Subjects: Grammatical Relations, Grammatical Functions and Functional Categories
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This paper presents an overview of how the notion of ‘subject’ has been defined in linguistic theory. Although the term developed out of Artistotelian logic, its use has been narrowed to refer to the grammatical relation (or function). Over the past 50 years, the definition of subject and its universality have been the source of much debate. Broadly Chomskian approaches claim that grammatical relations such as subject are not primitives of the grammar and can be derived from phrase structure. As such, testing for the subject involves constituency tests (more recent versions of Chomskian syntax, however, abstract away from constituency). Other approaches (Relational Grammar, Lexical‐Function Grammar) posit grammatical relations as primitives of the grammar that are not necessarily related to constituency. And at the other extreme, certain linguists argue that subjects are not found in all languages and therefore the notion is not one of interest (e.g. Role and Reference Grammar). This paper reviews the various analyses of subjects and considers in some detail how the notion of subject has evolved within the Chomskian framework.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.004 | 0.003 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.018 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.007 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".