What is "quirky subject"

n. (context linguistics grammar English) A subject in a grammatical case other than the nominative (used with certain verbs in some languages, e.g. Icelandic).

Quirky subjects (also called oblique subjects) are a linguistic phenomenon whereby certain verbs specify that their subjects are to be in a case other than the nominative.

For example, a sentence like "*Me like him" is ungrammatical in Standard English because the subject is ordinarily in the nominative. In many or most modern nominative–accusative languages, this rule is inflexible, the subject is indeed in the nominative case, and almost all treat the subjects of all verbs the same. Icelandic is of interest to linguistics as it has been argued to be the only modern language with quirky subjects.

The class of quirky subjects in Icelandic is a large one, consisting of hundreds of verbs in a number of distinct classes: experiencer verbs like vanta (need/lack), motion verbs like reka (drift), change of state verbs like ysta (curdle), verbs of success/failure like takast (succeed/manage to), verbs of acquisition like áskotnast (acquire/get by luck), and many others.

In superficially similar constructions of the type Spanish me gusta, the analogous part of speech (in this case me) is not a true syntactical subject.

Many linguists, especially from various persuasions of the broad school of cognitive linguistics, do not use the term "quirky subjects" since the term is biased towards languages of nominative–accusative type. Often, "quirky subjects" are semantically motivated by the predicates of their clauses. Dative-subjects, for example, quite often correspond with predicates indicating sensory, cognitive, or experiential states across a large number of languages. In some cases, this can be seen as evidence for the influence of active–stative typology.