The Issue of Subject – General and Contrastive Aspects

Abstract

The paper deals with the issue of subject from the perspective of applied linguistics. The focus is on the syntactically founded grammatical subject, and the sub-specification of this concept and inclusion of non-syntactic criteria is also addressed. In the description of formal approaches to the research of this phenomenon in natural languages the focus is placed on the Croatian language, but examples from other Slavic languages are also compared, as well as those from the German and English language. Special consideration is given to the realisation of the subject by means of various semantic roles, implicit subjects and subjectless clauses.