This chapter addresses secondary predicates (SPs), those elements conveying an additional predication on top of the first predication featured by the main verbal form. Slavic secondary predicates follow the regular pattern, typical of most Indo-European languages, of a non-verbal element related to an argument in the clause. Having defined the concept, the author discusses the following types of this phenomenon in Slavic languages: (a) depictive secondary predication and (b) regular (final state) and trajectory resultative constructions. She also presents non-verbal predicates in argument position, which share some features with secondary predication.

This chapter discusses null-subject clauses, those that do not have the subject in the nominative case. Viewing Slavic languages in their totality, there is a range of null subjects from grammatically obligatory to optional (the presence of the subject signifies emphasis or juxtaposition) to pragmatically motivated. If we view the pro-drop feature as a continuum, as suggested by Pešková, from pro-drop in West Slavic and South Slavic to partially pro-drop in East Slavic (more so in Ukrainian, less so in Russian), then we could correlate a construction of the type (i) Uk. Hru-ACC zakinčeno-ppl ‘Game over (finished)’ with the pro-drop languages, and a construction of the type (d) Rus.-Uk. Udarilo-pastNEU gromom-INSTR ‘Hit by lightning (thunder)’ with partially pro-drop languages. In addition, Russian has a propensity to form infinitive constructions that are absent in other languages.

Elizabeth Anscombe has called the part of the Tractatus dealing with the relation between the will and the world “obviously wrong.” To understand and assess this view, I look at what Wittgenstein, Schopenhauer, and Anscombe say about the will. She is right to reject the view of the will that she calls wrong, but it is possible that Wittgenstein intends his readers to reject it too. Recent work by Anne-Marie Søndergaard Christensen, Eli Friedlander, Modesto Gómez-Alonso, and Michael Kremer helps us to see this, and to understand Wittgenstein’s views on ethics as well. The will, conceived as something distinct from our actions in the world, is indeed a chimaera, as Anscombe argues. Will belongs to what we do. And it is not, as such, something that we can or should reject. If we are to reject anything in this neighbourhood, it is idle wishing that the world would change.

The coda is essentially a supplementation of, rather than a conclusion to, what has gone before. It begins by considering the space of the page as a textual environment, and the ways in which its meanings are diversified by tabular layout. The argument moves on to the challenges of multi-perspectivalism and agglomerative looking as they weave a depth in our existential duration and ecological relating. Translation also triggers blind fields beyond the frame of the text by the use of collage and the cultivation of Erlebnis. The coda then addresses the nature of translational subjecthood, and ends with propositions about the real ecological reach of translation which is an integral part of its literariness.

The ‘ethical turn’ in anthropology has charted alternatives to some prevailing philosophical, psychological, and anthropological approaches. This engagement forces anthropologists to reconsider old antinomies such as constraint and agency, relativism and universalism, individualism and collectivism. Like other anthropologists of ethics, we resist forms of determinism that would reduce ethical life to the putatively universal constraints of biology and psychology, the logic of rationality, or the workings of power and ideology. Instead, we consider the processes through which what seem to be constraints or universals serve as affordances that are ethicalized through historically contingent reflexive practices. Rather than being forced to choose between the individual and the collective in terms of who (or what) the ethical subject is, we demonstrate how social interaction is a critical site in which and through which such ethicalization occurs.

This chapter introduces the two essential parts of a simple sentence: the subject and the predicate. A detailed discussion is provided on the various linguistic forms that can serve as the subject and the predicate, as well as their grammatical features.

This chapter demonstrates that the demonstratives zhè and gè in Mandarin Chinese and its dialects were grammaticalized from two general classifiers in late Middle Chinese, both of which originated from ordinary nouns. Based on diachronic facts and dialectal data, the present analysis addresses the motivation and mechanism for the course of development from classifiers to demonstratives. This finding may make a significant contribution to historical linguistics.

This essay explores the relationship of literature and perversity in Roberto’s Bolaño’s short fictions “The Secret of Evil,” “The Insufferable Gaucho,” and Distant Star. While literature within the history of Latin American letters often provides a critique of or antidote to political and economic atrocities, in Bolaño’s texts literature is complicit in the very horrors it depicts. In Bolaño’s view, any effort to pit fiction and social actuality against each other in the interest of rescuing either represents a means to avoid the disturbance that, for Bolaño, defines contemporary existence.

Judith Norman takes up the complicated question of feminism in WWR.Political critiques of the history of philosophy frequently accuse philosophers of illegitimately universalizing a particular view of subjectivity – unwittingly normalizing a parochial conception of human nature, for instance.Although this is a critique that can undoubtedly be extended to Schopenhauer, it is striking that Nietzsche, drawing largely on metaphysical resources derived from Schopenhauer, was one of the first to really recognize and contest this illegitimate philosophical strategy. Norman looks at the extent to which Schopenhauer anticipated Nietzsche in this project of tracing a genealogy of the subject within a metaphysics of will, closely examining Schopenhauer’s fraught discussion of sexual difference in “The Metaphysics of Sexual Love.” This leads her to the question of the ontological status of sexual difference, and whether this cleft in nature registers at the level of transcendental subjectivity, and the consequences for Schopenhauer’s view of the subject, the question of women readers of the text, and women subjects of philosophy in general.

A predication prototypically predicates an event. Events have multiple participants in their semantic frame. Some participants are more central than others. The information packaging of event participants construes certain participants as core arguments and others as oblique arguments. Transitivity constructions are defined in terms of the prototypical expression of central participants as core argument phrases. ‘Subject’ and ‘object’ are defined crosslinguistically in terms of degree of topicality (salience) and force dynamics (subject acting on object). Basic argument encoding strategies are flagging, indexation, and word order. An exemplar approach to defining transitive constructions is taken, using the agentive change of state event of breaking as the exemplar event, following Haspelmath. Subject generally precedes verb and object in word order. Variation in alignment is based on the system of transitive and intransitive constructions, in terms of which core argument of the transitive construction the intransitive argument aligns with, including the rare case where the core arguments of intransitive constructions are split between transitive subject and object.

This chapter deals with the analyses of the grammatical phenomena that have been related to information structure in the Romance languages, and that have played a central role in the general research on the encoding of information-structure notions in the grammar and at the interfaces. An overview is presented of this work, which has offered a great contribution to our current understanding of both empirical and theoretical issues. Highly debated questions are addressed, such as the relationship between focus and newness and between topic and givenness, the grammatical and interpretive correlates of different types of focus and topics, and the ‘aboutness’ nature of topics in contrast with subjects.

The opening chapter sets out the terminological and conceptual ideas that provide a basis for the remainder of the book. Problematising the topic of musical subjectivity, it explicates the various meanings that have been given to this awkward notion and through increasing clarification proposes a range of potential meanings. Subjectivity here appears to refer to the experience of music as akin to a living being, an animate consciousness, but such that the experience may be of an apparent immediacy that shades it into a privileged first-person perspective. The second part of the chapter looks in turn to how subjectivity manifests itself both in music and in history, interrogating the notion of the musical subject through a series of questions that may be summarised as who, how and where, when and why? One of the properties of the idea of subjectivity identified here is that it is not a pre-given entity but a dynamic process that requires our own active participation for its interpretation. And thus while a number of conceptual questions still remain to be answered at the close of this chapter, it is given to the main body of the book to respond to these matters.

It is often held that only by the time of the late Sophist did Plato discover a way of dealing with puzzles about the possibility of false judgement and false statement. Earlier dialogues such as Euthydemus and Theaetetus which introduce the puzzles are thought to labour under assumptions about how language relates to reality, born of inexperience in semantics, that stood in his way. Here it is argued that in both those dialogues Plato is in fact doing something subtler than captivity to a crude picture of the way language works would allow. A more attentive reading of these two texts makes it clear that he has already identified the structural relation between subject and predicate as the key: not only to understanding how false judgement is possible, but through that to bigger questions about the relation of thought and language to the world in general. The Euthydemus, in particular, shows us how many more ways there are for an argument to go wrong than are dreamed of in the logic books. It even suggests that a failure in logic may sometimes be simultaneously a failure in love.

Chapter 4 provides examples of reanalyses, rather than different choices, that are prompted by the Principle of Determinacy. The first change involves the reanalysis of a loosely adjoined phrase as a subject argument because a topicalized subject does not result in an optimal computation. The principle also accounts for changes involving copulas, both the change from demonstrative to copula and from topic to subject. Auxiliaries and quantifiers in English provide fertile ground to investigate determinacy, because these move from lower to higher heads and specifiers, respectively. It is shown that auxiliary movement indeed violates determinacy and that options exist to circumvent it, e.g. skipping T and reanalyzing as a higher functional head. Floating quantifiers do not violate determinacy because they first move as QPs and subsequent moves are of DPs.

Non-finite clauses are always subordinate, don’t show primary tense or agreement information, often lack a subject, and often refer to a possible situation rather than an actualized one. There are five kinds: ‘to’-infinitival & bare infinitival with a plain-form verb; gerund-participial with a gerund-participle verb; past-participial with a past-participle verb; and verbless clauses. The subordinators ‘for’ and ‘to’ in infinitival clauses mark subjects and head VPs respectively.

A pronoun subject in a non-finite clause may be in genitive or accusative case. If a clause has no subject, a predicand can often be determined syntactically by looking at a linguistic antecedent, often the subject of the main clause. In other cases, it must be inferred, either from something in the discourse or as a participant in the speech act. Hollow non-finite clauses lack both a subject and a non-subject NP, the semantic content of which is recoverable from an antecedent.

Some verbs taking infinitival complements are transparent. The syntactic subject of such a verb is the predicand of its clausal complement but not of the matrix clause. The subject is said to be raised. There are also raised objects.

The clause is a special kind of phrase with a verb phrase (VP) as its head, also called its predicate. The subject is an external complement (outside the VP). Though traditional definitions of the subject fail, subjects have some characteristic properties. Notably, they usually precede the VP, but some interrogative constructions feature subject-auxiliary inversion, in which the subject is preceded by an auxiliary verb; subject pronouns are usually nominative case. Semantically, subjects are typically the predicand, a semantic term for what a predicate applies to. Objects are internal complements, and pronoun objects are usually accusative case. Some verbs license two objects: direct and indirect. The verb ‘be’ and a few others take predicative complements. Like objects, predicative complements are internal complements. Unlike objects, they can be adjective phrases and they never correspond to any passive subject. There are ascriptive and specifying uses of ‘be’. Internal complements also include various subordinate-clause and preposition-phrase complements.

This chapter engages with Asian American utopian narrative forms as a heuristic for naming the contradictory subjects, spaces, and temporalities that emerge from competing visions of emancipation in the post-1990s period. In the wake of cultural nationalisms of earlier decades, and in a moment of neoliberal utopianism that hailed the end of the Cold War as the “achievement” of universal “Western liberal democracy,” women of color feminists critiqued cultural nationalism and the neoliberal utopian pursuit of a knowable subject and endpoint. The project of the liberal individual subject, they illuminate, elides racialized, gendered, and sexual difference for emancipatory projects. Demanding alternative accounts of freedom, Asian American feminists called for “subjectless” and “collective” politics. This chapter explores how this theoretical shift coincides with Asian American writers underscoring the paradoxes of utopian forms, as producing logics of domination and freedom. Through Sesshu Foster’s Atomik Aztex (2005) and Karen Tei Yamashita’s I Hotel (2010), this chapter rethinks Aztlán and the I-Hotel as galvanizing utopian forces for the Chicano and Asian American movements. Rather than abandoning utopia, Yamashita and Foster offer the utopian as a contradictory space to challenge the nationalist essentialisms of minority movements and the market individualism of neoliberal capitalism.

The two authors come apart here, not simply because Ruse is a nonbeliever and Davies a practicing Christian. Ruse was raised a Quaker and so, thinking theologically, he thinks in a Quaker context. More than anything he is accepting (or he would be if he were still a believer) of apophatic theology. One cannot say what God is but rather what He is not. How one works out the details of the Trinity are not that important. One is committed to the Trinity on faith, and for the rest – “now we see through a glass darkly.” For Davies, by contrast, theology is grounded in the thinking of the great theologians. He believes one can make progress on understanding the Trinity. Here is where the clash comes, not so much because Ruse is a nonbeliever, but because his theology tells him that all such attempts as those of Davies are bound to fail. 1 + 1 + 1 ≠ 1.

Chapter 5 examines syntax, how sentences and phrases are built. It explores the relation between structure and meaning, showing how structure allows us to clarify ambiguity. Readers see how sentences are made up of phrases that in turn are made up of different words. These words belong to specific categories, with the category of the phrase determined by its head. The chapter explains the distinction between lexical and functional categories and presents the two basic processes for building sentences: Merge and move. Readers explore and practice the representation of sentence structure with tree diagrams. They are presented with a template for the representation of structure and shown how to use trees to indicate the difference between complements and adjuncts, and how the tree must represent not only word order but also how different phrases relate to each other. Tense is presented as the head of the sentence, with the verb phrase as its complement. In a parallel fashion, the determiner is presented as the head of the determiner phrase, with the noun phrase as its complement. Different structures such as questions, passives, and relative clauses are introduced and practiced. An appendix details step-by-step how to build syntactic trees.