We have now established one of the most important properties of verbs. They can have subjects. But as yet we have taken a rather limited view of subjects. When the subject is an instance of third person reference (he, she, it, they), we could use a more explicit form of words to indicate what we are talking about. Instead of It barks, They sing, or She sparkles, we could say The dog barks, Your friendly neighbours sing, or The hostess sparkles; in fact, very frequently we need to do this to be clear. Thus we can use a noun phrase with a common noun head as subject. It is clear that The dog barks and The hostess sparkles are expressions that have a truth value exactly like the expressions that have a personal pronoun as subject. By itself, the expression the dog cannot 3 Verbs and verb phrases Verbs and verb phrases 37 be interpreted as making a claim; all we could say in response is something like What about it? At the very least, the utterance of the words the dog would have to be accompanied by a gesture such as pointing. But when somebody says the dog barks, we know that he is making a claim even without a gesture: the force is conveyed by
the words alone.