Seminar paper from the year 2007 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 2,3, University of Heidelberg (Institut für Anglistik), course: Hauptseminar Functional Syntax, language: English, abstract: In this term paper I will investigate the structure of English sentences with the subject

notion as a starting point. It presents a classical notion to analyse clauses and sentences

but how exactly can a subject be defined? For this purpose, I will show that the notion is

not detailed enough and suggest a distinction into grammatical, logical and psychological

subject. This proves useful to analyse sentences which at first glance do not appear to have

any subject at all. In a next step I will focus on features of the grammatical subject

according to the Cambridge Grammar of the English language (2005). The discussion will

prove that the properties given for grammatical subjects do not constitute a fixed frame

which sharply distinguishes between elements eligible to be subjects and others that are

not. Instead I will argue that the subject category is best analysed as a prototype category

and that its features have prototypical character.

The second section is concerned with different ways of accounting for particular

structures of language. If various syntactic functions can appear at the beginning of

sentences then why does a speaker choose a particular construction instead of another? I

will argue that this question is closely related to analyses of clauses, sentences and

utterances going beyond a mere subject vs. predicate dichotomy. I will start with a

discussion of the thematic structure of sentences and clauses and introduce the distinction

of topic and comment. The second step complements the thematic structure of language

with the information structure, in which constituents can be labelled given and new.

This analysis also considers the intra- and extra-linguistic context of clauses and sentences

and can thereby account for a fair share of speaker-choices between differing

constructions. Since there are still some cases that cannot be explained by looking at the

information structure, I will then present the notion of perspective as very helpful. Taking

together these different levels of analysis one is enabled to account for a large quantity of

possible constructions in the English language.