Abstract
The definition of subject differs front one researcher to another, but it is mainly the concept of a syntactic level indicating the component of a sentence that has the maximum grammatical predominance in the nucleus of the event consisting of a predicate in the center and components demanded by its case government. If the word order is not fixed, or grammatical categories like the part of speech classification, intransitive/transitive verb, voice, case marking etc. are not clear, we can not set up Such a subject in an isolating language.
Because Vietnamese, which is a typcal isolating language, may not fulfill all the above-mentioned conditions, I do not think it appropriate to set up a subject, but to submit an introduction of the new concept of “Logical Subject” and “Logical Predicate” (hereafter LS-LP) to the grammatical description of such a language and discuss the appropriateness in this proposal.
LS-LP is the basic structure of the syntactic level in a language that cannot set Lip a subject, and LS is directly governed by the sentence. It is a constituent showing the object of human judgment, while LP expresses the content of human judgment, and it is a constituent correponding to LS.
If the proposition of a sentence expresses at all the speaker's judgment (or propositional acts) toward the actual, so to speak, “an actual reconstruction act”, certainly it is specified with the feature of language, because human thought is fundamentally realized via language. In any language that fulfills the above-mentioned conditions, a proposition consists of the predicate verb and components demanded by case government. Therefore, the syntactic structure is relatively independent of LS-LP structure; but in a language like Vietnamese, the above-mentioned conditions of a syntactic structure becoming independent of LS-LP structure do not exist, and in order to present the primal posture (a pure syntactic structure that has not been influenced by morphological factors) of a human language, we must use LS-LP for grammatical analysis and description. There is not other way.
Since it is the abstract concept to which LS-LP exceed a part of speech, unlike the subject and predicate, to an isolating language like the Vietnamese, grammatical description must begin from the correlation of the meaning of a word instead of the part of speech of each word, and then detect the syntactic proof.
Thus, I would be pleased to see research carried out so that the framework of general grammatical theory can be reexamined.
