From: yochanan bitan (ButhFam@compuserve.com)
Date: Sat May 27 2000 - 18:09:02 EDT
Clay egrapse:
>Looking at the two texts I
>have quoted above they seem to have some similarity to the examples Dik
uses
>to show how the semantic Recipient can function as a subject. However I
find
>myself unwilling to accept the idea of a constituent in the dative case as
a
>subject
Good intuition, Clay.
I would agree that datives are NOT syntactic subjects. Period.
Dik would agree. Dik calls Subject a 'syntactic' function not a semantic
'role'. So, even if his definition sounds 'semantic', it is manifested and
defined 'syntactically' within each language.
As to the generic, cross-linguistic question, 'what is a subject', please
don't raise it on this list. Answers depend on whether someone is thinking
pragmatically 'about topics', semantically 'about agents', syntactically
'about subjects', or within another linguistic system that collapses these
three parameters into two or one.
errwso
Randall Buth
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