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From: morgan@uicsl.UUCP
Newsgroups: net.nlang
Subject: Re: American Languages - (nf)
Message-ID: <4249@uiucdcs.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 30-Nov-83 22:52:06 EST
Article-I.D.: uiucdcs.4249
Posted: Wed Nov 30 22:52:06 1983
Date-Received: Fri, 2-Dec-83 07:54:26 EST
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#R:rayssd:-27400:uicsl:8600032:000:1448
uicsl!morgan    Nov 30 18:06:00 1983

Your definition and discussion conflate things that need to be
kept separate, including at least these:

	grammatical subject	(the traditional notion)
	discourse topic
	referring expression

You begin by talking about subjects, then give a definition that
would apply to any noun phrase that has reference (i.e.
referring expression), then you mention 'focus of attention',
which might be an appropriate way to look at discourse topics.
The three are quite distinct, at least in English.  What
would count as a grammatical subject need not be the discourse
topic, as when one says in a discussion of John,

	Everybody likes John

where grammarians new and old would agree that 'everybody' is
the subject, though John (NB not 'John') is the focus of
attention.  In fact the grammatical subject need not even
refer to anything; many languages have "dummy" subjects, as
in

	It's raining
	It's a long way to Chicago
	It's illegal to sleep in subways

where, most grammarians would agree, 'it' is the subject,
but certainly not the topic, since as a matter of fact it
doen't refer to anything, but is merely an empty morpheme
to satisfy the English requirement that every declarative
clause have a grammatical subject.

In fact, it appears that we need all three of these notions
to make sense of the syntax of natural languages.  But
giving satisfactory explicit definitions of each is
extremely difficult, and worth pursuing, if you're interested.