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In linguistics, a small clause consists of a subject and its predicate, but lacks an overt expression of tense. [1] Small clauses have the semantic subject-predicate characteristics of a clause, and have some, but not all, properties of a constituent. Structural analyses of small clauses vary according to whether a flat or layered analysis is ...
Predicates may also be collective or distributive. Collective predicates require their subjects to be somehow plural, while distributive ones do not. An example of a collective predicate is "formed a line". This predicate can only stand in a nexus with a plural subject: The students formed a line. — Collective predicate appears with plural ...
The predicate is a verb phrase that consists of more than one word. In the backyard, the dog barked and howled at the cat. This simple sentence has one independent clause which contains one subject, dog, and one predicate, barked and howled at the cat. This predicate has two verbs, known as a compound predicate: barked and howled. (This should ...
A simple sentence is defined as the combination of a subject and a predicate, but if no subject is present, how can one have a sentence? Subject-less clauses are absent from English for the most part, but they are not unusual in related languages. In German, for instance, impersonal passive clauses can lack a recognizable subject, e.g.
A predicative expression (or just predicative) is part of a clause predicate, and is an expression that typically follows a copula or linking verb, e.g. be, seem, appear, or that appears as a second complement of a certain type of verb, e.g. call, make, name, etc. [1] The most frequently acknowledged types of predicative expressions are predicative adjectives (also predicate adjectives) and ...
The subject is defined as the verb argument that appears outside the canonical finite verb phrase, whereas the object is taken to be the verb argument that appears inside the verb phrase. [3] This approach takes the configuration as primitive, whereby the grammatical relations are then derived from the configuration.
The understood subject of the gerunds in these sentence is non-discriminate; any generic person will do. In such cases, control is said to be "arbitrary". Any time the understood subject of a given predicate is not present in the linguistic or situational context, a generic subject (e.g. 'one') is understood.
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.