The psychological subject and predicate

Abstract The present study is a demonstration of the independence of the psychological subject-predicate (topic-comment) distinction from the notions of grammatical and logical subject and predicate. Two hundred and eighty college students were given the task of selecting one of two pictures to go with a sentence in an ambiguous situation. The ambiguity was created by the fact that neither picture actually represented the content of the sentence; however, one picture or the other will be selected depending on which aspect of the sentence (the agent or the object) is selected as the psychological subject. The results clearly indicate that the psychological subject and predicate cannot be equated with the logical subject and predicate. Although the results for some sentence types can be accounted for by the role of word order, it is clear that the superficial subject is not consistently selected as the psychological subject. These results are a partial confirmation of the Prague School approach to the notion of topic and comment, in which this distinction involves a separate level of analysis from the logical or grammatical organization of the sentence.