The Syntactic Forms of Predication

Abstract

In Chapter 2 I argued for a syntactic predication relation which cannot be reduced to a thematic relation. I argued that this syntactic relation is a saturation relation between a predicate and an argument, its subject, and I claimed that there was a locality relation between subject and predicate, namely that subject and predicate have to c-command each other. The discussion in Chapter 2 concentrated on primary, or clausal, predication relations, and in particular on the predication relation within small clause complements of consider and other ECM verbs, where the predication relation is realised in its simplest form. By this I mean that small clause predication has two basic characteristics, and the predication relation is more complicated if either of these properties is changed. Small clause predication is direct predication, by which I mean that the subject and predicate c-command each other, and it is primary predication, which means that the subject and predicate form a constituent. If either of these properties does not hold of a predication relation, then we need to say something more than what was said in Chapter 2.KeywordsDirect ObjectPrimary PredicationEvent ArgumentMaximal ProjectionSmall ClauseThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.