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This page pertains to UD version 2.

nsubj: nominal subject

A nominal subject (nsubj) is a nominal which is the syntactic subject of a clause. The governor of this relation is typically a verb with an exceptions: when the verb is a copular verb, the nsubj relation is headed by the complement of the copular verb, which can be an adjective or a noun.

Ai balconi si affacciano donne/NOUN anziane.
nsubj(affacciano, donne)
Chi/PRON ha ucciso l'ingegner Reali?
nsubj(ucciso, Chi)
La situazione arbitrale è pessima/ADJ.
nsubj(pessima, situazione)
cop(pessima, è)
Questa ricchezza è tutta apparenza/NOUN.
nsubj(apparenza, ricchezza)
cop(apparenza, è)

The nsubj role is only applied to semantic arguments of a predicate. When there is an empty argument in a grammatical subject position (sometimes called a pleonastic or expletive), it is labeled as expl or better expl:impers

Si può procedere .
expl:impers(procedere, Si)

NB Note that when the verb is used in the passive voice the nominal syntactic subject is marked with the subtype nsubj:pass. When the subject is clausal, it’s preferable to use other specialized relations (csubj or its subtype csubj:pass).


nsubj in other languages: [bej] [bg] [bm] [cop] [cs] [de] [el] [en] [es] [ess] [et] [eu] [fi] [fr] [fro] [ga] [gd] [gsw] [hy] [it] [ja] [ka] [kk] [kmr] [ky] [mr] [myv] [no] [pa] [pcm] [pt] [qpm] [ro] [ru] [sl] [ssp] [sv] [swl] [tr] [u] [uz] [vi] [xcl] [yue] [zh]