Eric Weidner 
The subject notion and Functional Ways of Structuring Language [EPUB ebook] 

Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies – Linguistics, grade: 2, 3, University of Heidelberg (Institut für Anglistik), course: Hauptseminar Functional Syntax, language: English, abstract: In this term paper I will investigate the structure of English sentences with the subject
notion as a starting point. It presents a classical notion to analyse clauses and sentences
but how exactly can a subject be defined? For this purpose, I will show that the notion is
not detailed enough and suggest a distinction into grammatical, logical and psychological
subject. This proves useful to analyse sentences which at first glance do not appear to have
any subject at all. In a next step I will focus on features of the grammatical subject
according to the Cambridge Grammar of the English language (2005). The discussion will
prove that the properties given for grammatical subjects do not constitute a fixed frame
which sharply distinguishes between elements eligible to be subjects and others that are
not. Instead I will argue that the subject category is best analysed as a prototype category
and that its features have prototypical character.
The second section is concerned with different ways of accounting for particular
structures of language. If various syntactic functions can appear at the beginning of
sentences then why does a speaker choose a particular construction instead of another? I
will argue that this question is closely related to analyses of clauses, sentences and
utterances going beyond a mere subject vs. predicate dichotomy. I will start with a
discussion of the thematic structure of sentences and clauses and introduce the distinction
of topic and comment. The second step complements the thematic structure of language
with the information structure, in which constituents can be labelled ‘given’ and ‘new’.
This analysis also considers the intra- and extra-linguistic context of clauses and sentences
and can thereby account for a fair share of speaker-choices between differing
constructions. Since there are still some cases that cannot be explained by looking at the
information structure, I will then present the notion of perspective as very helpful. Taking
together these different levels of analysis one is enabled to account for a large quantity of
possible constructions in the English language.