I have perhaps s silly question, but I’m confused, so better ask somewhere.
In the sentence:
Jan is my name. Is ‘jan’ the subject, or do you switch and make ‘my name’ the subject?

This is probably best answered by Victor, as he’s got the most “experience” at this point with questions of grammar.

However, that said, if I had to guess (and I would have to guess, as it’s been 35 years+ since I’ve had any lessons in grammar), I would have to say that ‘Jan’ is the subject.

Just my 13 dinar’s worth.

Some thoughts:

Chatbot grammar tree:

Sentence “Jan is my name.” = NP+VP

“Jan” = noun phrase (NP)
“is my name” = verb phrase (VP)

noun phrase = [can act as a] subject.
verb phrase = [can act as a] predicate

VP = verb+object
verb = “is”
object = “my name”.

NOTE: This casual reply may need some tweaking.

No,  “Jan” is not a noun phrase,  it is simply a noun.

A noun phrase is a group of words.

“Jan” is the subject noun of the sentence.

“is my name” is the predicate.

“is” is the predicate verb.  “name” is the direct compliment noun of the verb “is”.

“my” is an adjective modifier, modifying the direct compliment noun “name”.

So “Jan is my name” is parsed as:

[ Jan (subject)  ]  [ is my name (predicate) ]

[ is (predicate verb) ]  [ my name (direct compliment of predicate verb) ]

Thus “Jan”, the subject, is “doing” the “act” of “is” (or being in the state of, since it is a linking verb “is”).  “name” is the receiver of the action (or state in this case because we are using a LINKINGVERB “is” ).

Sounds like I was right. Can we start keeping score now?

Victor,
Good thing I didn’t consult Wikipedia, or I would have still been wrong about “Jan” being a noun phrase.  At least now, I have only myself to blame for saying “Jan” was a noun phrase instead of just a noun.  ( BTW: I implied “Jan” was a pronoun in the noun phrase without saying.)

Wikipedia says, “In grammar, a noun phrase (abbreviated NP) is a phrase whose head is a noun or a pronoun, optionally accompanied by a set of modifiers.” but now we know we can not rely on Wikipedia as a grammar reference.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Noun_phrase

Finally, grammar is cool, but I am only interested in using it to build a better A.I. so saying a noun is a noun phrase makes for one less condition to code for.

No that definition from Wikipedia is valid.  A noun phrase can consist of:

a) noun
b) a prepositional phrase

Example “The lady in the blue dress can really dance.”

Here, “lady” is the subject noun.  It is being modified by:

a) adjective modifier “the”  -and-
b) prepositional phrase “in the blue dress”

“in the blue dress” is a prepositional phrase, and it modifies the noun (‘lady’).

The noun and its modifying prepositional phrase together are thus called the noun phrase (or NP for short).

But in “Jan is my name”,  the
 
        “is my name” is a predicate, not a prepositional phrase, thus cannot serve as a noun phrase to modify ‘Jan’.

Thus we have :

        noun
        predicate

which adds up to, you guessed, a complete simple sentence.

Ok, that’s what I thought. At least, that’s how I (thought I) learned it. But then I come to the semantics of the thing: what does the sentence actually mean and how do I need to execute it. And at that stage, it appears to make more sense if you switch it. Let’s first look at the meaning:

-Jan is my name = my name is jan (both sentences actually have the same meaning, but in the first, ‘jan’ is emphasised). So for both we have:
who = I
what = name
value = jan
(verb = be) not important here

‘who’, ‘what’, and ‘value’ need to be extracted from subject and object. This process is not the same for both (there are subtle differences). And that’s where I hit the bump. If I only allow the sequence: ‘agent-verb-object’, I need to do a whole bunch of stuff simply to get them switched and interpreted correctly. But, if I break grammar rules and also allow ‘object-verb-subject’, it becomes a matter of solving ambiguity: is it ‘object-verb-subject’ or ‘subject-verb-object’ (far easier to do in my system).
I was still in lingo on this yesterday, but a good night sleep has helped me clear my mind. I think I’m going for the ambiguity and break grammar rules here.
have you guys had something like this before?

Cool thread here. It’s a while ago for me as well, but I know these words in Dutch. What do you think about ‘bijvoeglijk voornaamwoord’, ‘werkwoord’, or ‘onderwerp’ (adjective, verb and subject).

Actually, it would be cool to have this in Chatbots.org Wiki, with a special sections per page: application in chatbots, and related forum topics.

Keep on thinking…

So far I haven’t hit any bumps like that in my engine.

“Jan is my name”
  So “is” is a linking verb.  We are linking “Jan” to “name” , what name? “my” name.  We are linking it through the
  present tense linking verb “is”.  So we’re not saying it WAS Jan, or WILL BE Jan, we are saying it is CURRENTLY Jan.
  Thus, even “is” IS important.

“My name is Jan”
  Same thing, we’re using present tense linking verb “is”, we are relating name with Jan.

I think what is throwing you is that the sentence is overly simple!  It is one of these sentence where you could just use a template “(x) is (y)”.  Then check a database.

You could get away with that here (templates).  My very early bot designs just used templates, but their limitations reveal themselves almost immediately.  Thus I decided the only way to truly have a free form NLP engine was to embrace grammar.

My bot ignores NOTHING in grammar, it factors in every word, “is”,  “the”,  “a”.  Even those words are important.

@Erwin: Oh ye. That rings a bell. I’ve always found the Dutch naming sooo very windy, I mean: bijvoeglijk voornaamwoord = adjective.  Mmmmm.
@Victor: You’re off course (please, someone finally tell me how you spell this ‘offcourse’ correctly?) right about the verb. Perhaps I better should have said: In my system, the verb ‘be’ can, at this stage, be inferred through the ‘action’ that was executed in combination with the ‘time’ tag associated with the statement. So it’s still valid and needed info, but stored more indirectly to keep the number of relationships down to what’s only needed.
In the meantime, I already found an example that would be far more difficult to resolve in the same manner as I thought handling the ‘jan is my name’:
My house is your house. (subject = my house, verb=is, object=your house; basic right). But, structurally, it’s best stored like:
who=you
what=house
value=my house
(we need to link the data record that represents ‘my house’ to the object that represents ‘you’).
I guess this will have to be dealt with through trial and error (debugging). Bugger, I hate those, they take too much time.

“off course”—means—the boat went “off course” and now nobody knows where it is.

“of course”—well , of course one plus one is 2 !!

So 2 words, bugger. Spell checkers are a must for me, but I never got that one right, I new off course was not correct, but ‘offcourse’ always gave me a spelling error.

yep . .they are 2 words.  both are prepositional phrases by the way.

Dear Jan.
Your question is not silly. Subject plays an important role in a sentence. Both of them are Subjects depend on your use.

How about this:

“He writes good.” should be “He writes well.” and both mean he is good at writing. But “He is good.” is different than “He is well.”

I looked up copula (linguistics) in Wikipedia…