Interpretational remarks on the notion of subject in generative grammar

What is it about?

The paper raises the topic of what the functional and logical notion of subject is. It examines the syntax-semantic nature of Icelandic and Polish quirky subject constructions (subjectless clauses in which the initial DP bears oblique Case) with psych-verbs. Of main interest is the full vs. default agreement on V which nominative DPs and quirky subjects always trigger, respectively. We attempt to define the primitive notion of subject from two standpoints – its LF representation and how it is mirrored syntactically by the predication relation of the subject with respect to vP/VP and the proposition of the sentence in TP between the subject and T′. We discuss the semantic and configurational dependencies between quirky subjects and nominative DPs and vP and TP/CP. The paper investigates also the landing site for non-nominative initial DPs and argues for the Topic Phrase in the Left Periphery (Rizzi 1997) as a most natural candidate to host quirky subjects. Hopefully, the conclusions reached here may offer some way of bringing the notion of subject towards its more satisfactory understanding and description within the generative approach.

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Why is it important?

The notion of what grammatical and logical subject is within the Generative Grammar approach seems to be an illusive topic that often becomes disregarded. In this work, we attemp to offer a viewpoint on how to define grammatical and logical subject in terms of its distributional and semantic properties. The study draws examples from Polish and Icelandic.

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