earticle

영어

This paper delves into some aspects of subject across verbs and languages which include an accusative and an ergative type of languages, centering around thematic role assignment, Case marking, and verb agreement. Noting that all these properties fail to contribute to the working definition of subjecthood in a generalized and consistent way, I accordingly argue that subject should be defined as being placed in a syntactically designated position, independent of its thematic role. To provide a unified account of subject, I propose the VP-Internal Argument Hypothesis, in which all the arguments of a verb are base-generated within VP with a theta role assigned by the verb. Any argument NP ranked the highest according to the Thematic Hierarchies raises into the specifier of a functional projection, which is responsible for Case checking and EPP, to become the subject of VP. The other arguments remain within VP and become the complement of the verb.