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Topic: Subject

These resources relate to the grammatical function Subject. A Subject is often (but not always!) a noun, pronoun or noun phrase that comes straight before the verb, and is the person/thing that is doing the action or what the clause is about.

Subject

The Subject of a sentence is often defined as the phrase identifying the agent that carries out the action denoted by the verb. All the examples below involve actions (fleeing, sniffing, writing) carried out by the individuals referred to by the highlighted phrases, and for this reason we identify these phrases as Subjects.

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Grammatical functions in the clause

The description of word classes, phrases, and clauses in terms of their structure is part of the study of form. We now turn to the study of grammar from the perspective of function: this notion refers to what words, phrases and clauses do as units of language.

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Englicious (C) Survey of English Usage, UCL, 2012-21 | Supported by the AHRC and EPSRC. | Privacy | Cookies