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The subject complement is bold in the following examples: The lake was a tranquil pool. – Predicative nominal; Here, was is a copula (a concomitant form of be) that links the subject complement a tranquil pool (which has the head noun pool), to the subject the lake (which has the head noun lake). The lake is tranquil. – Predicative adjective
An early example occurs in a sermon by Isaac Barrow published in 1741. [12]" … his oaths are no more than waste and insignificant words, deprecating being taken for serious, or to be understood that he meaneth anything by them, but only that he useth them as expletive phrases … to plump his speech, and fill up sentences."
In informal speech of English, the copula may also be dropped in general sentences, as in "She a nurse." It is a feature of African-American Vernacular English, but is also used by a variety of other English speakers. An example is the sentence "I saw twelve men, each a soldier." [11]
A subject-gapped RC behaves differently in Cantonese from English by being after the head noun (prenominal RC), which always yields a VOS order. It is extremely rare for SVO languages to adopt a prenominal RC structure. In a sample of 756 languages, only 5 languages have that VOS combination (less than 0.01%), one of which is Cantonese. [10]
The stereotypical subject immediately precedes the finite verb in declarative sentences and represents an agent or a theme. The subject is often a multi-word constituent and should be distinguished from parts of speech, which, roughly, classify words within constituents. In the example sentences below, the subjects are indicated in boldface.
An example of SVO order in English is: Andy ate cereal. In an analytic language such as English, subject–verb–object order is relatively inflexible because it identifies which part of the sentence is the subject and which one is the object. ("The dog bit Andy" and "Andy bit the dog" mean two completely different things, while, in case of ...
A subject complement (variously called a predicative expression, predicative, predicate noun or adjective, or complement) appears in a predicate with a linking verb (also called a copula). A subject complement is a noun, adjective, or phrase that refers to the subject of the linking verb, illustrated in the following examples. Elizabeth is a ...
In an ordinary English clause, the subject is normally the same as the topic/theme (example 1), even in the passive voice (where the subject is a patient, not an agent: example 2): The dog bit the little girl. The little girl was bitten by the dog. These clauses have different topics: the first is about the dog, and the second about the little ...