Notions of subjecthood and Switch reference: evidence from Seri

Abstract

It is generally agreed that the notion plays an important role in the syntax of natural languages. Different theories, however, provide quite different characterizations of this notion. In Government-Binding (GB) Theory, as developed in Chomsky (1981; 1982) and much subsequent work, is a derivative notion that can, in effect, be construed in different ways. With respect to X-bar theory, the subject of a clause is the NP immediately dominated by S, that is, [NP,S]. Although this is the usual definition of subject, there are ways of singling out other classes of elements that manifest properties generally associated with subjects. With respect to 0-theory, the element assigned the verb's (Williams (1981; 1987), Zubizarreta (1985)) can be thought of as the logical subject of a clause-given the assumption that the external 0-role is assigned in passive clauses as in the analyses of Jaeggli (1986) and Baker (1988), among others. With respect to Case theory, the clausal subject could be defined as the NP assigned nominative Case.' The idea that grammatical relations are theoretical primitives is developed in Relational Grammar (RG) (see, for example, the papers in Perlmutter (1983a), Perlmutter and Rosen (1984), and Postal and Joseph (1990)) and Arc Pair Grammar (Johnson and

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