5 - Predicates

Summary

This chapter discusses the nature of predicates. It is important to keep in mind that the concept of predicate that we will be concerned with here is the one used in case grammar, where one distinguishes between the predicate verb and its arguments. This concept needs to be clarified before a new case category is introduced in the next chapter.

What is a predicate?

Predicate and argument pertain to the cognitive level (the terms have been taken over by linguists from logic). The decision as to what is the predicate and what are the arguments of a sentence is logically prior to case assignment and the determination of the syntactic functions by which they are to be realized (see also Chapter 2, Section 5.3). The question to be examined now is: by which objective criteria may the predicate be identified?

Predicates and verbs

In the literature on case grammar it is usually assumed implicitly that the predicate is the main verb of the sentence. This happens to be true for English sentences, but there are languages, like Hebrew, for instance, where a sentence does not necessarily have a verb. Furthermore, it will not do to define the predicate as the main verb, even in English, because, as mentioned, predicate is a cognitive category and its definition is logically prior to determining how it is to be expressed.