A monarchy without subjects: on Brassai’s (almost) subject-free dependency grammar

The paper presents Sámuel Brassai’s reasons for almost entirely eliminating the term subject (Hu. alany) from syntactic analysis, and the manner in which this was achieved. It is shown that Brassai’s dependency grammatical theory was in large measure motivated by his rejection (reminiscent of Tesnière) of the logical tradition working with a subject-predicate division. In contrast with much of today’s dependency grammar, Brassai did more than relegate subjects to dependent status; he also stripped them of their name, preferring to use the term nominative (Hu. nevező) instead. The term subject was retained for only a subset of finite clauses, and applied on a semantic basis in partial independence from nominative case. The final part of the paper discusses Brassai’s approach to the semantics of nominative dependents