Languages & Linguistics
Subject Predicate Relationship
The subject-predicate relationship is a fundamental concept in linguistics that describes the structure of a sentence. It refers to the relationship between the subject, which is the person or thing performing the action, and the predicate, which contains the verb and provides information about the subject. Understanding this relationship is crucial for analyzing sentence structure and meaning in language.
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5 Key excerpts on "Subject Predicate Relationship"
eBook - PDFLanguage and Logics
An Introduction to the Logical Foundations of Language
- Howard Gregory(Author)
- 2015(Publication Date)
- Edinburgh University Press(Publisher)
Second, if sentence meanings were atomic, there should in principle be no relation in meaning between different basic sentences. But, in fact, different sentences are often related in meaning, and we may want to describe that relationship. For example, ‘John loves Mary’ does not mean the same as ‘Mary loves John’: the truth of one is not dependent on the truth of the other. Nonetheless there is a relationship between the two sentences; they consist of the same building blocks put together in a different way. We often get at this relationship in ordinary language by using expressions like vice versa : ‘John loves Mary, but not vice versa’. Such relationships (and many others) can easily be treated using predicate logic. 3.1 PREDICATES The first task facing us in this chapter is to analyse basic sentences into their main meaningful elements. The following example sentences will start us off. 34 the classical picture (3.1) The cat killed the sparrow. (3.2) Mary is a student. (3.3) Greece is beautiful. (3.4) Russia is bigger than England. (3.5) Vienna is in Austria. The first sentence illustrates the very common pattern traditionally described as Subject-Verb-Object. This occurs in some form in most languages, though not neces-sarily in the same order (for example in Japanese it would be Subject-Object-Verb). It is helpful to think of the sentence as describing a situation, in which there are a certain number of participants. In this case the situation can be described as a killing situation. The element which contributes this description is called the predicate . In this example, the predicate is the main verb. As the first of several rules of the thumb in this section, you can take it that the main verb, if there is one, will be the predicate. A killing situation requires two core participants, one to play the role of killer and the other to play the role of victim. As Sherlock Holmes says, a murder requires (at least) a killer and a corpse.
eBook - PDF- D. Zaefferer(Author)
- 2019(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
Predication and Sentence Constitution in Universal Perspective Hans-Jürgen Sasse Universität zu Köln Institut für Sprachwissenschaft Meister-Ekkehart-Str. 7 D-5000 Köln 41 0. Introduction In the 1970's there was a trend among linguists to question the universality of the sub-ject. It was thought that the subject-predicate relation, modelled upon the typical Indo-European pattern, was not applicable to all languages of the world (cf. the contributions to Li 1976, in particular Keenan, Li and Thompson, Schachter and Schwartz, also Sasse 1978 and 1982, and many other works at that time). Strangely enough, research into relational typology concentrated almost exclusively on the subject (and adjacent areas such as topics, ergativity, etc.), eventually extending to other participant relations such as objects, although it would have seemed warranted to direct the main interest of research to the predicate, the most basic relational entity in sentences. Given the mutual dependency of subjects and predicates, the former cannot be understood without the latter, and vice versa. As a result, if we have doubt about the universal validity of the subject, we are in reality challenging the generally accepted universal concept of a bipartite Aristotelian subject-predicate structure. The Aristotelian concept of predication was problematized very early by language philosophers such as Frege, Brentano, and Marty, though with little, if any, impact on linguistics. The most predominant models in grammatical theory basically relied on the subject-predicate dichotomy as the main factor of sentence constitution. The reason is that there was not enough typological evidence available, even some fifteen years ago (not to mention the time when Frege, Brentano and Marty developed their ideas), to conclude what other types of relations could be involved in constituting the self-contained, utter-able linguistic expression of a proposition. In recent years the situation has drastically changed.
eBook - PDFSemantics
Advances in Theories and Mathematical Models
- Muhammad Tanvir Afzal(Author)
- 2012(Publication Date)
- IntechOpen(Publisher)
We are not then alluding to the particular and accidental relation brought about by the different tenses, moods or tense-aspects of the predicate, but to the general qualification of the subject conditioned by the material import of the predicate itself. In other words, we are referring to the different manners in which the predicate qualifies the subject. It Queries and Predicate – Argument Relationship 59 “A full analysis of the basic grammatical function – e.g. the function of the subject and predic ation , […] the real nature of sentence form ation – can be achieved only with the help of the static [not genetically comparative] method by which linguistic phenomena are not unduly separated from the action of speaking . […] In the field of syntax the general shift of interest from the external aspect of language to its inner life is exemplified by the emphasizing of the stylistic principle and by the substitution of the functional conception for the traditional formal point of view. Finer methods of linguistic analysis have brought to light the importance of what I should call the double-faced character of linguistic phenomena. It consists [of] a continuous fluctuation between the general and the individual . […] Linguistic research can either concentrate on what has already become a common possession of all members of the linguistic community or it can study the individual efforts of linguistic creation. The traditional school of linguistics has so exclusively limited itself to the study of commonly accepted means of expression that the individual speaker has disappeared from its ken. As a reaction against this too objective conception of language, a school of an extreme linguistic subjectivism chiefly represented by Professor K. Vossler has appeared, which following the ideas of Wilhelm von Humboldt and Benedetto Croce regards the act of linguistic expression as something [as] individual as artistic creation.
eBook - PDF- Manfred Bierwisch, Karl Erich Heidolph(Authors)
- 2014(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
IRENA BELLERT ON THE SEMANTIC INTERPRETATION OF SUBJECT-PREDICATE RELATIONS IN SENTENCES OF PARTICULAR REFERENCE* At the outset I wish to point out that the notions of subject and predicate used in this paper pertain neither to the grammatical categories as defined for hierarchical surface structures of utterances, nor to the relations definable in terms of the deep structures of a transformational grammar [cf. Chomsky (1965:23) for his notion of logical subject], for neither of these two terms could then be assigned an invariant semantic interpretation. Most linguists agree that a more abstract level of representation than a hierarchical surface structure tree should be assumed as a basis for the semantic interpretation of utterances in natural language. However, the problem of how deep structures should be represented still remains open, even for those linguists who are known as adherents of a transformational generative grammar. Without considering the general and complex problem of how deep structures could be represented as to constitute an adequate basis for the semantic interpretation, I will discuss here only one problem which seems to me quite essential with respect to the search for a possible deep structure representation, namely, the problem of how to determine the notions of subject and predicate in such a way that their semantic interpretation be invariant from utterance to utterance and compatible with the lin-guistic intuitions of a competent speaker. It appears that the notion of subject — which we will refer to as logical subject 1 — * This paper was in part delivered at the Meeting of the Polish Linguistic Society in Kraków, March 1967, and in part at the International Congress of Linguists, Bucarest, August, 1967. It is a largely extended version of the two reports. 1 The notion of logical subject as used here should not be confused with the notion of 'topic', 'datum' or 'logical subject' as used in different versions in the literature.
eBook - PDF- William A. Foley(Author)
- 2011(Publication Date)
- De Gruyter Mouton(Publisher)
The statement of this rule refers to two different grammatical categories, subject and direct object, which belong to the set of grammatical relations, and has been phrased thus in a number of current grammatical theories which take grammatical relations as primitives. It seems fairly clear from the above examples that the notions of subject and (direct) object are useful in the description of English grammar, but in order to qualify as primitives in a grammatical theory, it is necessary to show that they play a role in all human languages and, further, that they are well defined concepts in all. It is the extension of these relatively clearly defined notions of grammatical relations in western European languages to lan-guages of an alien type which will be investigated and queried here, by looking at the grammatical patterns of an exotic language of New Guinea named Yimas, but before proceeding with this, it is necessary to back up a bit and consider some basic facts about the structure of human language. At the most fundamental level, language is a highly complex mapping between meaning and form, between semantic concepts and phonetic realizations. The most basic token of language behavior is an utterance; this matches an idea that the speaker has with an outward phonetic realization. The minimum complete utterance is a word, and, as Saussure (1966) long ago pointed out, a word is at base a conjunction of a (semantic) concept and a (phonetic) form. Words in all languages are divided into classes, but the smallest number of classes which seems The conceptual basis of grammatical relations 133 possible in human languages is two, noun and verb, although languages need not agree in the assignment of particular words to particular classes (see Jacobsen 1976). In any case, the universal categorization of words into at least these two basic word classes is a very important typological fact.
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