Subject (grammar)
The stereotypical subject immediately precedes the finite verb in declarative sentences and represents an agent or a theme.
The fourth criterion is better applicable to other languages, the exception being the subject and object forms of pronouns, I/me, he/him, she/her, they/them.
The fifth criterion is helpful in languages that typically drop pronominal subjects, such as Spanish, Portuguese, Italian, Latin, Greek, Japanese, and Mandarin.
In ergative languages such as the nearly extinct Australian language Dyirbal, in a transitive sentence it is the patient rather than the agent that can be omitted in such sentences: Balan dyugumbil baŋgul yaraŋgu balgan, baninyu 'The man (bayi yara) hit the woman (balan dyugumbil) and [she] came here' This suggests that in ergative languages of this kind the patient is actually the subject in a transitive sentence.
In such cases then, one can take the first criterion as the most telling; the subject should agree with the finite verb.
This is so despite the fact that spiders in sentence 2 appears after the string of verbs in the canonical position of an object.
The existence of subject-less clauses can be construed as particularly problematic for theories of sentence structure that build on the binary subject-predicate division.
Subject-less clauses are absent from English for the most part, but they are not unusual in related languages.
In German, for instance, impersonal passive clauses can lack a recognizable subject, e.g. Gesternyesterdaywurdewasnuronlygeschlafen.sleptGestern wurde nur geschlafen.yesterday was only slept'Everybody slept yesterday.
'The word gestern 'yesterday' is generally construed as an adverb, which means it cannot be taken as the subject in this sentence.
'Since subjects are typically marked by the nominative case in German (the fourth criterion above), one can argue that this sentence lacks a subject, for the relevant verb argument appears in the dative case, not in the nominative.
Impersonal sentences in Scottish Gaelic can occasionally have a very similar form to the first German example where an actor is omitted.
In the following sentence, the word ‘chaidh’ ("went") is an auxiliary carrying tense and is used in an impersonal or passive constructions.
The object, in contrast, appears lower in the second tree, where it is a dependent of the non-finite verb.
The subject remains a dependent finite verb when subject-auxiliary inversion occurs: The prominence of the subject is consistently reflected in its position in the tree as an immediate dependent of the root word, the finite verb.
