the “Extended Standard Theory” to “Principles and Parameters Theory” and then to the “Minimalist Program”, the notion of subject plays no formal role at all. Not only is “subject” not a primitive term in these theories, but in their most recent instantiations it is not even clear that there is any derived or defined notion which captures the traditional intuition of what a subject is (as there was, for instance, in the theory of Chomsky 1965). What we have seen, in a sense, is a progressive deconstruction of the traditional category “subject” so that the properties which are supposed to define it are distributed across a range of distinct (but derivationally linked) syntactic entities and positions. This theoretical eccentricity may turn out to have been foolish or wise, but it is certainly grounded in some of the deeper methodological instincts of generative grammar. My purpose in this contribution is to consider some recent proposals about the syntax of subject” nod, to try to place those proposals in a broader theoretical and historical perspective, and to evaluate their plausibility at least in a tentative way.

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    Jim McCloskey

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McCloskey, J. (1997). Subjecthood and Subject Positions. In: Haegeman, L. (eds) Elements of Grammar. Kluwer International Handbooks of Linguistics. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-011-5420-8_5

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