Subject and subiectum

Abstract

The paper discusses the relationship between subject and subiectum in the theoretical and methodological framework of cognitive grammar and poetics, in literary texts. The grammatical subject is a grammatical function, placing a thing, i.e., a participant in the focus of attention within the scene expressed in the sentence, and functioning as a semantic starting point. The grammatical subject and the subiectum elaborated in the text are separated from each other in specific cases, and in the process of partition, the two are connected
again in various ways. In a literary work, the subiectum is not formed through the direct elaboration of a grammatical subject, but by meeting different ways of the subiectum’s self-creation and self-reference, along the intersubjective actions of the speaker and the recipient, in the text and in the discourse space. The paper presents this relationship, among others, in the poetic processes of separating the syntactic subject and the lyrical speaking subiectum, by self-addressing, depersonalization, subjectification, and subject extension.