Heidegger

Axiom 0: Allegations of Demolition

2. What is a Predicate?

Michael Eldred wrote:

>first signification, a sentence is composed of subject + copula
>+ predicate.

>For the second signification, a sentence is composed of subject +
>predicate, where the predicate, in turn, is composed of copula +
>’predicate in the first sense’.

it is good to see that you are coming around to the view I expressed
several months ago:

as I’ve said before, there are two popular ways to parse a simple
sentence like ‘the ball is red’:

1: Subject - Copula - Predicate

2: Subject - Predicate (Copula - Complement)

in either case ‘the ball’ is the subject.

according to the first system for parsing a sentence, ‘is’ is the
copula; and, ‘red’ is the predicate. thus, a predicate that is not
explicitly present would be implicit.

according to the second system for parsing a sentence, ‘is red’ is the
predicate; but, this system would break down the predicate into its
constituent parts: copula and complement. thus, a complement that is not
explicitly present would be implicit.

[end quote from 2007-10-12 (Are you Denying that the Copula can have an
Implicit Complement?)]

>There is even a third signification in there of a predicate to the
>exclusion “of any adjunct”.

in the sentence ‘the ball is red today’, the adjunct is ‘today’. this
third signification merely means that ‘today’ is not part of the
predicate.

the following is an extract from the Wikipedia article on grammatical
adjuncts:

In linguistics, an adjunct is a sentence element that establishes the
circumstances in which the action or state expressed by the verb take
place.

The following sentence uses adjuncts of time and place:

Yesterday Lorna saw the dog in the garden.

This definition can be extended to include adjuncts that modify nouns or
other parts of speech (see noun adjunct):

The large dog in the garden is very friendly.

Adjuncts are always extranuclear; that is, removing an adjunct leaves a
grammatically well-formed sentence. They can thus be contrasted with
complements. All adjuncts are adverbials.

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adjunct]

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How do any of these ’significations’ help you establish that ‘is/am’ is
a predicate in sentences like ‘it is’ or ‘I am’?

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very puzzled, I am.

Joe

–
Philosophy is, after all, done ultimately in the first person for the
first person. — H-N Castaneda

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 http://what-am-i.net
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Posted on Monday, December 31st, 2007 at 7:10 pm
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