Verbs and predication (Ms Phung)
Verbs can be described as 'predicators', and the role of the verb in the clause can be described as 'predicating'. Could we use these notions to give a foundation to the category of verb? Can we say that verbs are defined by their role as predicators? Unfortunately, the answer to this has to be 'no'. Let's see why.
The predicate is the part of the sentence which attributes a property to a referent. The term 'property' is a bit misleading: it covers not just adjectival properties, but verbal ones too. So in (1), the referent in question is Stephen, and the properties attributed to him are all properties which consist of performing a certain action: walking home, shooting Nazis and accepting the glass. Because these actions all involve other entities (home, Nazis and the glass) the sentences include the NPs home, seventeen Nazis and the glass, which specify additional information about the action.
(1) a. Stephen walked home.
b. Stephen shot seventeen Nazis.
c. Stephen accepted the glass.
These NP objects aren't necessary for a predication, since we can remove them and still succeed in attributing properties to Stephen: the properties of walking (2a), shooting (2b) and accepting (2c):
(2) a. Stephen walked.
b. Stephen shot.
c. Stephen accepted.
As a result, it's conventional in linguistics to say that it's the verb which is the predicator in a sentence: in a well-formed English sentence, there must be a verb, but there need not be anything other than a verb. The verb can bring associated NPs along as objects or complements, as in (1), but these associated NPS don't themselves predicate, as we can see if we remove the verb from the sentences of (1):
(3) a. *Stephen home.
b. Stephen seventeen Nazis. c. Stephen the glass.
These sentences are ill-formed: in the absence of a verb, the non-subject NPs can't contribute to specifying the property attributed to Stephen. For this reason, the verb is thought of as the necessary part of the predicate, and the verb is known as the predicator.
That, then, explains what predicates and predicators are. Back to the question of whether we could define verbs in terms of predication, thereby providing a semantic basis for the category.
Unfortunately, it turns out there are also other parts of speech than the verb which can be considered as predicates. Look at (4):
(4) a. Stephen walked home ecstatic/ten feet tall/ravenous.
b. Stephen shot seventeen Nazis dead.
c. Stephen accepted the glass empty.
d. Stephen accepted the prize delighted.
Here we find additional properties being attributed to the referents of the sentence. In (4a) and (4d), the property of being ecstatic/ten feet tall/ ravenous or delighted is attributed to the sentence's subject (Stephen), while in (4b) and (4c) properties are attributed to the sentence's objects: in (4b) the property of being dead is attributed to the Nazis, and in (4c) the property of being empty is attributed to the glass.
This creates a serious problem if we want to define verbs as predicators, since what the sentences in (4) show is that not all predicators are verbs. If we're planning to identify verbs with the class of predicators, the (4) examples show that this will also include ecstatic, ten feet tall, ravenous, dead and empty as verbs a consequence we must avoid, since these words aren't verbs on anyone's criterion!