On the one hand, the concept is so fundamental to the western thought and the structure of the indoeuropean languages, that it must be one of those many things that "already the ancient Greeks" discussed. But I can spontaneously only trace it back to the XVII century.
Does anyone know more?
"Everything between people is entangled, and nobody can be called neither entirely innocent nor entirely guilty." (Sabo's transl.)
Mesa Selimovic, The Fortress
You can chronologically arrive to your enquiring when you ascertain for example how old is the opposition to it, if any other source is unavailable. I can point you Buddhism from the 6th c. BC and its rejection of this "antispiritual" partition. No such proposition of the distinction is accepted by Buddhists/and surely it has to exist to provoke opposition/...
Se puede matar el hombre
Pero no mataran la forma
En que se alegraba su alma
Cuando souaba ser libre
......
They can kill a man/but they cannot kill the way /his soul rejoices/when it dreams/that it is free
....
A folklore song from Venecuela
Linguistically, the difference between subject and object is as old as language. Every language in the world observes a structure to differntiate subject and object. Moving to a language as different in deveopment as you can be from Europe, Japanese expresses the linguistic difference by using ga/wa to demarcate a subject and wo/o to indicate an object. The distinction between subject and object is one of the foundation principals of human linguistic communication.Originally Posted by Sabo
As far as the Ancient Greeks already discussing it, they must have. As in all Indo-European languages (including the few latent examples in English and the Romance languages) Greek has inflections. For example (the example is singular in both cases), the subject form (nominative) of 'word' is "logos" where as the object (direct, accusative) is "logon" and the indirect object (dative) is "logo." This distinction can be proven to be even older. Sanskrit with the same system of distinction between object and subject had its rules clarified and solidified during a period of time roughly contemporary to the Solonian reforms of Athens and its Golden Age under Pericles (the oldest Sanskrit grammar was compiled in the fifth century BC) and must have existed with limited changes for at least a few hundred years previous. It has since, as a result of compilation, become fossilized and probably represents the oldest unchanged language utilized in the world today (though it is not spoken). The very compilation of such a grammar would presuppose an understanding of subject/object relations, and indeed, the composition of Sanskrit grammars represents the first and last true, serious exploration of linguistics for several thousand years.
In any case, it is clear that the subject/object distinction must exist for logical human communication and thought. To even begin to ponder anything one must grapple the effect of the origin of an action, the action itself, and where the end of the action rests. It is this same dialectic which defines even mathematical reasoning.
In these days, old man, no one thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don't, so why should we? They talk of the people, the proletariat, and I talk of the mugs. It's the same thing. They have their five year plan and I have mine.-Harry Lime, The Third Man novella by Graham Greene
Thank you very much for these clarifications. Exactly what I needed. Thanks.
"Everything between people is entangled, and nobody can be called neither entirely innocent nor entirely guilty." (Sabo's transl.)
Mesa Selimovic, The Fortress
This may be nitpicking, but there have been arguments that not all languages in fact employ subject/object distinction, at least if we consider subjecthood and objecthood to be purely syntactic properties (as they are usually defined). An example is Hungarian, which has often been argued to make no use of the notion of subject. (Of course, whether "not making use of" equals "not existing" is a valid question.)
Moreover, some (in theoretical linguistics, which is where I am coming from) argue that objects are in fact nothing but non-subject arguments, and therefore have no special status for themselves. Others seem to prefer to talk in terms of thematic roles rather than those of subjecthood and objecthood, although that also seems to me like a route that gets you into a lot of trouble. I have personally tentatively argued for subjecthood and objecthood to be interpretational, and as such the results of some kind of interaction between something like thematic roles and the pragmatic qualities of the arguments. Although I am the first to admit that I may be totally wrong.
All this, of course, is highly theoretical. Yet, I would personally be wary of supposing that every language naturally observes a structure to differentiate between subjects and objects. Especially when some languages have supposedly been attested that in fact tolerate subject-object ambiguity, and at least in certain cases make no effort to differentiate between the two. (Although I am personally still somewhat sceptical about the validity of these studies.)
So, I think that what I want to say is that I would never say never when it comes to linguistic data.In any case, I think SheykAbdullah's comment is spot on in terms of the history of linguistics (which I am by no means an expert on).
Although, while Panini's Sanskrit grammar was indeed composed on the 5th century BCE, isn't it generally supposed that there was also some rather influential, although by now lost, earlier linguistic work dating from around the 8th century BCE? I of course have no idea whether subjects and objects were discussed there.
Edit: I just realised that SheykAbdullah indeed also mentioned the earlier Sanskrit tradition.
Last edited by vili; 11-19-2006 at 05:33 PM. Reason: Addition
I am not familiar with Hungarian, but I looked it up in Wikipedia and it does indeed have subjects, but it is a null-subject language, which means that there are certain indications within the verb which may allow a subject to be ommitted from the sentance (as it can be in most languages, English, French, and Chinese are notable exceptions). An example of this works is the Spanish sentence;
Yo voy a la casa
I go to the house.
Now Spanish (This is for those of you who do not know this already. Please forgive me those of you who do and to whom this is elementary) has different verb conjugations depending on whether the subject is singular/plural, first, second, or third person, so since the 'yo' or 'I' can be gathered from information found within the verb it may be omitted since its presence may be inferred;
Voy a la casa
Making it a 'null-subject' language. Hungarian has a similiar theme, but it does have a concept for a subject.
In fact, the subject/object relationship is so prevelant in linguistics the ordering of the subject-object-verb in a sentence can be used to catagorize languages (though not very well because some languages, such as Arabic, have a very felxible sentence order). For example, English is called a SVO (Subject-Verb-Object) language because we have (normally) a Subject, a Verb, and then an Object, but Farsi on the other hand is an SOV languages (Subject-Object-Verb), so sentences in English like 'I bake a cake' becomes the Yoda-like 'I cake bake.'
As far as the field of theoretical linguistics, I must defer to you Vili because it is out of my element. I am a comparative/Descriptive linguist and a linguistic anthropologist so such things are far out of my element. However, as far as natural languages go the rule that every language has a subject/object/verb is pretty close to unbreakable, though you are right. Normally linguistic conventions should never be written in absolute terms.
After all, a subject-object-verb realtionship can be expressed as nothing more than something acting something.
In these days, old man, no one thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don't, so why should we? They talk of the people, the proletariat, and I talk of the mugs. It's the same thing. They have their five year plan and I have mine.-Harry Lime, The Third Man novella by Graham Greene
Sure, Wikipedia will tell you that Hungarian has subjects. However, some theoretical linguists like E. Kiss will tell you that this is a simplification of matters, and that if you actually look at the structural representation of Hungarian, it in fact does not have subjects. Or, maybe I should rather say, Hungarian makes no use of the syntactic notion of a subject. This actually has nothing to do with null-subjects, but is an argument that is wholly motivated by the structural representation of the language.
It is also true that SVO typology has been used to distinguish languages, and as far as I know it is indeed one of the most common typological distinctions along with the ergantive-accusative axis. But like all typologies, it is only a guideline, and as "free word order" languages like Warlpiri show, I would say that it is a guideline borne out of the configurational view of language, which in itself may be flawed.
(Note also that "free word order languages", I would say, are as far as I can tell not actually free in their word order, only free in terms of the SVO ordering. Languages like Warlpiri actually appear to have very strict word order rules, but they seem to be based on more pragmatic considerations.)
In fact, I think that the differences in our views are not actual differences at all, but simply borne out of the fields that we work in. I would imagine that in the fields of linguistic anthropology and comparative linguistics, which I am quite ignorant about, the S/O distinction (or should I say the S/A/O distinction) is actually not exactly the same as what those working on syntactic theories would see subjects and objects as being. So, perhaps it is a correct (and certainly useful) to claim in descriptive linguistics that all languages have subjects and objects (I don't know if this actually was one of Greenberg's universals), while in the more theoretical frameworks you end up having to be more specific, and investigate what objecthood and subjecthood actually stand for.
You are probably right. I am sure that I know at least as little about theoretcal linguistics as you know about descriptive/comparitive and linguistic anthropology.
As far as the immutability of SVO esitence and Greenburg's universals, I am not sure if the explicit existence subject/object existence is one. To me, and to everything I've read, it seems inevitable, according to everything I know and everything I've read a natural language has to possess a subject/object conception (again, maybe this is not how it worls in theoretical linguistics) on some level of order. I supose there might be a natural language out there I have never read about that explicitly lacks both, but it would be so fundamentally different from my experience I have to admit I'd be totally lost.
As far as free-ordering languages go, I can understand your point. Classical Greek was relatively free in word ordering in writing with the order being used on a flexible emphatic scale (words that wanted to be emphasized would come first in a sentence, however the coherency of propositional phrases and clauses would be fixed in their relative positions within the sentence), however it is unsure if this was just a writing convention or whether the Greeks were actually so fluid in speech. It is probably doubtful they were so liberal in speech as inflected languages spoken today from the Indo-European family are still affixed in a somewhat rigid word-order. Arabic, as I mentioned before, is another fairly free word order language, but it is only the verb that is allowed to float in sentence position. The most intersting facet of Arabic's word order changes is that the person and gender of the verb is modified based on the verb's relative position to the subject(s). Of course in the case of both Greek and Arabic declinsions in the nouns exist to denote their relationship to one another and to the verb. This is why I mentioned I personally do not feel that catagorizing languages based on SVO order is a particularly effective method of doing things. It creates universal rules that seem to be less than universal.
In any case, I can not imagine a language without subjects (not that I am doubting the idea from a theoretical standpoint), so how does it work that Hungarian is said not to have any?
In these days, old man, no one thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don't, so why should we? They talk of the people, the proletariat, and I talk of the mugs. It's the same thing. They have their five year plan and I have mine.-Harry Lime, The Third Man novella by Graham Greene
That, indeed, sounds interesting. I might in fact look into this more closely, as it may actually be related to what I am working on at the moment. Does this take place in literary or colloquial Arabic?
To be honest, I don't know much about Arabic language(s) at all -- the only bit of Arabic that I have ever really read about was negation phenomena, and that was a while back. (But I seem to remember that in Arabic the negative marker is marked for tense, while the verb is marked for person? Which is the opposite of what takes place in for example Finnish.)
As I said, this is based on the assumption that to be a subject is simply to occupy a specific syntactic position. In a nutshell, the argument then goes that Hungarian, which can be treated as a verb-first language, has no specific position for its "subject-like" arguments, and therefore it is difficult to say that there is a subject position in the language to begin with. In other words, the word order in Hungarian does not seem to be in any way influenced by the "subject-like" qualities of an argument. Instead, Hungarian rather makes use of notions like topicalisation (which, one could say, is dangerously close to subjecthood), focus and contrast in order to derive its word order.
This, of course, is all quite theoretical. And if you define a "subject" to be something other than a simple syntactic position, you will certainly end up with different results.
To my understanding the alteration of verbal agreement occurs in dialect as well as in the literary form (MSA, or Modern Standard Arabic which has a use not only in literature but also in general media, and as such may be said to be a living language, though admittedly it is being kept alive by a linguistic life support system. It serves as the lingua franca of the Middle East and every foreign soldier, governmental official, student, linguist, academic, or diplomat trained to speak Arabic is trained in this dialect initially; the dialect from which the other dialects branched off in the course of time), but I am not really an expert in Arabic, just someone on the trail to learning it and as such my experience is somewhat limited, but proficient, with the aid of reference grammars.
In any case, The VSO order in the language is always maintained unless the subject of the sentence is a pronoun, in which case the sentence automatically becomes SVO for clairty (In Arabic a verb ONLY agrees both in number AND gender with either an unmentioned subject OR a subject that precedes the verb. If the subject comes after the verb the verb agrees only in gender and is in the singular. If the subject is seperated from the verb by one or more words the verb is, again, always singular and may be, if the subject is feminine, either masculine or feminine (up to the writer's/speaker's discretion. If the subject is masculine it will ALWAYS be masculine. As you can see Arabic, at least the MSA, is the doll of a very old and established grammatical tradition).
As regards negation in Arabic, it does not necesarily denote tense though it can, but as far as I know this difference is mostly literary, though I could be wrong. In a negative sentence in Arabic a verb may denote tense (with the exception of the verb 'to be' which is a whole other explination and a verb that both does and does not exist. Apparantly, Arabic grammarians have historically been masters of existentialism), but certain negations may ALSO denote tense, in which case the tense of the verb will be different than the natural tense of the sentence. For example, 'lan' is used to denote a negative future condition, in which case the verb does not recieve the normal future prefix and instead appears in the subjunctive. In the case of 'lam', which is used to denote the negation of the past, the verb appears in the jussive and not the past (the jussive is also used as a kind of negative and first person imperative form). There are other forms of 'no', 'ma' and 'la', and while the use of these is directly related to a present vs a past sense (in MSA ) the verb appears conjugated in its appropriate context. As I said, I am almost confident enough to say that this difference is not existent in dialects (at least most of them), but I wouldn't want to be quoted on that point.
In these days, old man, no one thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don't, so why should we? They talk of the people, the proletariat, and I talk of the mugs. It's the same thing. They have their five year plan and I have mine.-Harry Lime, The Third Man novella by Graham Greene
Thank you for the information, SheykAbdullah. I will certainly be digging deeper into the matters Arabic at some point.
If you're interested in the role of subjecthood another interesting investigation might be into the middle passive of Attic Greek (I'm not sure if you are aware of this already), but the middle passive acted as a kind of 'not-quite' real passive tense, in essence it was used to indicate actions where something owned or controlled by the subject was influenced by his actions (of course this being different than normally passive and intransitive verbs where, as you know, the subject is the object), for example the middle passive (which in most conjugations is the same as the passive) for 'I lead my horses' is;
'Agomai tous hippous'
Where as the normally conjugated transitive, 'I lead your horses' is;
'Ago humon hippous'
In essence, anything owned or controlled by the subject of the setence is regarded syntactically as part of the subject (in the first setence there is no possesive to denote ownership, ownership is implied and demonstrated by the use of the middle passive indicating the horses are 'you.' The genetive for 'my' would be 'hamon auton'). It probably, as an example, deals more with objecthood I would imagine than subjecthood, but I always thought it would be an interesting point if I were more of a theoretician.
In these days, old man, no one thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don't, so why should we? They talk of the people, the proletariat, and I talk of the mugs. It's the same thing. They have their five year plan and I have mine.-Harry Lime, The Third Man novella by Graham Greene
Sorry about getting back so late, but finally the forum works again. I haven't been able to connect in the past couple of days.
In any case, I actually read about middle passives this spring when I was reading about subject choice and looking into differential subject and object marking cross-linguistically. It's an area that I would love to delve deeper into, but haven't yet got to the point where I could do so.
The discussion had taken an interesting turn, but the linguistic aspects have been dominating. Earlier today I was reading Werner Heisenberg's Physicist Conception of Nature where he underlines the fundamental chance in the status of subject/object relationship, brought about by the quantum theory (and the Copenhagen interpretation of it). Newtonian physics has a clearcut distinction between object and subject. When an XIX century physicist was approaching the study of the nature, he was hopping to unveil the law of it; the subject of his study was nature "itself". After quantum physics this is no longer possible - there is no "nature itself". The process of observation for ever changes the observed. The observer and the observed are interacting. Heisenberg writes: ”We can no longer speak of the behavior of the particle independently of the process of observation.” The laws we formulate are not about the nature itself, but about our knowledge of it.
There is no point in returning to my original question, since the discussion between vili and SheykAbdullah has convinced me that, with some possible exceptions, there seems to be a fundamental distinction s/o in most (major?) languages. When this distinction first appeared in philosophy is in that perspective not as crucial as I initially though (i.e. since the distinction is embedded in the language, it becomes more a question of making it conscious by philosophy or linguistics then coming up with some "new" philosophical idea, not immanent to the "world"). But has something changed since the advent of quantum theory? Is our awareness of the s/o relationships changing?
I also came to think of another idea that I read a few years back. Unfortunately I can't remember the authors name, but maybe someone else does. He's German, now living, possibly a writer or a theorist of culture. My memory is rather dim, but he claimed something like: the western man's relation to the nature and other people etc was that of s/o; opposed to this was some other culture's (let's call them non-western, since I don't remember which it was). Non-western relation is not s/o; he calls it the culture of presence, I think. The idea was appealing at the time, but I wonder how much substance it possibly could have. The language is, I believe, at least to some extent a mirror of the values of the societies that use it. How probable is it that most languages in the world would have s/o distinction and at the same time not have the s/o thinking about their relations with other people, the nature etc.
I hope you'll be indulgent towards the jumps in my reasoning (from language to philosophy to culture). I'm not trying to make a convincing universal statement; I'm simply speculating on a question which has occupied my mind recently.
"Everything between people is entangled, and nobody can be called neither entirely innocent nor entirely guilty." (Sabo's transl.)
Mesa Selimovic, The Fortress
In order to change our fundamental view of object/subject relations we would need more than just quantum physics to intervene. Our entire logical structure is based on subject/object distinctions. You don't just have to look at language, even in mathematics the conepts exists, only not nearly as explicitly. I have often been intriqued by the relationship between langauge and math (indeed, I firmly believe that all human thought is essentially rooted in logical systems and it is my proposition that human cognition is incapable of producing illogical thought, but that is a bit of a controversial statement so I'll leave it here). For example, the statement 'I bake a ckae for Julie' has a subject, objects, and a verb, namely it has something that originates an action and something that is acted upon to create a result, which is just like an arithmatic expression (I will use simple expressions for the sake of simplicity, but every mathematical expression from the most advanced calculus to the strangest modular arithmatic follows these same steps), eg, '2+3=5' has something that originates the action (2), something that is acted upon (3) and a result (5). One may point out that two and three may be reversed, but so may the 'subject' and 'object' in an intransitive sentence such as, 'It was he,' but note that in the mathematical equivalent of a transitive sentence ('He fixes a car.'), a subtraction equation, '2-3' does not yield the same result as '3-2', so it may be seen that in both mathematics and language the same propensity to subject and object relations exist (even furhter, one could suggest a third leg added to the triangle, that of the concept of 'transformative,' or maybe 'transferitive').
Fundamentally all human thought exists in this linear aspect, and I think it would be nearly impossible to change it. Additionally, I firmly believe (and this is another thing that may need to be saved for later) that mathematics and science are entirely arbitrary abstractions that are NOT Objective Reality, instead are BASED on Objective Reality, and in that sense are slaved to humanity's basic outlook on the universe which is submerged in subject/object values. I would say that no matter how much scientists would like to escape the notion of science and math being slaved to humanity's basic inability to understand anything outside its artificial (systematic) constraints, they will never be able to because they are still men.
To prove that subject/object relations still exists and dominates even in quantum physics one must merely look at the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle itself, namely that the observed is changed by observation. This statement itself demonstrates a subject/object distinction (and observer vs and observee). In order to truly embrace the full implications of the destruction of subject/object distinction in quantum physics one would have to observe without observing and that in itself is impossible, unless somehow cheated; unless the observation proccess in nullified in a way CONSISTENT with out basic cognitive conceptions (subject/object, logical orders, etc). Perhaps with Star Trek's Heisenberg Compensators?
I have often heard that it is impossible to break the laws pf phsyics, but it is possible to bend them. If that is so it is only because we are bending our own perception of how the laws operate and not the laws themselves (because I say no laws exist). Science itself is all about this kind of thing, namely taking the object (nature) and bending it, twisting it, cheating it, and explaining it to the subject (us). It is an inescabable cycle, and the moment someone figures out how to break the relationship they will transcend humanity and, dare I say, become an equal with God himself.
In these days, old man, no one thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don't, so why should we? They talk of the people, the proletariat, and I talk of the mugs. It's the same thing. They have their five year plan and I have mine.-Harry Lime, The Third Man novella by Graham Greene
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