Курсовая работа: Subject: ways of expressing the sentence

My dog was walking I was walking my dog [3,160]

The subject may also have a recipient role with verbs such as have, own, possess, benefit (from), as is indicated by the following relation:

Mr. Smith has bought/given/sold his son a radio → So now his son has/owns/possesses the radio

The perceptual verbs see and hear also require a ‘recipient’ subject, in contrast to look at and listen to, which are agentive. The other perceptual verbs taste, smell, and feel have both an agentive meaning corresponding to look at and a recipient meaning corresponding to see:

Foolishly, he tasted the soup

* Foolishly, he tasted the pepper in the soup

The adverb foolishly requires the agentive; hence, the second sentence, which can only be understood in a non-agentive manner, does not make sense.

Verbs indicating a mental state may also require a recipient subject:

I thought you were mistaken (cf It seemed to me…)

I liked the play (cf The play gave me pleasure)

Normally, recipient subjects go with stative verbs. Some of them (notably have and possess) have no passive form:

They have a beautiful house ↔ A beautiful house is had by them

The subject may have the function of designating place or time:

This path is swarming with ants (= Ants are swarming all over this path)

The bus holds forty people (=Forty people can sit in the bus)

Unlike swarm, the verbs in such sentences do not normally admit the progressive (* The bus is holding…) or the passive (* Forty people are held …).

Temporal subjects can usually be replaced by the empty it, the temporal expression becoming adjunct:

Tomorrow is my birthday (= It is my birthday tomorrow)

The winter of 1970 was exceptionally mild (= It was exceptionally mild in the winter of 1970)

Eventive subjects (with abstract noun heads designating arrangements and activities) differ from others in permitting intensive complementation with a time adverbial:

The concert is on Thursday (but * The concert hall is on Thursday)

Finally, a subject may lack semantic content altogether, and consist only of the meaningless ‘prop’ word it, used especially with climatic predications:

It’s raining/snowing, etc. It’s getting dark It’s noisy in here [3, 163]

Note: The ‘prop’ subject it as discussed here must be distinguished from the ‘anticipatory’ it of sentences like ‘It was nice seeing you’, where the ‘prop’ subject is a replacement for a postponed clausal subject (= Seeing you was nice).

1.3 Ways of Expressing Subject

As it is stated above, the Subject 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. [7, 67]

The subject can be expressed by different parts of speech and by different constructions:

1. The noun in the common (or occasionally possessive) case;

The sulky waiter brought my tea. (Du Maurier)