Subject of sentence

Subject is one of two main parts of sentence together with predicate. It usually express the person or thing which makes or is modified by the action (predicate). However subject may be omitted, typically in impersonal and imperative clauses. Subject may be presented by following forms:

  • Noun or pronoun (optionally with determiner): “Winged dragon destroyed the city” ⇒ “Skoirûrz lûg duluzâ goium”;
  • Infinitive (optionally with dependent words, counted as 3rd person singular): “To live peacefully is human's dream” ⇒ “Kîbut borzarz kulâ taur tarkhaib”;
  • Dependent sentence or clause: “Who awakes early gets all the loot” ⇒ “Amai rilorâ ânth (zîg) snabâ raunûk”; counted as subject in a whole compound sentence, but individual words may serve different syntactical roles within the clause, e.g. in this example “who” is the subject of clause, “awake” is predicate and “early” is adverbial;
  • may be absent but implied (e.g. in imperative clauses like “(You,) Do your job!” = “Kramp bulfib!”).

It may be hard to distinguish subject from other parts of sentence when subject is an enclitic pronoun becoming a prefix of person (“Tathrokh” = “He eats”).

If the subject is expressed by two nouns or pronouns joined by conjunction “and” = “agh”, then verb takes plural form. Example: “Shagrat and Gorbag were talking in the tower” ⇒ “Shagrat agh Gorbag shugbuzû lugumor”, “You and I are made for each other” ⇒ “Fi agh da krampâkuzû ûghûr iskûr”. Similarly, predicate becomes plural when subject is expressed by two nouns or pronouns, if one is in nominative case and the other is in comitative case: “Shagrat with Gorbag captured Frodo” ⇒ “Shagrat Gorbagsha dikuzû Frodo”.

Add more info about passive

syntax_subject.txt · Last modified: 2023/09/07 19:38 by 127.0.0.1