terminology - A subject close to my heart


What are the differences between: subject, subjective, nominative, and the nominative case? If there aren't any substantial ones, why are there so many terms for basically saying the same thing?



Answer



Nominative and (the) nominative case mean the same thing. It's just a normal shortening of a noun compound, like future and the future tense, optative and the optative mood, middle and the middle voice. These are all technical names for grammatical phenomena, none of which occur in English.


Subjective means the opposite of objective; i.e, a subjective judgement is not objective. If you see it used as a grammatical term in a discussion of grammar, it's a sign that the author is parroting opinions instead of facts. It's not a grammatical term used by grammarians, but it used to be part of old handwaving terminology like "subjective complement".



There are subject complements and object complements, but they're types of noun clauses functioning as subject or object; this is not the same thing at all as any of the phenomena that used to be called "subjective complements".



Subject is a grammatical relation. In English and most non-ergative languages, there are three possible grammatical relations: subject, direct object, and indirect object.


These three are the usual linguistic reflexes of the arguments of intransitive, transitive, and bitransitive predicates in predicate calculus:



  1. DEAD (Bill)

  2. READ (Bill, book)

  3. GIVE (Bill, book, Mary)


English requires every clause to have a subject (even if it isn't there, it must be attributable); every transitive clause has a direct object as well; every bitransitive clause has both, plus an indirect object.



These are often just called 1, 2, and 3 by Relational Grammarians; e.g, the dative alternation is stated in RG as Promote 3 to 2, while Passive is Promote 2 to 1).



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