; A typical; finite clause in English has a single constituent that serves as subject. This constituent precedes; the finite verb in non-inverted clauses like simple declarative clauses, follows the finite verb in; inverted clauses like polar questions, agrees in person and number with the finite verb and with a; tag subject when a tag is present, undergoes subject raising, and so on (Postal 2004). Five; constructions violate these generalizations and in the literature have called into question the; identity of the subject constituent. In each of these five constructions the finite verb agrees with; a following constituent in a declarative clause despite the fact, among others, that the constituent; preceding the verb exhibits subject behaviors of the kind identified by Keenan (1976). To the; authors’ knowledge, despite intensive analysis of several of these patterns, the group as a whole; has not been subject to prior study. The constructions are: Presentational Inversion (e.g., On the; porch stood marble pillars), Presentational there (e.g., The earth was now dry, and there grew a; tree in the middle of the earth, Deictic Inversion (e.g., Here comes the bus), Existential there (e.g.,; There’s a big problem here) and Reversed Specificational be (e.g., The only thing we’ve taken back; recently are plants). The approach of Sign-Based Construction Grammar (Sag 2012) enables us to; establish precisely what all five patterns have in common and what is particular to each, revealing; that a constructional, constraint-based approach can extract the correct grammatical; generalizations, not only in ‘core’ areas of a grammar, but also in the hard cases, where concepts; such as subject, which readily handle the more tractable facts, fail to fit the facts at hand. We; see further that the five split-subject patterns, sometimes identified as clausal, yield to a; strictly lexical analysis.
