ABSTRACT
Plato's influence may be seen in both the Western and the Arab tradition of grammatical analysis. Each tradition, however, has gone its own way in dealing with the roles played by sentence elements in their descriptions, in the one, of Indo-European languages and, in the other, of Classical Arabic (i.e. the language of pre-Islamic poetry and of the Qur'an). While the Arab grammarians have no single general term corresponding to 'subject', most Western scholars (eg Wright, Cantarino) have used the term in their grammars of Arabic. The present chapter examines how far this use is justified, in the light of modern linguistic theory,
2.2 MODERN WESTERN TRADITION
The category of 'subject' has played a central role in the Westerrl tradition of language description. While the definition of 'subject' was traditionally a notionally based one (see OED), it is clear that in fact there was an implicit morpho-syntactic basis to its identification. Modern linguists have sought to make that basis explicit (huddleston 1976), while acknowledging its partial correspondence with notional categories such as Agent and Topic (Lyon.s 1977, Allerton 1980).
