Dative Subjects, Subjecthood Features and Agreement Properties

 

Katarzyna Miechowicz-Mathiasen

Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznań

 

The paper in the most part deals with the so-called Dative Subjects and their subject nature. It presents some of the previous analyses of subjects/ subjecthood coming from the following frameworks: Relational Grammar (RG), Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG), Case Grammar (CG), Role and Reference Grammar (RRG); the enumerated analyses propose a considerable amount of standard assumed subjecthood tests against which we are going to check the Dative Subjects in question. A separate section is devoted to the presentation of an approach proposed by Ura (2000) rooted in the minimalist framework (Chomsky 1995) and based on the idea of grammatical function split in the feature checking theory. We make an attempt at employing Ura’s ideas into our analysis of subjects/subjecthood and propose that some of the standard subjecthood and agreement properties result from a particular feature-checking operation, hence the notion of subject could in effect be defined on that basis. We will eventually conclude that subjecthood properties are indeed dependent on feature-checking operations, Dative Subjects owe their problematic nature to the grammatical function-split phenomena and agreement is dependent on the presence of Nominative.

 

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