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Discussion Groups / English Usage / January 2004What is the subject in a sentence that is dialogue?
For example, "Go to the store," he said "I told him to go to the store," John said. What is the subject here? The he or John said, or something else? Thanks. Here is a better one: "Mom, I'm bored and Bobby won't play football with me outside," Jack said. > For example, > [quoted text clipped - 5 lines] > > Thanks. >Subject: Re: What is the subject in a sentence that is dialogue? >From: "jm" john_20_28_2000@yahoo.com [quoted text clipped - 14 lines] >> >> Thanks. In "Go to the store" the subject is "You." In the second sentence the subject is "John". How come it is "You?" "He" is doing the saying. > >Subject: Re: What is the subject in a sentence that is dialogue? > >From: "jm" john_20_28_2000@yahoo.com [quoted text clipped - 17 lines] > In "Go to the store" the subject is "You." > In the second sentence the subject is "John". Rushtown" <rushtown@aol.com> wrote in message > news:20040124004929.11541.00000642@mb-m12.aol.com... > > >Subject: Re: What is the subject in a sentence that is dialogue? [quoted text clipped - 6 lines] > > >"Mom, I'm bored and Bobby won't play football with me outside," Jack > said. > > >> For example, > > >> [quoted text clipped - 10 lines] > > How come it is "You?" "He" is doing the saying. Andrew Smyth, aka Rushtown, is wrong (I refrain from saying "yet again"). In any sentence of the form of your examples, the grammatical subject is the person doing the speaking. The entire quotation is a direct object. You can then separately analyze the grammar of the quotation, which is what Andrew did with the first example. Quite apart from that, there is the question of what is the subject of an imperative sentence. Some people say it's an elided "you"; others say that an imperative sentence doesn't need a subject. It really doesn't matter as long as you understand how to construct such sentences and how to ascertain their meaning -- neither of which is all that hard to do.  SignatureJ. Philippe Lieblich > Here is a better one: > > "Mom, I'm bored and Bobby won't play football with me outside," Jack said. It's neither better or worse: Jack said z. It's exactly the same. SignatureMartin Ambuhl > For example, > [quoted text clipped - 3 lines] > > What is the subject here? The he or John said, or something else? He said x. John said y. What do you think the subjects of these sentences is? SignatureMartin Ambuhl The other guy said "You" was the subject. I thought it was the I said, He said. Thanks. > > For example, > > [quoted text clipped - 8 lines] > > What do you think the subjects of these sentences is? > For example, > "Go to the store," he said > "I told him to go to the store," John said. > What is the subject here? The he or John said, or something else? In order . . . Rule 1: Where the sentence includes direct speech, the direct speech is parsed second and the other part of the sentence is parsed first. Rule 2. Direct speech may be parsed as a sentence by itself. By rule 1 the subjects are (a) he and (b) John. By rule 2 the direct speech in (a) has no subject (imperative verbs being a special case), and the direct speech in (b) has subject I. -- Don Phillipson Carlsbad Springs (Ottawa, Canada) >For example, >"Go to the store," he said >"I told him to go to the store," John said. >What is the subject here? The he or John said, or something else? You ask for "THE subject", as if there were only one. In fact, every verb phrase has a subject, and each of these sentences has more than one verb phrase, hence the same number of subjects (not all of which appear as separate words, of course). First sentence: Main clause he said [S] 'he' is subject of 'said' [S] Object complement go to the store 'you' is subject of 'go' Second sentence: Main clause John said [S1] 'John' is subject of 'said' [S1] Object complement I told him [S2] 'I' is subject of 'told' [S2] Object complement to go to the store 'him' is subject of 'go' (For more about Object complements, see http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler/aue/complmnt.html) So you can see that there are 5 subjects all told in these two sentences, and it doesn't matter which ones are dialogue, or whether they're indirect or direct discourse. A clause is a clause, a verb phrase is a verb phrase, and a subject is a subject. Which subject you want to call 'THE subject' is, er, subject to your whim. You could decide to call the subject of the main clause THE subject of the sentence if you want to, though it's clearer and more correct to speak of the subject of each clause separately. -John Lawler http://www.umich.edu/~jlawler U Michigan Linguistics Dept ----------------------------------------------------------------------- "You can only find truth with logic if you have already found truth without it." -- G.K. Chesterton |
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