English grammar - Roger Berry 2012
D11 Subject, actor, theme
Section D Extension
Michael Halliday
Michael Halliday (2004) reprinted from An Introduction to Functional Grammar (3rd edition, revised by Christian Matthiessen), Arnold: London, pp. 53-57.
This reading takes us into some new areas: grammatical theory (how do we go about describing grammar, what are the possibilities?), the history of grammatical description, and so on. However, its main aim is to discuss the ambiguity of the word ’subject’. There is a popular interpretation of this word as well as a terminological, grammatical, one. Compare
What is the subject of this paragraph?
What is the subject of this verb?
The two possibilities come together in
What is the subject of this sentence?
But Halliday goes further than this, identifying three possible meanings that are relevant to language description.
His psychological subject, which he later calls ’theme’ was referred to briefly in A11 as ’topic’. Note that this concept, whatever it is called, does not correspond to the idea of ’given’ information as described in A11, though the two often coincide.
’Actor’ here refers to what we have called ’agent’ elsewhere.
One of the concepts that is basic to the Western tradition of grammatical analysis is that of Subject. Since this is a familiar term, let us take it as the starting point for investigating the functions in an English clause.
Consider the clause:
the duke gave my aunt this teapot
In accordance with the syntactic principles established by medieval grammarians, which were themselves based on the grammarians of ancient Greece and Rome, each clause contains one element that can be identified as its Subject (see e.g. Covington, 1984; Seuren, 1998: 34-7) and in this instance, the Subject would be the duke.
Here are some other clauses with the Subject shown in italic:
Oh, I’m just starving and all [[you’ll feed me]] is something rotten, or something [[I hate]]. I hate lasagne and I don’t want rotten carrots - I only want salted carrots. (Text 76)
I wasn’t making a cubby house; that wasn’t a cubby house. - What were you making with it, then? (Text 76)
Adam, do you like red or white? - I would like red but only if you’re opening it. (UTS/Macquarie Corpus)
(S04:) That’s [[how my nan used to do them in Manchester]] - parboil them. - (S02:) What parboil them? - (S04:) Yeah. - (S01:) Did she? - (S04:) Yeah. (UTS/ Macquarie Corpus)
They fit me. - Do they? - They will. (UTS/Macquarie Corpus)
The thought occurred to me on Air Force One a few weeks ago when I was escorted into President Clinton’s cabin for a farewell interview. (Text 110)
[. . .]
It is possible to conclude from these examples that ’Subject’ is the label for a grammatical function of some kind (subject being the Latin translation of a word in Greek, hypokeimenon, used as a grammatical term by Aristotle in the sense of ’that which is laid down, or posited’). There seems to be something in common, as regards their status in the clause, to all the elements we have labelled in this way. But it is not so easy to say exactly what this is; and it is difficult to find in the grammatical tradition a definitive account of what the role of Subject means.
Instead, various interpretations have grown up around the Subject notion, ascribing to it a number of rather different functions. These resolve themselves into three broad definitions, which can be summarised as follows:
(i) that which is the concern of the message
(ii) that of which something is being predicated (that is, on which rests the truth of the argument)
(iii) the doer of the action.
These three definitions are obviously not synonymous; they are defining different concepts. So the question that arises is, is it possible for the category of ’Subject’ to embrace all these different meanings at one and the same time?
In the duke gave my aunt this teapot, it is reasonable to claim that the nominal group the duke is, in fact, the Subject in all these three senses. It represents the person with whom the message is concerned; the truth or falsehood of the statement is vested in him; and he is represented as having performed the action of giving.
If all clauses were like this one in having one element serving all three functions, there would be no problem in identifying and explaining the Subject. We could use the term to refer to the sum of these three definitions, and assign the label to whichever element fulfilled all the functions in question. But this assumes that in every clause there is just one element in which all three functions are combined; and this is not the case. Many clauses contain no such element that embodies all three. For example, suppose we say
this teapot my aunt was given by the duke
- which constituent is now to be identified as the Subject?
There is no longer any one obvious answer. What has happened in this instance is that the different functions making up the traditional concept of Subject have been split up among three different constituents of the clause. The duke is still represented as the doer of the deed; but the message is now a message concerning the teapot, and its claim for truth is represented as being vested in my aunt.
When these different functions came to be recognised by grammarians as distinct, they were first labelled as if they were three different kinds of Subject. It was still implied that there was some sort of a superordinate concept covering all three, a general notion of Subject of which they were specific varieties.
The terms that came to be used in the second half of the nineteenth century, when there was a renewal of interest in grammatical theory (see Seuren, 1998: 120-33, on the subject-predicate debate that lasted from the nineteenth century until the 1930s), were ’psychological Subject’, ’grammatical Subject’ and ’logical Subject’.
(i) Psychological Subject meant ’that which is the concern of the message’. It was called ’psychological’ because it was what the speaker had in his mind to start with, when embarking on the production of the clause.
(ii) Grammatical Subject meant ’that of which something is predicated’. It was called ’grammatical’ because at the time the construction of Subject and Predicate was thought of as a purely formal grammatical relationship; it was seen to determine various other grammatical features, such as the case of the noun or pronoun that was functioning as Subject, and its concord of person and number with the verb, but it was not thought to express any particular meaning.
(iii) Logical Subject meant ’doer of the action’. It was called ’logical’ in the sense this term had had from the seventeenth century, that of ’having to do with relations between things’, as opposed to ’grammatical’ relations, which were relations between symbols.
In the first example, all these three functions are conflated, or ’mapped’ on to one another, as shown in Figure 2-11.
Figure 2-11 Same item functioning as psychological, grammatical and logical Subject
In the second example, on the other hand, all three are separated (Figure 2-12). In this teapot my aunt was given by the duke, the psychological Subject is this teapot. That is to say, it is ’this teapot’ that is the concern of the message - that the speaker has taken as the point of embarkation of the clause. But the grammatical Subject is my aunt: ’my aunt’ is the one of whom the statement is predicated - in respect of whom the clause is claimed to be valid, and therefore can be argued about as true or false. Only the logical Subject is still the duke: ’the duke’ is the doer of the deed - the one who is said to have carried out the process that the clause represents.
Figure 2-12 Psychological, grammatical and logical Subject realised by different items
As long as we concern ourselves only with idealised clause patterns, such as John runs or the boy threw the ball, we can operate with the label Subject as if it referred to a single undifferentiated concept. In clauses of this type, the functions of psychological, grammatical and logical Subject all coincide. In the boy threw the ball, the boy would still be Subject no matter which of the three definitions we were using, like the duke in the first of our examples above.
But as soon as we take account of natural living language, and of the kinds of variation that occur in it, in which the order of elements can vary, passives can occur as well as actives, and so on, it is no longer possible to base an analysis on the assumption that these three concepts are merely different aspects of one and the same general notion. They have to be interpreted as what they really are - three separate and distinct functions. There is no such thing as a general concept of ’Subject’ of which these are different varieties. They are not three kinds of anything; they are three quite different things. In order to take account of this, we will replace the earlier labels by separate ones which relate more specifically to the functions concerned:
psychological Subject: Theme
grammatical Subject: Subject
logical Subject: Actor
We can now relabel Figure 2-12 as in Figure 2-13.
Figure 2-13 Theme, Subject and Actor
In the duke gave my aunt this teapot, the roles of Theme, Subject and Actor are all combined in the one element the duke. In this teapot my aunt was given by the duke, all three are separated. All the additional combinations are also possible: any two roles may be conflated, with the third kept separate. For example, if we keep the duke as Actor, we can have Theme = Subject with Actor separate, as in Figure 2-14(a); Subject = Actor with Theme separate as in (b); or Theme = Actor with Subject separate as in Figure 2-14(c).
In any interpretation of the grammar of English we need to take note of all these possible forms, explaining how and why they differ. They are all, subtly but significantly, different in meaning; at the same time they are all related, and related in a systematic way. Any comparable set of clauses in English would make up a similar paradigm. Often, of course, there are not three distinct elements that could carry the functions of Theme, Subject and Actor, but only two, as in Figure 2-15 (not included). [. . .]
And often no variation at all is possible, if there is only one element that can have these functions; for example I ran away, where I is inevitably Theme, Subject and Actor. (Even here there is a possibility of thematic variation, as in run away 1 did or the one who ran away was me; see Chapter 3.) On the other hand, while explaining all these variants, we also have to explain the fact that the typical, unmarked form, in an English declarative (statement-type) clause, is the one in which Theme, Subject and Actor are conflated into a single element. That is the form we tend to use if there is no prior context leading up to it, and no positive reason for choosing anything else.
Figure 2-14 Different conflations of Subject, Actor and Theme
Questions, suggestions and issues to consider
1. What does ’unmarked’ (on the last line of page 254) mean?
2. How does ’actor’ relate to the semantic roles of subject that Berk discusses in D8?
3. Look at the rearrangement in this example. What names have we given to the processes involved?
This teapot my aunt was given by the duke.
4. Take a short text and try to identify the subjects, actors and themes in it.