Subject Predicate Relationship

5 Key excerpts on "Subject Predicate Relationship"

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  Linguistics: A Complete Introduction: Teach Yourself

  • David Hornsby(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Teach Yourself

    (Publisher)

  predication.

  The predicates in the sentences above are of three different kinds:

  •   In sentence 1, the single argument dinosaurs is the subject, and the predicator is the intransitive verb exist, which allows no other complements.

  •   Sentence 2 has both a subject (Samantha) and a direct object complement (her bar examinations), because the verb prepare has both an agent (doing the action) and a patient (something on the receiving end of the action).

  •   Sentence 3 has a subject (Paul), a direct object (a tip) and an indirect object (the waiter).

  Case study: Pro-drop and ‘dummy’ subjects

  A further difficulty for our subject+predicate definition is the fact that many languages allow sentences not to have a specified subject. This phenomenon is known as pro-drop, and is particularly common in the Romance languages:

  Spanish	hablo español	(I) speak Spanish
  Portuguese	falamos português	(we) speak Portuguese
  Italian	parlano italiano	(they) speak Italian

  It might be argued that the ‘subject’ in these examples is understood, and can in fact be deduced from the personal verb ending (see Chapter 6 ).

  In non-pro-drop languages, some specified subjects have no obvious referent. What, precisely, is raining in it is raining, for example, and what does ‘it’ refer to in it is clear that we need a new plan? Likewise there in There is a lot of confusion has no referent and serves only to satisfy a requirement that English verbs have a specified subject. Subjects like these, which have a purely grammatical role, are generally known as dummy subjects

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  Grammatical Relations

  The Evidence Against Their Necessity and Universality

  • D. N. S. Bhat(Author)
  • 2002(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Part I Evidence against the necessity of grammatical relations

  Passage contains an image

  2 The need for grammatical relations

  2.1 DIFFERENTIATING BETWEEN SEMANTIC AND PRAGMATIC RELATIONS

  Sentences can generally be analyzed as consisting of a set of arguments (noun phrases) and a predicate. There are some exceptions to this general rule in some languages, such as the equational sentences of Kannada, in which there is no predicate, or the ‘weather’ sentences of the same language in which there is no argument (see 3.2.1 ). The arguments occurring in a sentence have to represent two main types of relations called ‘semantic’ relations and ‘pragmatic’ relations, of which the former relate the arguments with the predicate and the latter with the speech context.

  Semantic relations deal with the basic ‘conceptual’ meaning of a given sentence. Their number and type is determined by the kind of predicate that occurs in the sentence, or rather by the kind of event or state that the predicate denotes. For example, the verb give would generally require three different semantic relations, namely the giver (agent), the receiver (recipient) and the object given (patient), whereas the verb cry would require only one: the person who cries (agent).

  Pragmatic relations, on the other hand, deal with an entirely different type of meaning: namely, the way in which these different arguments are related to other arguments that occur in the speech context (for example, the ones occurring in the preceding sentences) and also with the participants themselves of the speech act, such as the speaker and the addressee. This latter type of relation is regarded as dealing with the organization or ‘packaging’ of the arguments concerned (Foley and Van Valin 1984). For example, a given argument may have to refer to an individual or object that is already being talked about in the speech context or to one that is being newly introduced into the conversation; it may have to refer to an individual that needs to be specifically emphasized or to one that may be left in the background; and so on.

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  Universal Grammar

  • Edward L. Keenan(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  b-subjects). Then we shall attempt to provide universally valid criteria for identifying subjects of b-sentences in any L. Once the b-subjects have been identified in any particular L then the full set of properties characteristic of b-subjects in that L can be determined. So in some Ls b-subjects may have a certain case marker, or position, or they may exhibit a very specific type of transformational behaviour, or even have semantically specific properties. Finally, once the full complement of b-subject properties has been determined for a given L, subjects of non-basic sentences will be defined to be those NPs, if any, which present a clear preponderance of the properties characteristic of b-subjects. Thus in any given L, subjects of non-basic sentences may present very few of the universal properties in that L since they possess very many of the language specific properties of b-subjects in that L.

  Note further, that on this type of definition, subjects of certain sentences, and more generally of certain sentence types, will be more subject-like than the subjects of others. The reason is that they will exhibit more of the complement of properties which characterise b-subjects in general. Thus the subjecthood of an NP (in a sentence) is a matter of degree.

  In addition, it seems to me that subjects in some Ls will be more subject-like than those of other Ls in the sense that they will in general, present a fuller complement of the properties which universally characterise b-subjects. Very possibly, for example, European Ls are more subject oriented than those Sino-Tibetan Ls discussed by Li and Thompson (1976) .

  2.1 The Definition of Basic Sentence in a Language

  • (4) For any Language L,
    1. a syntactic structure x is semantically more basic than a syntactic structure y if, and only if, the meaning of y depends on that of x. That is, to understand the meaning of y it is necessary to understand the meaning of x;
    2. a sentence in L is a basic sentence (in L) if, and only if, no (other) complete sentence in L is more basic than it.

  Concerning (4a), there is no simple way of determining whether some sentence e.g. is more basic than another since such a determination requires that we understand the meaning of the two sentences. So some cases will surely be problematic. But many cases we feel are quite clear. E.g., John is a linguist is clearly semantically more basic than Fred thinks that John is a linguist since we cannot understand the meaning of the latter without understanding that of the former. If we didn’t know what John is a linguist meant, we wouldn’t know what Fred is thinking. Further, each of the following structures is semantically more basic than all of those which follow it: John sang, John sang off-key, John didn’t sing off-key, the fact that John didn’t sing off-key, some newspaper reported the fact that John didn’t sing off-key, some newspaper which reported the fact that John didn’t sing off-key

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  Philosophy of Language and Linguistics

  • Piotr Stalmaszczyk(Author)
  • 2014(Publication Date)
  • De Gruyter

    (Publisher)

  156 They complement one another, each drawing out a different aspect, and only together do their insights generate a powerful framework in which we can understand logical grammar of the language, a framework identifying saturated names and sentences and unsaturated functors as three fundamental syntactic roles (compare Strawson!).

  2 . A unified approach. Subject and predicate revisited

  Now we have the resources to explain how the logical structure of a sentence is to be built. The basic syntactical rule for all kinds of sentences, or even all and any compound saturated expressions, follows:

  Basic Syntactic Rule (BSR)

  Every saturated compound expression (i.e. a name or a sentence) parses into exactly one n-place unsaturated functor and n of its saturated arguments (if any argument happens to be a compound expression itself, the rule applies accordingly).

  In atomic sentences the functor is an n-place predicate, while its arguments are n names (n≥1).

  (BSR) is a more fundamental insight into the logical structure of linguistic expressions than mere subject-predicate distinction. The latter we can get from the former:

  A predicate is a(ny) sentence-forming functor taking nominal arguments. A subject is relativized to a sentence. In a sentence in which the functor is one-place predicate, the subject is the name that is the sole argument of this functor.

  With respect to sentences in which the predicate takes more than one name, the notion of the subject needs some more elaboration.

  Let us start the labour with a short summary of what we know about sentences, names, and functors. What we need to repeat and highlight is that these are structural roles

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  Principles of Semiotic

  • David S. Clarke(Author)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  Section 4.2 we criticized what is called the ‘redundancy’ or ‘performative’ theory of truth which claims that to say of an utterance of a sentence that it is true is simply to accept or assert that sentence. There we argued that acceptance is analogous to recognition of a significate occurrence, and this latter psychological act can occur without there being an ascription of truth, as happens for non-conventional signals and natsigns. But this criticism should not be taken as an endorsement of the rival correspondence theory. The terms ‘fact’ and ‘state of affairs’ are simply technical philosophic terms introduced to provide a correlate to the term ‘sentence’, and it seems obvious that they stand for nothing that independently exists. Someone says ‘This table is brown’, and I agree, having identified the intended referent and judged that what I perceive is of the type signified by the predicate ‘is brown’. But independent of me there are not two entities, one the table as an object, the other the quality of brownness inhering in it, nor is there a state of affairs of the table being brown. There is one entity, the table, the referent of the sentence’s subject as used on that occasion and identified by the hearer if communication is successful. The subject–predicate distinction is a functional one, evolving, as we have seen, as a means of extending the referent occasion. It has absolutely no ontological import, contrary to the claims of the correspondence theory. There is no temptation to introduce states of affairs in describing the interpretation of natsigns and signals. There should be none when the interpretation is directed towards utterances of sentences, despite the added complexity of structure introduced at this level.

  So far we have restricted discussion to the meaning expressed by the subject–predicate structure of a sentence. We saw in 4.3 how features of signals such as pitch, intensity, and frequency of repetition can be used by communicators to convey the illocutionary force with which they are intended. At the level of language illocutionary force can also be conveyed by distinguishable parts of sentences. The easiest to identify are the performative prefixes first noted by Austin, prefixes such as ‘I warn you that …’, ‘I state that …’, ‘I question whether …’, etc. which express the force of the subject–predicate radical that follows, that is, indicate whether it is being used as a warning, statement, question, etc. Thus, ‘I warn you that John is coming’ and ‘I state that John is coming’ contain prefixes which indicate that the content expressed by the radical ‘John is coming’ is to be understood as a warning and a statement. For an imperative such as ‘Close the door’ illocutionary force is also indicated by performative prefixes. Thus, we form ‘I request you to close the door’ and ‘I order you to close the door’ as a means of indicating that closing the door is being requested and ordered. As for signals, intonation and stress are available as ‘natural’ indicators of illocutionary force. The addition of verbal expressions at the level of sentences has the advantage of enabling indefinitely greater explicitness and precision in conveying how a given content is to be understood.

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