Subject (grammar) in the context of "Grammatical relations"

The Categories (Ancient Greek: Κατηγορίαι, romanized: Katēgoriai; Latin: Categoriae or Praedicamenta) is a text from Aristotle's Organon that enumerates all the possible kinds of things that can be the subject or the predicate of a proposition. They are "perhaps the single most heavily discussed of all Aristotelian notions". The work is brief enough to be divided not into books, as is usual with Aristotle's works, but into fifteen chapters.

The Categories places every object of human apprehension under one of ten categories (known to medieval writers as the Latin term praedicamenta). Aristotle intended them to enumerate everything that can be expressed without composition or structure, thus anything that can be either the subject or the predicate of a proposition.

In grammar, a noun is a word that represents a concrete or abstract thing, like living creatures, places, actions, qualities, states of existence, and ideas. A noun may serve as an object or subject within a phrase, clause, or sentence.

In linguistics, nouns constitute a lexical category (part of speech) defined according to how its members combine with members of other lexical categories. The syntactic occurrence of nouns differs among languages.

A noun phrase – or NP or nominal (phrase) – is a phrase that usually has a noun or pronoun as its head, and has the same grammatical functions as a noun. Noun phrases are very common cross-linguistically, and they may be the most frequently occurring phrase type.

Noun phrases often function as verb subjects and objects, as predicative expressions, and as complements of prepositions. One NP can be embedded inside another NP; for instance, some of his constituents has as a constituent the shorter NP his constituents.

In grammar, the nominative case (abbreviated NOM), subjective case, straight case, or upright case is one of the grammatical cases of a noun or other part of speech, which generally marks the subject of a verb, or (in Latin and formal variants of English) a predicative nominal or adjective, as opposed to its object, or other verb arguments. Generally, the noun "that is doing something" is in the nominative, and the nominative is often the form listed in dictionaries.

In linguistics and grammar, a sentence is a linguistic expression, such as the English example "The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog." In traditional grammar, it is typically defined as a string of words that expresses a thought, or as a unit consisting of a subject and predicate. In non-functional linguistics it is typically defined as a maximal unit of syntactic structure such as a constituent. In functional linguistics, it is defined as a unit of written texts delimited by graphological features such as upper-case letters and markers such as periods, question marks, and exclamation marks. This notion contrasts with a curve, which is delimited by phonologic features such as pitch and loudness and markers such as pauses; and with a clause, which is a sequence of words that represents some process going on throughout time.A sentence can include words grouped meaningfully to express a statement, question, exclamation, request, command, or suggestion.

In linguistics, agreement or concord (abbreviated agr) occurs when a word changes form depending on the other words to which it relates. It is an instance of inflection, and usually involves making the value of some grammatical category (such as gender or person) "agree" between varied words or parts of the sentence.

For example, in Standard English, one may say I am or he is, but not "I is" or "he am". This is because English grammar requires that the verb and its subject agree in person. The pronouns I and he are first and third person respectively, as are the verb forms am and is. The verb form must be selected so that it has the same person as the subject in contrast to notional agreement, which is based on meaning.

The analytic–synthetic distinction is a semantic distinction used primarily in philosophy to distinguish between propositions (in particular, statements that are affirmative subject–predicate judgments) that are of two types: analytic propositions and synthetic propositions. Analytic propositions are true or not true solely by virtue of their meaning, whereas synthetic propositions' truth, if any, derives from how their meaning relates to the world.

While the distinction was first proposed by Immanuel Kant, it was revised considerably over time, and different philosophers have used the terms in very different ways. Furthermore, some philosophers (starting with Willard Van Orman Quine) have questioned whether there is even a clear distinction to be made between propositions which are analytically true and propositions which are synthetically true. Debates regarding the nature and usefulness of the distinction continue to this day in contemporary philosophy of language.

In language, a clause is a constituent or phrase that comprises a semantic predicand (expressed or not) and a semantic predicate. A typical clause consists of a subject and a syntactic predicate, the latter typically a verb phrase composed of a verb with or without any objects and other modifiers. However, the subject is sometimes unexpressed if it is easily deducible from the context, especially in null-subject languages but also in other languages, including instances of the imperative mood in English.

A complete simple sentence contains a single clause with a finite verb. Complex sentences contain at least one clause subordinated to (dependent on) an independent clause (one that could stand alone as a simple sentence), which may be co-ordinated with other independents with or without dependents. Some dependent clauses are non-finite, i.e. they do not contain any element/verb marking a specific tense.