Subject is Not Agent: Syntactic, Semantic, and Discourse Roles
You probably heard that the basic word order in English is subject-verb-object, or SVO, and that the subject is the agent of the action. You may have also heard that the subject is the topic of the sentence (or the known or given information.)
Well, that only works for a canonical isolated transitive sentence. Yep, that’s a mouthful. It means that ‘subject equals agent equals topic’ is right for a sentence like:
1) The dog chased the squirrel.
But equating subject to agent to topic is not right for sentences like:
2) But it was the squirrel who chased dog!
3) In the woods, the squirrel vanished.
4) The dog was found hiding in a car.
In 2), we are shifting the flow of information so that the subject of the sentence The squirrel chased the dog is put into focus; now the squirrel is the semantic agent and a syntactic complement adding new information for the reader. In 3), the topic is where something happened, and it is expressed by the fronted adjunct in the woods. In 4), the dog is the semantic theme and the subject and topic of the sentence.
In discourse, three aspects are at play to ensure understanding: syntactic functions, semantic roles, and discourse relevance.
Syntactic functions announce the cast of participants and circumstances in a clause or sentence—and I’m using participant in a broad sense, as entities involved in the mini-story being told by the verb (people, animals, places, things, ideas, etc.). The participants interact in a set of circumstances. Syntactic functions provide the slots where to place the participants and circumstances of the story and include subject, predicate, objects, complements, and adjuncts.
Intransitive sentences have one participant that functions syntactically as subject. Transitive sentences have two participants, a main character called subject and a supporting character called object. They may even have more, as in the concept of giving or receiving, for instance, which requires three participants: a giver, a given, and a recipient.
Sentences in English do not only consist of subjects, verbs, and objects. Sentences can include complements—other than objects—which complete the predicate in structure and meaning, as in:
5) A squirrel is such a likable animal.
6) The discovery made the dog owner uncomfortable.
7) The boy went to the park.
8) The candidate is upset.
Sentences can also include modifiers that add information about the manner, time, place, or other features of an entity involved in the event or the event itself. The current lingo for such modifiers is adjuncts. They are said to be structurally dispensable, in the sense that the phrase, clause, or sentence in which they appear is still perfectly grammatical without them. But they can add key information!
Adjuncts can range from single words to phrases to entire clauses and can modify verbs, nouns, and adjectives as well as phrases and entire clauses
9) The dog disappeared mysteriously.
10) The dog disappeared without a trace.
11) The boy walked the dog although it was raining.
12) The park closest to their house did not allow dogs.
The main participants in the event described by the verb are often called arguments of the verb. Not in the sense of plot or fight, but in the logical sense of a necessary factor for the predicate. Besides their syntactic function, arguments and optional pieces of information play semantic roles.
Semantic roles show us how characters and circumstances relate to each other. They describe who did what, what was done, who was affected, where things happened, when, how, etc. Semantic roles include agent, patient, theme, instrument, location, etc. These roles reflect the truth we see in the event as speakers or writers, independently of the reality or objectivity of it.
Depending on who we are communicating with and how far along we are in the story (or how much our interlocutor knows already), we may need to manipulate the entrance of semantic roles into the sentence changing their syntactic functions to establish their relevance in our discourse. See Figure 1 for examples of the most common semantic roles.
Topics and remarks (also known as theme and rheme) shine the spotlight on the issue at hand allowing the cast of characters to enter and leave the scene in accordance with the speaker’s intent. They help us keep track of given and new information: what is being talked about (topic) and what is being said about it (remark or comment). Because discourse is linear (one word follows another), topics come first and remarks follow.
The same event can be described differently to shine light on different aspects of it, either because the we want to as speakers or writers or because the plot line needs it. For instance, when rival football teams play a match, the local newspaper from the winning team’s town may headline quite differently from the local newspaper from the loosing team’s town.
13) Red Sox sweep Yankees in June series.
14) Yankees swept by Red Sox in June series.
In 13) the subject is the agent and the topic of the sentence about which the news of “winning over the Yankees” is given. In 14) the subject is the patient and the topic of the sentence about which the news of “loosing to the Red Sox” is given.
Now, the focus can change by pre-posing the time adjunct “in June series,” to make the defeat, for instance, relative to a certain point in time only:
15) In June series, Yankees swept by Red Sox.
English also puts at our disposal verb choice to shine the light differently on an event. We can narrate the same scenario filling the syntactic slots with different semantic roles by choosing contrasting verbs like give/receive, buy/sell, rob/steal, borrow/lend, as in:
16) Brazilian forward Neymar sustained an injury that nearly ended his career.
17) Colombian defender Juan Zuñiga inflicted an injury on Neymar that nearly ended the Brazilian forward’s career.
In conclusion, grammatical manipulations that include syntactic slot assignment and phrase order, combined with lexical choices, allow us to bring to the front or move to the background participants and circumstances, without changing their semantic role, to weave the stories we want to tell.
Figure 1: Semantic Roles
