Курсовая работа: Subject: ways of expressing the sentence

The practical part is aimed at investigation of the subject features in the works of American and English fiction and fulfillment of the comparative analysis in the given works of two different cultures – American and English.

The results of the executed practical work demonstrating common and contrasting ways of expressing the subject in British and American fiction are evidenced in conclusion of the project.

subject sentence

1.Chapter One. The Subject: Ways of Expressing It in the Sentence

1.1 Definitions of the Subject

The notion of the Subject in the grammatical theory of the English language can be presented very briefly and clearly: it is the main part of a two-member sentence which is grammatically independent of the other parts of the sentence and on which the predicate is grammatically dependent. [8, 67]

The reason for calling the subject and the predicate the main parts of the sentence and distinguishing them from all the other parts which are treated as secondary, is roughly this. The subject and the predicate between them constitute the backbone of the sentence: without them the sentence would not exist at all, whereas all the other parts may or may not be there, and if they are there, they serve to define or modify either the subject, or the predicate, or each other. [10, 205]

A linguistic experiment to prove the correctness of this view would be to take a sentence containing the subject, a predicate, and a number of secondary parts, and to show that any of the secondary parts might be removed without the sentence being destroyed, whereas if either the subject or the predicate were removed there would be no sentence left: its ‘backbone’ would be broken. This experiment would probably succeed and prove the point in a vast majority of cases.

The question now arises: what criteria do we practically apply when we say that a word (or, sometimes, a phrase) is the subject of a sentence? [10, 206]

The grammatical phenomenon of the subject in English has been examined by a number of linguists, philologists and grammatical experts both of English and foreign origin in different epochs. This notion is defined in various interpretations; still the common backbone is identified in all of them. Let’s retrace this ‘common thread’, kept in all the definitions of the subject.

Sidney Greenbaum in ‘The Oxford English Grammar’ notes that the subject of a sentence is the constituent that normally comes before the verb in a declarative sentence and changes position with the operator in an interrogative sentence. It is applicable, the verb agrees in number and person with the subject (I am ready): the subject ‘I’ is first person singular and so is ‘am’ [2,305]

Paul Roberts in ‘Understanding Grammar’ presents the subject as the element stressed or the new element added to the discourse end in complexities that are interesting philosophically but useless grammatically. The beginner’s device to find the subject is first to find the verb and then ask ‘who?’ or ‘what’ before it. When the subject is very specific (e.g. a proper name), we may even invert the normal word order without befuddling out listeners. [6, 405]

Some brief definitions of the subject are presented by Richard Gardiner and Timothy Cobb in ‘Today’s English Grammar’ from one side, and by Geoffrey Leech in ‘An A-Z of English Grammar and Usage’ from the other side.

In ‘Today’s English Grammar’ the authors state that the word indicating the person or thing referred to is called the subject of the sentence. [1, 202]

Geoffrey Leech, in his turn, notes that the subject is a grammatical term for the past of a clause or sentence which generally goes before the verb phrase (in statements). [5, 413]

Russian philologists, such as Kaushanskaya in «Грамматикаанглийскогоязыка», say that the subject is the principal part of a two-member sentence which is grammatically independent of the other parts of the sentence and on which the second principal part (the predicate) is grammatically dependent, i.e. in most cases it agrees with the subject in number and person. The subject can denote a living being, a lifeless thing or an idea. [13, 115]

According to I. P. Krylova in ‘A Grammar of Present Day’ the subject is a word or a group of words which names the person, object or phenomenon the sentence informs us about. [14,85]

Thus, we can identify the following common points:

a) the subject is normally a noun phrase or a clause with nominal function;

b) the subject occurs before the verb phrase in declarative clauses, and immediately after the operator in questions;

c) the subject has number and person concord, where applicable, with the verb phrase. [3, 158]

Б. А. Ильинin «Стройсовременногоанглийскогоязыка» examines the question first of all by formulating the structure of the definition itself. It is bound to contain the following items: (1) the meaning of the subject, that is its relation to the thought expressed in the sentence, (2) its syntactical relations in the sentence, (3) its morphological realization: here a list of morphological ways of realizing the subject must be given, but it need not be exhaustive, as it is our purpose merely to establish the essential characteristics of every part of the sentence.

The definition of the subject would, then, be something like this. The subject is one of the two main parts of the sentence. (1) It denotes the thing whose action or characteristic is expressed by the predicate. (2) It is not dependent on any other part of the sentence. (3) It may be expressed by different parts of speech, the most frequent ones being: a noun in the common case, a personal pronoun in the nominative case, a demonstrative pronoun occasionally, a substantivized adjective or past participle, a numeral, an infinitive, and a gerund. It may also be expressed by a phrase. [10, 207]

1.2 Classification of the subject

There aresome classifications given by different authors. For example, from the structural point of view and functional point of view

1.2.1 Classification of the subject from the structural point of view

From the point of view of the structure, the subject can be:

1. Simple , expressed by a word or a number of words in the nominal case, the combination of which represents one doer of the action.

No glass renders a man’s form or likeness so true as his speech. (Ben Johnson, Timber)