Subject (grammar)
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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According to a tradition that can be tracked back to Aristotle, every sentence can be divided in two main constituents, one being the subject of the sentence and the other being its predicate. In English, subjects govern agreement on the verb or auxiliary verb that carries the main tense of the sentence, as exemplified by the difference in verb forms between he eats and they eat.
The subject has the grammatical function in a sentence of relating its constituent (a noun phrase) by means of the verb to any other elements present in the sentence, i.e. objects, complements and adverbials.
The subject is a phrasal constituent, and should be distinguished from parts of speech, which, roughly, classify words within constituent.
