Subject (grammar) in the context of Topic–comment

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, grammatical relations (also called grammatical functions, grammatical roles, or syntactic functions) are functional relationships between constituents in a clause. The standard examples of grammatical functions from traditional grammar are subject, direct object, and indirect object. In recent times, the syntactic functions (more generally referred to as grammatical relations), typified by the traditional categories of subject and object, have assumed an important role in linguistic theorizing, within a variety of approaches ranging from generative grammar to functional and cognitive theories. Many modern theories of grammar are likely to acknowledge numerous further types of grammatical relations (e.g. complement, specifier, predicative, etc.).

The role of grammatical relations in theories of grammar is greatest in dependency grammars, which tend to posit dozens of distinct grammatical relations. Every head-dependent dependency bears a grammatical function.

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.

The term predicate is used in two ways in linguistics and its subfields. The first defines a predicate as everything in a standard declarative sentence except the subject, and the other defines it as only the main content verb or associated predicative expression of a clause. Thus, by the first definition, the predicate of the sentence Frank likes cake is likes cake, while by the second definition, it is only the content verb likes, and Frank and cake are the arguments of this predicate. The conflict between these two definitions can lead to confusion.

A verb is a word that generally conveys an action (bring, read, walk, run, learn), an occurrence (happen, become), or a state of being (be, exist, stand). In the usual description of English, the basic form, with or without the particle to, is the infinitive. In many languages, verbs are inflected (modified in form) to encode tense, aspect, mood, and voice. A verb may also agree with the person, gender or number of some of its arguments, such as its subject, or object. In English, three tenses exist: present, to indicate that an action is being carried out; past, to indicate that an action has been done; and future, to indicate that an action will be done, expressed with the auxiliary verb will or shall.

Active voice is a grammatical voice prevalent in many of the world's languages. It is the default voice for clauses that feature a transitive verb in nominative–accusative languages, including English and most Indo-European languages. In these languages, a verb is typically in the active voice when the subject of the verb is the doer of the action.

In active voice, the subject of the sentence performs the action expressed by the main verb and is thus the agent. For example, in the sentence "The cat ate the fish", 'the cat' functions as the agent performing the action of eating. This contrasts with the passive voice, where the subject is the recipient of the action, such as in "The fish was eaten by the cat." The use of both active and passive voices in languages enhances versatility in sentence construction, allowing either the semantic agent or patient to assume the syntactic role of the subject.

In linguistics, the topic, or theme, of a sentence is what is being talked about, and the comment (rheme or focus) is what is being said about the topic. This division into old vs. new content is called information structure. It is generally agreed that clauses are divided into topic vs. comment, but in certain cases, the boundary between them depends on the specific grammatical theory that is used to analyze the sentence.

The topic of a sentence is distinct from the grammatical subject. The topic is defined by pragmatic considerations, that is, the context that provides meaning. The grammatical subject is defined by syntax. In any given sentence the topic and grammatical subject may be the same, but they need not be. For example, in the sentence "As for the little girl, the dog bit her", the subject is "the dog", but the topic is "the little girl".

A grammatical case is a category of nouns and noun modifiers (determiners, adjectives, participles, and numerals) that corresponds to one or more potential grammatical functions for a nominal group in a wording. In various languages, nominal groups consisting of a noun and its modifiers belong to one of a few such categories. For instance, in English, one says I see them and they see me: the nominative pronouns I / they represent the perceiver, and the accusative pronouns me/them represent the phenomenon perceived. Here, nominative and accusative are cases, that is, categories of pronouns corresponding to the functions they have in representation.

English has largely lost its inflected case system but personal pronouns still have three cases, which are simplified forms of the nominative, accusative (including functions formerly handled by the dative), and genitive cases. They are used with personal pronouns: subjective case (I, you, he, she, it, we, they, who, whoever), objective case (me, you, him, her, it, us, them, whom, whomever), and possessive case (my, mine; your, yours; his; her, hers; its; our, ours; their, theirs; whose; whosever). Forms such as I, he, and we are used for the subject ("I kicked John"), and forms such as me, him, and us are used for the object ("John kicked me").

In linguistic typology, ergative–absolutive alignment is a type of morphosyntactic alignment in which the subject of an intransitive verb behaves like the object of a transitive verb, and differently from the subject of a transitive verb. Examples include Basque, Georgian, Mayan, Tibetan, Sumerian, and certain Indo-European languages (such as Pashto and the Kurdish languages and many Indo-Aryan languages like Hindustani). It has also been attributed to the Semitic modern Aramaic (also called Neo-Aramaic) languages. Ergative languages are classified into two groups: those that are morphologically ergative but syntactically behave as accusative (for instance, Basque, Pashto and Urdu) and those that, on top of being ergative morphologically, also show ergativity in syntax. Languages that belong to the former group are more numerous than those to the latter.

The ergative-absolutive alignment is in contrast to nominative–accusative alignment, which is observed in English and most other Indo-European languages, where the single argument of an intransitive verb ("She" in the sentence "She walks") behaves grammatically like the agent (subject) of a transitive verb ("She" in the sentence "She finds it") but different from the object of a transitive verb ("her" in the sentence "He likes her"). When ergative–absolutive alignment is coded by grammatical case, the case used for the single argument of an intransitive verb and the object of a transitive verb is the absolutive, and the case used for the agent of a transitive verb is the ergative. In nominative-accusative languages, the case for the single argument of an intransitive verb and the agent of a transitive verb is the nominative, while the case for the direct object of a transitive verb is the accusative.

In linguistics, polypersonal agreement or polypersonalism is the agreement of a verb with more than one of its arguments (usually up to four). Polypersonalism is a morphological feature of a language, and languages that display it are called polypersonal languages.

In non-polypersonal languages, the verb either shows no agreement at all or agrees with the primary argument (in English, the subject). In a language with polypersonal agreement, the verb has agreement morphemes that may indicate (as applicable) the subject, the direct object, the indirect or secondary object, the beneficiary of the verb action, etc. This polypersonal marking may be compulsory or optional (the latter meaning that some agreement morphemes can be elided if the full argument is expressed).