1030: Subject Oct 4, 2017

In English statments, the verb will almost always come after the subject, though this is not true of questions nor imperatives. Because English is not declined i.e. the form of the noun does not change depending upon how it functions syntactically, it does not especially matter whether the subject were to be considered an object or an agent of the verb by the speaker; nothing changes phonetically to the individual nouns in sentences like "the man saw the dog" and "the dog was seen by the man", so generally it doesn't matter. Nevertheless, even though the agent was "the man" in both sentences, in the one written in the passive voice, "the dog was seen by the man", 'the dog' is considered the subject, and indeed "by the man" can be omitted. If this seems like an arbitrary classification however, consider that in other languages, such as Latin, in which nouns are declined, even when the subject is not the agent, in passive constructions, the nominative case used for subjects would be employed. We even see this with English pronouns, such as in "she saw him" and "he was seen by her", as the pronouns change depending upon how they are used in the construction.