| The purpose of the next three chapters is to enumerate and define in a general way the two principal components of a sentence: the subject and predicate. These terms originally referred to logical components, but they have come to refer to their syntactic analogues as well. The logical predicate has one or more arguments. The logical predicate together with its arguments comprise a proposition. Now, if we assert this proposition as a declarative sentence in English, it is usually the subject that expresses the first argument of the logical predicate. That there is a difference between logical syntax and English syntax may at times cause some consternation. The other arguments of the logical predicate find expression in various objects or other complements of the verb in the sentence, these being terms for various parts of the English sentence’s predicate. Subjects, objects and complements in English consist in various kinds of noun phrases, noun clauses, adjectival phrases and adverbial phrases. From a logical standpoint these last two often relate to the rest of the sentence as either subordinate or superordinate predicate expressions. In addition the adjectival phrase is sometimes a subordinate structure of a noun phrase, and sometimes a structure belonging with the syntactic predicate. Similarly the adverbial phrase is sometimes a subordinate structure of a verb phrase, of an adjective phrase, or sometimes a structure belonging with the syntactic predicate. Some linguists might not choose to call these components “phrases,” since often they are but a single word. These investigators use the name of the part of speech together with the -(i)al suffix, i.e., nominal, verbal, adverbial, and adjectival. Further, there are other components of a sentence — mainly words like the conjunction, which indicate syntactic relations. To some extent these correspond to some of the logical connectives. Typically there are several levels of structural elements between the sentence seen as a whole and the words that make it up. In these next few chapters we give an overview of the components of the sentence which later chapters cover in much more detail. Many of the grammatical terms, concepts, and other elements reviewed are built on traditional grammar as introduced in another work on this site (Southworth & Goddard, 1889). |