WAYS OF EXPRESSING THE SUBJECT

The subject is expressed by:

1. A noun in the common case (including substantivized adjectives and participles) or a nominal phrase with a noun:

The fog is thinning. The blue of the sky deepened visibly.

The dying must be left in peace. A great number of frees were felled.

Occasionally a noun in the genitive case may be the subject. This may be if a noun denotes someone’s place of business or residence, as in:

The grocer’s was full.

It may be the result of ellipsis as in:

Jim’s was a narrow escape. (= Jim’s escape was a narrow one.)

The latter type of subject is rather emphatic.

2. A pronoun- personal, demonstrative, defining, negative, indefinite, possessive, interrogative:

I shall do the best I can. Nothing can be done about it. This is the last straw.

One learns by experience. Who told you this? Theirs is not a very comfortable lodging… All were present.

3. A numeral (either cardinal or ordinal) or a nominal phrase with a numeral:

Seven cannot be divided by two. Two of them were left in the camp.

4. An infinitive or an infinitive phrase:

To understand is to forgive. To deny the past is to deny the future.

5. A gerund or a gerundial phrase:

Talking mends no holes. Working for someone keeps a woman calm and contented.

6. An infinitive or a gerundial predicative complex:

For her to fall asleep in broad daylight was not at all usual.

His walking out of the room in the very middle of the argument was quite unexpected.

7. Any word or words used as quotations:

“And” is a conjunction.

The “how” and the “why” of things never seems to occur to children.

His “How do you do” never sounds cordial enough.

“The War of the Worlds” was first published in 1898.

8. A group of words which is one part of the sentence, i.e. a syntactically indivisible group.

At that time their friend and defender was coming to the solution.

Here the friend and the defender are treated as one person.

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Exclamatory sentences	\|	GRAMMATICAL CLASSIFICATION OF THE SUBJECT

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