Abstract
This paper investigates experimentally the extent to which global theme, local theme, and previous theme control the speaker's selection of syntactic subject in English. Two groups of forty English native speakers each are asked to tell a story in accordance with a given title, while looking at a set of pictures. The titles and pictures are manipulated in such a way that one of the two characters of the story is perceived more salient. Applying logit analysis to the results shows that all three factors significantly affect subject assignment in English. It is also shown that local theme is the most powerful and consistent factor in explaining syntactic subject.
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