On subject assignment in Serbo-Croatian within the framework of functional grammar

This paper discusses the analysis of Subject assignment in Serbo-Croatian in Dik (1980) and Dik and Gvozdanovic (1981). It is argued that the conclusion that Subject function is not relevant to the grammar of Serbo-Croatian is not tenable. It is also argued that Functional Grammar cannot account for the relationship between active and passive clauses in Serbo-Croatian since it recognizes only one level of syntactic representation. A constraint is proposed which makes the rule of Subject assignment in passive clauses sensitive to an initial assignment of Object to a non-Agent term; alternatively, Functional Grammar should be abandoned in favour of a theory which recognizes syntactic functions at more than one level.