ABSTRACT
The notion ‘subject’ has so long been part and parcel of the traditions of linguistic scholarship that its meaning has been taken for granted and its universality has come to be assumed. More recently, however, discussions of subject and its universality do recognize rather tacitly that there are languages in which the notion of subject may not be applicable. Hence, statements of the universality of subject have more recently been rephrased to say that in languages that do have ‘subject’ the stated universal properties are universally applicable. From this we can infer that there are languages that may not have subject as an essential component of clause syntax and that subject itself as a grammatical category is not an absolute universal. What has remained clouded by controversy is whether or not in certain languages, e.g. Tagalog and other Philippine languages, the NP that is the target of predication is analyzable as ‘subject’ or as (clause level) ‘topic’.
