Word order in old english

2. The position of subject and predicative
The subject typically stands before the predicator and its position is external to the verb phrase. The position of the subject plays a very important role in distinguishing it from the object in finite clauses. This is due to the loss of inflections. Without inflections it would be often impossible to distinguish the subject from the object if the position of the subject was not fixed.³
Peter killed Paul. X Paul killed Peter.
If the default position of the subject was not fixed it would be very difficult to find out who is the killer in the sentences above. There are of course certain non-canonical constructions in which the position of the subject is different but they will be dealt with later.
A personal pronoun acting as a subject of a sentence appears in its nominative form. Nevertheless, case does not play a very important role in distinguishing the subject from the object in English since it lost almost all inflections except for a few personal pronouns.
Person and number inflections of the verb are determined by the subject.
According to Huddleston and Pullum the subject is an obligatory element in all canonical clauses. (Huddleston and Pullum 2002, 236) “The fact that the subject is obligatory is reflected in the possibilities for reducing clauses when material is recoverable from the context. Sue has eaten them already, say, can be reduced to She has (e.g. in answer to the question Has Sue eaten them already?), but not to Has or Has eaten.” (Huddleston and Pullum 2002, 239)
A clause can only contain one subject, no more. On the other hand there can be for example more than one object per sentence.

2. Dummy Subject

Some constructions require a semantically empty dummy subject to be used. According to Biber et al. it can also be called a non-referential subject. (Biber et al. 1999, 125) Such a subject does not convey any semantic content. It is only used to complete the sentence in a grammatical way. Dummy subject is most commonly used in clauses expressing information about weather, distance or time.⁴

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