Now let's look at subjects and direct objects in Japanese, which are a bit more complicated. One possible Japanese translation of sentence 1 above would be the following sentence.
Languages with Flexible Word Order May Have Case Markers to Help Hearers Identify the Syntactic Roles of Constituents
Notice first that the order of the sentence constituents is different in Japanese. The prototypical position for the verb in a Japanese sentence is at the end, so both the subject and the direct object precede it. The subject usually precedes the direct object, though this order is not so rigid. Second, notice that the Japanese sentence has two words that don't correspond to anything in the English sentence, wa and o. These words, sometimes called particles, specify the role of the NP they follow in the sentence. The particle o specifies that the previous NP is in the accusative case, that is, that it is the direct object of the sentence (though the detailed function of o is somewhat more complicated than this). A word like this is called a case marker. The particle wa has a different sort of function; it specifies that the NP it follows is the "topic" of the sentence, roughly what the sentence is "about". Notice that in this case wa follows the subject of the sentence. It turns out that Japanese also has a nominative case marker, ga, but when the subject is the "topic", the nominative case marker is replaced by the topic marker wa.
The figure below illustrates the syntax-semantics mapping for do_to sentences in Japanese. The dashed line separates the subject and direct object from the verb, which they normally precede. The "<" symbol between the subject and direct object is fuzzy because this ordering is only a tendency in Japanese.
A Japanese direct object can also be a "topic", though this is less common. In that case the accusative case marker o is replaced by the topic marker wa. Here is what our hugging example would like with the direct object as topic; notice that the normal place for the topic is the first position in the sentence.
4 |
Lois |
wa |
Clark |
ga |
dakishimeta |
Lois |
topic |
Clark |
nom |
hugged |
'Clark hugged Lois.' |
You can think of the difference between sentences 3 and 4 as corresponding roughly to the following (somewhat awkward) English translations: 'as for Clark, he hugged Lois' (3) and 'as for Lois, Clark hugged her' (4).
What is important about all this for our purposes is that Japanese has special words, case markers, to indicate which NP is the subject and which the direct object. That is, even when the order of the subject and direct object deviates from the default order (subject first), a hearer can figure out which NP is which.
What is also important about Japanese is how it is like English. For the do_toschema the syntax-semantics mapping is the same: the subject maps onto the agent, and the direct object maps onto the patient.
Let's look at one more language before we consider other types of states and events. Spanish is similar to English in the default order of the constituents — subject, verb, direct object — but as already mentioned, there is much more freedom in Spanish to deviate from the default. Spanish is also like Japanese in having an accusative case marker, though this is normally limited to direct objects referring to humans. Here is one Spanish translation of sentence 1.
5 |
Clark |
abrazó |
a |
Lois |
Clark |
hugged |
acc |
Lois |
'Clark hugged Lois.' |
The accusative case marker a appears before the NP Lois, marking it as the direct object of this Spanish sentence. The figure below illustrates the syntax-semantics mapping for Spanish do_to sentences. The accusative case marker is in a fuzzy box because it is only used in certain situations.
But depending on what is being emphasized and what is being treated as surprising information by the speaker, the constituents can be put in other, less common, orders. Here is a possibility that corresponds closely in meaning to the Japanese sentence 4.
6 |
A |
Lois |
la |
abrazó |
Clark |
acc |
Lois |
her |
hugged |
Clark |
'Clark hugged Lois.' |
Even with the normal positions of subject and direct object switched, the sentence is still interpretable because of the accusative case marker preceding Lois. To make it even clearer, Spanish speakers usually insert a redundant object pronoun when the order is the reverse of the usual one; in this case the pronoun is la 'her'.