Podmiotowość zaklęta w języku : analiza podmiotu w strukturze składniowej zdań języka prawnego

Abstract

The aim of the study is to examine whether the category of subjectivity in law manifests somehow on the level of the syntax of legal language. The most appropriate object of attention seems to be the subject as a part of the sentence. Therefore the author presents three different ways of understanding this concept, which occur in linguistics: grammatical subject, thematic subject (theme) and logical subject (agens). They correspond to the three planes of the syntactic structure of a language. The discussion is illustrated by the examples from legal texts. The analysis leads to the conclusion that the functioning of a particular word as the grammatical subject and simultaneously as the agens (and usually also as the theme) is a behaviour typical of subjects in the legal sense. What confirms this are inspections of such words of legal language as ‘court’, ‘enterprise’ and ‘company’.