The Bounds of Subjecthood: Evidence from Instruments

Canonical subjects of eventive predicates are agentive and animate—so goes one of the over-arching, and idealized, generalizations of argument realization1. As robust as this generalization is, caveats are always made (e.g. Comrie 1989:107,128), in part due to a set of recalcitrant counter-examples, known as “instrumental subjects”, which violate this generalization on both counts. A paradigm case of the phenomenon is shown in (1): the entity which appears as an instrument in (1a) also appears as a subject in (1b), although it is neither agentive nor animate.