Talk:Subject (grammar)

Semantic subject?

I don't like this, really:

In English, verbs actually have two subjects: the semantic subject, which is the doer of the verb according to meaning, and a syntactical subject, which is what the verb agrees with, and it determines which case a pronoun gets.

In my view, while it's fine to mention the idea of "semantic subject" (as in the opening paragraphs), this confuses subject and agent/undergoer. The problem with the category of "subject" is that it is often circularly defined, or defined as a universal category (many claim Chinese has no such category), or defined disregarding the problems the concept has with ergative-absolutive languages.

The article also needs a little less emphasis on English, too (see WP:CSB).

I'd like to see if anybody has any opinions on this, before I get to the matter myself.

--Pablo D. Flores 13:51, 21 Apr 2005 (UTC)

I'm not a grammarian, so I can't comment on your first point, but about your second point--this is the English Wikipedia; I'd expect the Japanese WP to focus on the subject in Japanese. Meelar (talk) 13:53, Apr 21, 2005 (UTC)

I made a range of changes, including mention of ergative languages as requested above. I agree with Meelar that the English wiki would be written mainly for an English-speeking audience, but in the case of concepts from grammatical theory, it would not do justice to them to restrict their discussion to one language, since grammatical theory by no means is restricted to English. My inclination is that one should exemplify things with English as far as possible, but not exclusively, and certainly not exclude discussion of phenomena that don't occcur in English.--Neither 3 July 2005 17:07 (UTC)

Introduction (Sentence 3)

Grammatical function (page was missing). Started. Please see talk:grammatical function Ken H 03:04:27, 2005-08-05 (UTC)