Subject and Predicate
The contrast between "subject and predicate" is a significant one in at least four different realms of discourse: grammar, epistemology, logic, and metaphysics. A large number of philosophical problems have to do with how the distinction on one level is related to that on some other level; whether there really are four such distinct realms and, if so, how they bear on one another are matters of controversy.
Grammar
In the realm of grammar, subject and predicate are sentence parts; they are, therefore, words or groups of words, and their definition and identification is a matter of syntax. In the simplest case, where the sentence consists of just two words, such as
(1) � 0A0;Bats fly,
(2) � 0A0;Fraser swims,
the subject is the noun and the predicate is the verb. Very few sentences are so simple, but an indicative sentence with just one noun and one verb remains a good paradigm for the grammatical categories of subject and predicate because we can see in it the form of the sentence stripped down to its essentials: If either of the two words were omitted, we would no longer have an indicative sentence. Furthermore, very many sentences of English, as well as of other familiar European languages, break neatly and obviously into two parts corresponding to the noun and the verb in the paradigm, and modern linguistic analysis of sentence syntax generally begins by viewing a sentence as a noun phrase plus a verb phrase:
Although subject-predicate sentences are very common in English and in other languages, this form of sentence is not the only one, other forms being exemplified in English by normal idiomatic expressions for commands, requests, salutations, and so on.
This page contains 201 words.
Subject and Predicate article
Read the rest of this article.
This article contains 3,397 words
(approx. 11 pages at 300 words per page).
Order our Predicate (grammar) Article
