The Subject in Spanish and Some Related Topics

Abstract

The purpose of this study is to define a grammatical construct subject for Spanish sentences. Naturally, this task is only possible within a broader context: What is the sentence as a syntactic entity, and what is it composed of? The framework employed here is proposed by Steele (to appear) in the analysis of Luiseno. In the following pages, the readers will find that her framework also has validity in regard to Spanish, a language clearly distant from Luiseno. The organization of this paper is as follows. In Section 2, the traditional definitions of the subject will be reviewed, as well as the inadequacies and drawbacks inherent to these definitions. In Section 3, the Spanish sentence will be analyzed in some detail. In Section 4, based on this analysis of the sentence, an alternative definition of the subject will be proposed. In Section 5, the implications of this proposal will be examined and it will be shown that our analysis offers a better account of facts of the Spanish language than any previous analyses. In Section 6, a conclusion will be presented.