4 - Case, agreement, grammatical relations and thematic roles

Summary

A descriptive overview

Some structural properties of subjects and objects

Some of the most frequently listed structural properties of Icelandic subjects are illustrated in the following subsections and contrasted with object properties when possible (for a general overview of subject properties, see McCloskey 1997 and references cited there; for overviews of the properties of Icelandic subjects, see, e.g., Zaenen et al. 1985; Halldór Ármann Sigurðsson 1989, 1997, 2002a; Eiríkur Rögnvaldsson 1997; Jóhanna Barðdal 2002; Jóhanna Barðdal and Thórhallur Eythórsson 2003a, b; Thórhallur Eythórsson and Jóhanna Barðdal 2003, 2005; Höskuldur Thráinsson 2005:269ff. and references cited by these authors). Since a large part of this chapter will be devoted to the properties of oblique subjects, it is necessary to establish ways of distinguishing these from preposed objects. Hence the behaviour of canonical nominative subjects will often be contrasted with that of preposed objects in the following sections. In the following subsections some (further) properties of objects are reviewed. Note that it is not being claimed here that these alleged properties of subjects show that ‘subject’ is necessarily some sort of a primitive notion in linguistic theory. These properties listed below are presumably of various types. All that is being shown is that NPs that most linguists will call subjects typically have certain properties that (preposed) objects do not have. In the following sections we will then see that the so-called oblique subjects share these properties with nominative subjects and not with objects.