One hypothesis might have been that subjects all bear the same semantic role. But we already know from Section 2.3.1 that this is not the case: different verbs require (d), an EXPERIENCER, and in (36c), a PATIENT (apples are the thing grown). Looking at the distribution of the phrases in bold, we might conclude that subjects precede the verb in English. This is certainly true, and as noted in Chapter 1 it is indeed one of the ways we can tell subjects in English. It is definitely not true of all languages, though, as we saw for Irish in (16c), where the verb precedes the subject Having observed that English subjects precede the verb, you may wonder if every NP that precedes the verb in English is a subject. We particularly need to know the answer to this in (36d), where two NPs precede the verb. Only she is marked in bold, though. How do we know that she is the subject and not apples? There are two ways of this, and these tests give further properties of subjects in English. testing us two further properties of subjects in English