Subjects and their Properties, pt I

This is a really badly structured post, it's essentially just some points taken without much digestion from Yehuda N. Falk's Subjects and Universal Grammar. Turns out there's a lot more to cover than I first thought, so I'm going to give this in two or three rather lightly written installations.

This mainly is based on Falk's aforementioned work. Other works on subjects exist, but for conlanger purposes, a really concise summary of one book might be helpful. I have not seen much about subjects written for a conlanger audience, except the obvious things about ergativity and quirky case.

In the first chapter, Falk first presents a first approximation of subject, and this approximation is quite informative, although he goes on to refine it later on. We start out with this bit:

if a verb has an agent, that agent is the subject

Notice that this does not disallow non-agent subjects: this only disallows that in cases where the verb does have an agent.

the adressees of imperatives are subjects

I.e. if you first order someone, and then state that the person you ordered carried it out, you should be able to do so with that person as the subject of the verb you ordered him to do:

A (to B): Give an example, please!

B: I am giving an example now.

The first approximation also contains this:

in lots of languages, it is more likely for the subject not to be explicitly stated (i.e. a null pronoun) than other constituents

Further, in many languages, reflexive pronouns can only refer back to the subject of the same verb, c.f.:

I saw myself in a mirror

*She received the letter that I sent herself

(if the post office did a mistake, however, "she received the letter that I sent myself" is possible.)

In English, apparently it might be possible to have reflexive pronouns referring to non-subjects:

she made him embarass himself

And even more clearly:

noone can stop him but himself

Control is the term used for the restriction that appears in these examples:

they persuaded the starship captain to kiss the alien woman
* they persuaded the alien woman for the starship captain to kiss
they persuaded the alien woman to be kissed by the starship captain [Falk, pp. 4, 5]

There is no way - short of rearranging the nestled verb phrase so that the non-agent is a subject* - to make certain verbs (believe X to Y, persuade X to Y, etc etc) have X be a non-subject of the nestled verb. ( * this does violate part of the first approximation, but that will be dealt with in the second approximation)

And even further, raising seems restricted to subjects:

It seems that lions eat zebras
Lions seem to eat zebras
*Zebras seem for lions to eat
Zebras seem to be eaten by lions [Falk, p. 5]

Falk also points out that in most languages, subjects are more prone to wh-movement than other constituents are (but English is a clear counterexample!)

Further, many languages only permit sentences with subjects, and in certain frameworks the subject itself is not part of the verb phrase but exists outside it. Subjects tend to be definite.

Things like negation tend to operate differently with regards to scope over subjects than over other types of constituents. The example provided is

a. A student didn't take my course (a particular student did not take the class, and we may expect the speaker to specify why this is a problem or why this student is relevant)
b. I didn't see a student (unclear as to whether it's a specific student unknown to the listener, or whether there's no students at all)

I will continue this with a summary of the refined approximation, which might be followed by a more tidied up summary of the first entire chapter. We can notice there's already some space for conlanging, which I will showcase in the very next post on this topic.

Bibliography:
Falk, N. Yehuda, Subjects and Universal Grammar - An Explanatory Theory (Cambridge Studies in Linguistics 113), 2006. Basically everything is from the first seven pages.