Preliminaries to a History of Sentential Subjects in English (1997)

1. Subjects in English The notion is, as described in the gloss offered by Roger Lass (1987: 362), extremely complex, and it's not clear whether all languages have such a category, and its defining criteria ought to be. * But one thing that is clear is that subjecthood is generally conceived in overtly relational terms: are seen as the of sentences, or of predicates, or of particular verbs. And there is some agreement that this relation can be one-to-many. Thus, in (1) Peter is represented -- fairly uncontroversially, in spirit, if not in form -- as the subject both appears and like (I ignore the status to and other aspects the representation, including categorisation -- see, for instance, J.M. Anderson 1992: [section]5.6). Whether Peter's non-unary attachment is represented, as in (1), by simultaneous multiple dependencies (indicated by the solid lines, with the discontinous lines serving merely to associate items with nodes in the graph), or by successive derivational status as subject like and appears, or by both, there exists a large measure agreement among grammarians that Peter in this sentence is in some sense the subject of two different verbs. The idea that there might be a many-to-one relation between and sentences or verbs has had a rather more restricted currency. The suggestion that the syntax Japanese, for example, may attribute more than one subject to a sentence is controversial, and would be typologically parochial, apparently. J.M. Anderson (1992: [section]4.2), however, suggests that it is at least appropriate to allow for one rather restricted possibility for diversification with respect to a particular verb. He differentiates between we' might call a (strictly) syntactic subject a verb, distinguished in particular languages by its syntactic 'behaviour', such as, and in particular, the ability to be shared with another verb shown in (1), and a morphosyntactic which in particular languages is marked morphologically, by the bearing a distinctive case, traditionally labelled the nominative, and/or by the controlling concord on the verb. Frequently these types subject coincide, as with Peter in (1) with respect to appears (while the non-finite like lacks a morphosyntactic subject). But in English the same verb may have distinct syntactic and morphosyntactic subjects, as in (2): (2) There are olives in that jar. There is the syntactic subject - and so (3) shows it being shared by two verbs: (3) There appear to be olives in that jar. But olives, as morphosyntactic controls concord on the finite verb: it is the morphosyntactic subject are in (2) and appear in (3). The syntactic subject in English also has a distinctive pre-finite position. Two sets questions arise at this point: one set arises from the observation (alluded to in Lass' gloss) that it is not obvious that cross-linguistically it is always subjects that display the properties just described; the second concerns the motivations for attributing subjecthood to both syntactic and morphosyntactic subjects. Both sets can be resolved if we look rather more carefully at it takes to be a at what its defining criteria ought to be. I shall attempt to formulate these in a manner that is consistent with the traditional acceptance the notion subject, as well as providing answers to the questions just posed. I take as a starting point the following subjeethood criterion (J.M. Anderson 1979a: [section]2; 1979b: 131-132; 1980: 205; Bohm 1983: 117; 1993: [section]2.1.1): A language has if the agent in simple 'transitive' action sentences shares non-contingent syntactic or morphological properties with the (patient/agent) argument in 'intransitive' sentences which the latter does not share with the patient in 'transitive' action sentences; and in any sentence in that language are identified as sharing these properties. …