| Abstract: | The research involved an evaluation of the psychological reality of the syntactic functions of subject and object, the semantic functions of agent and patient, and the discourse functions of given and new. The domain of analysis was from the early two-word into the early three-word phase (approximately 1;7 to 2;5) of the acquisition of the relatively synthetic language of Polish. An analysis of the inflectional morphology revealed the appropriate use of all seven cases and contrasts within three dimensions of agreement before 1;9. These varied inflectional forms were used with sufficient frequency to argue that the nominative case and the agreement relations are productive subjecthood properties at this phase of development. The semantic function of the subject noun phrase was either an agent or a patient. Hence, case and agreement cannot be reduced to properties of semantic functions. Since both subject and object were rarely realized simultaneously in the surface structure in the early phase of two word utterances, the set of verb plus subject and verb plus object patterns (i.e., SV, VS, OV, and VO) were analyzed for the discourse functions of given and new. Neither discourse function nor cannonical (SV and VO) form control word order. As both subject and object came to be realized in the surface structure, subject before object priority was revealed as a subjecthood property but not in a rigid word order (i.e., both SVO and SOV patterns occurred). The evidence demonstrates the independent status of the syntactic function of subject. |
