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In the most typical cases, the predicand corresponds to the subject of a clause, and the predicate corresponds to a verb phrase (VP) that is the head of the clause. But there are also form-meaning mismatches, where the predicand is not a subject or where the predicate is not the head of the clause. Also, not every utterance has a predicand.
In linguistics, a verb phrase (VP) is a syntactic unit composed of a verb and its arguments except the subject of an independent clause or coordinate clause.Thus, in the sentence A fat man quickly put the money into the box, the words quickly put the money into the box constitute a verb phrase; it consists of the verb put and its arguments, but not the subject a fat man.
VP-raising, as expressed in the previous section, cannot account for Tzotzil's normal word order. If VP-raising had occurred, any further movement of direct objects or prepositional phrases would have been made prevented. [3] Aissen, however, showed that Tzotzil allows direct objects to be extracted since wh-movement occurs: [30]
The notion of a predicate in traditional grammar traces back to Aristotelian logic. [2] A predicate is seen as a property that a subject has or is characterized by. A predicate is therefore an expression that can be true of something. [3] Thus, the expression "is moving" is true of anything that is moving.
[10] [11] [12] If, however, one allows a small clause to contain a verb, then the sentences in (8d-e) can also be treated as containing small clauses: [13] The similarity across the sentences (8a-b-c) and (8d-e) is obvious, since the same subject-predicate relationship is present in all these sentences. Hence if one treats sentences (8a-b-c) as ...
Such sentences are more consistent with a theory that takes sentence structure to be relatively flat, lacking a finite verb phrase constituent, i.e. lacking the VP of S → NP VP. In order to maintain the traditional subject–predicate division, one has to assume movement (or copying) on a massive scale. The basic difficulty is suggested by ...
Inverse copular constructions challenge one of the major dogmas of the theory of clause or sentence structure, i.e. that the two basic constituents of a sentence - the noun phrase (NP) and the verb phrase (VP) - are associated with the logical/grammatical functions of subject and predicate (cf. phrase structure rules and sentence). In fact ...
A raising predicate/verb appears with a syntactic argument that is not its semantic argument but rather the semantic argument of an embedded predicate. In other words, the sentence is expressing something about a phrase taken as a whole. For example, in they seem to be trying, "to be trying" (the predicand of trying) is the subject of seem.