The Nature of Subject and Object

FAIN: FA-11718-77

David E. Johnson
Unaffiliated independent scholar

To investigate the role of the grammatical notions subject and object, studying the questions: (1) what are the motivations for appealing to subject and object in linguistic descriptions? (b) Are subject and object universals of language? (c) Are subject and object properly characterized in linguistic theory? Research will initially focus on establishing characteristic syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic correlates of subjects and objects in a number of languages which appear superficially to be very different with respect to the relevance of subject and object to their structure and organization. The goal is to isolate properties that are universally associated with these notions, so as to answer the question posed in (1).