What's the best way to find the subject in a sentence?

Solution 1:

Subjects are noun phrases, and usually have more than one word in them, but they can be just one word, if there are no modifiers. Subject is a grammatical concept restricted to languages with nominative-accusative systems, like most Indo-European languages. Languages like Basque, Georgian, Quiché, or Pitjantjatjara, which have absolutive-ergative systems, do not support a meaningful concept of Subject.

Virtually all tensed English clauses (including all simple sentences), require a Subject constituent.
Besides its position before the verb phrase, the grammatical properties of a Subject include:

• number agreement with the verb phrase
  The ladies are arriving ~ The lady is arriving
• inversion with auxiliary in questions
  The old man in the trenchcoat is coming => Is the old man in the trenchcoat coming?
• pronominalization in tag questions
  Those guys are the ones, aren't they?
• upstairs control of A-Equi deletion, plus downstairs deletion by Equi
  Bill wanted to see the painting = Bill wanted (for Bill) to see the painting.
• promotion by Subject-Raising (often obligatory)
  *For there to be beer in the fridge tends => There tends to be beer in the fridge.
• movement and optional deletion by Passive
  Acme Construction erected this building in 1936 => This building was erected in 1936.
• contraction with auxiliary (especially pronouns)
  The old woman has/is gone now => The old woman's gone now

In addition, there are semantic criteria governed by predicates. Most predicates will only accept certain types of noun phrase as subjects, and lots of tests can be fashioned with different verbs.

Solution 2:

This is actually a difficult question, and to some degree the answer depends on the theoretical framework you are using. As Dusty says, whether you consider the bare N or the whole NP (i.e. with or without complements and modifiers) as the subject is a matter of choice, and once you have passives then the syntactic subject may not be the semantic subject. In the 80's some grammarians decided that 'subject' wasn't a useful concept, and generalised it to the concept of a syntactic pivot.

The point of which is not (just ;-)) to air my knowledge, but to point out that finding a definition which will cope with every edge case is hard.

Solution 3:

A simplistic explanation: the subject is the noun acting in a sentence, the predicate is the action/verb and the object being acted upon.

For example:

[Subject] [ Predicate ]

[Subject] [[Verb] [Object]]

[The majority of people] [[didn't mind] [the new policy]]

If you want to dig deeper, the rules of sentence construction are more complicated with many variations and caveats.

I like marenostrum's practical suggestion of asking a who or what question, but it can be misinterpreted:

What was was it that people didn't mind?

The new policy.

What did a great number of students do yesterday?

They went on strike.

Solution 4:

A practical way might be asking the sentence the question who. or what. (See RegDwight's comment, and "Edit 1" below) The answer is the subject.

With your examples:

The majority of people didn't mind the new policy.

Who didn't mind the new policy?

the majority of people

A great number of students went on strike yesterday.

Who did go on strike yesterday?

a great number of students

Edit 1: I am omitting the question what. In fact I was not fine with it while writing it. I wrote it in case of the subject be neuter but that was a mistake. So we should ask who not taking into account the answer may be a "it". Such as: The clever white mouse ate the cheese. Who did eat the cheese? The clever white mouse. Obviosly, the question what leads us to the object if asked against the subject: What did the white clever mouse eat? The cheese.

Solution 5:

In general, the subject is known as the doer or agent or be-er in an active sentence whereas it can be a recipient or the receiver of action in a passive sentence. Normally subjects come at the beginning of simple sentences or clauses. e.g.

• The dog bit me. (active)
• I was bit by the dog. (passive)

In the case above, the dog is the subject of first sentence (in active voice) and I is the subject of second sentence (in passive).

A simple sentence or a clause usually takes the form of subject + predicate. To be clear, the subject is the noun/pronoun/noun phrase that stands before the predicate. (Predicate is the phrase containing verb and object/complement which describes something about the subject.)