The subject notion and Functional Ways of Structuring Language

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 subjectnotion as a starting point. It presents a classical notion to analyse clauses and sentencesbut how exactly can a subject be defined? For this purpose, I will show that the notion isnot detailed enough and suggest a distinction into grammatical, logical and psychologicalsubject. This proves useful to analyse sentences which at first glance do not appear to haveany subject at all. In a next step I will focus on features of the grammatical subjectaccording to the Cambridge Grammar of the English language (2005). The discussion willprove that the properties given for grammatical subjects do not constitute a fixed framewhich sharply distinguishes between elements eligible to be subjects and others that arenot. Instead I will argue that the subject category is best analysed as a prototype categoryand that its features have prototypical character.The second section is concerned with different ways of accounting for particularstructures of language. If various syntactic functions can appear at the beginning ofsentences then why does a speaker choose a particular construction instead of another? Iwill argue that this question is closely related to analyses of clauses, sentences andutterances going beyond a mere subject vs. predicate dichotomy. I will start with adiscussion of the thematic structure of sentences and clauses and introduce the distinctionof topic and comment. The second step complements the thematic structure of languagewith 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 sentencesand can thereby account for a fair share of speaker-choices between differingconstructions. Since there are still some cases that cannot be explained by looking at theinformation structure, I will then present the notion of perspective as very helpful. Takingtogether these different levels of analysis one is enabled to account for a large quantity ofpossible constructions in the English language.