The Subjectival Surface-Syntactic Relation in Serbian

The paper focuses on the notion of (surface) syntactic subject in Serbian within the syntactic dependency framework of the MeaningText linguistic theory. Properties of the subject are described and its text implementations illustrated with data from a variety of contemporary texts. 1 The Problem Stated The aim of this paper is to describe and illustrate, from a syntactic dependency viewpoint, the notion of syntactic subject as applied to Serbian. By doing so, the paper puts to test the adequacy of the conceptual and formal tools of the MeaningText dependency syntax, hoping to contribute to a broader understanding of the general notion of syntactic subject itself. Syntactic subject is the dependent element of the subjectival surface-syntactic relation, a major valence-controlled syntactic-dependency relation. It is the most privileged dependent element of the clause in that it possesses properties that do not accrue to any other clause element. Understandably, the notion of syntactic subject has been vigorously investigated, especially in typological/cross-linguistic perspective, for instance, in Keenan (1976), Kibrik (1977), Foley & Van Valin (1997), Mithun & Chafe (1999), Lazard (2009), Creissels (2014) and Mel’čuk (2014), to mention just a few influential papers. Yet, a number of issues surrounding the notion remain controversial: null subjects, quirky subjects, psychological vs. grammatical subject, and so on; even the cross-linguistic nature of the notion has been questioned. For the viewpoint taken on some of these issues in this paper, see the next section. As for the syntactic subject in Serbian, even though it has been described in studies such as Piper et al. (2005: 487-491), Klajn (2005: 225227 and 256-257), and Mrazovac & Vukadinović (2009: 525-527), the latter being dependencyoriented, to the best of my knowledge, there has been no comprehensive account of this syntactic role—at any rate, not in a formalized dependency framework of the type used here. For Croatian, studies dedicated specifically to issues related to the syntactic subject include Kučanda (1998), Buljan & Kučanda (2004) and Belaj & Kučanda (2007); given the proximity of the two languages, the findings for Croatian are valid for Serbian as well. The research reported in the paper is part of a larger project on identification and description of surface-syntactic relations in Serbian. The linguistic data used in the research comes from two contemporary novels (Žurić 2009, Arsenijević 2013), the Corpus of Serbian language, and Serbian Internet pages, accessed through Google searches; some examples are my own. The rest of the paper is structured as follows: Section 2 presents the theoretical framework of the paper and introduces the necessary notions; Section 3 describes and illustrates the subjecthood in Serbian; Section 4 formulates a conclusion.