"Colui, colei o l'oggetto che compie un'azione". Caricature, semplificazioni e stereotipi nell'apprendimento di una nozione sfuggente

This paper discusses the definitions of subject provided in the GRASS project (Grammar Reflection on Syntactic Subject at School) by students of different ages, with the purpose of collecting information on the kind of notion underlying these definitions as well as on their role in the students' acquisition of this grammatical category. The analysis of the most common definition in the sample ("person, animal or thing accomplishing the action") and of the examples provided to illustrate it suggests that, in spite of its being widespread, this type of definition is not easily understood by the students and tends to be re-interpreted in a different, non-literal and more general sense, extended to a wider series of cases of grammatical subjects, also when no actions are accomplished and when the strategy used to identify the subject can only be morphosyntactic and certainly not semantic.