The sentence, as structured by a predication, is traditionally the core unit of gram- mar. But it has remained unclear how to explain the sentence for many decades. The traditional Aristotelian notion of the sentence conceives it as consisting of a subject, a predicate, and a sign of Tense. But generative grammar has resisted regarding putatively ‘semantic’ notions such as subject or predicate as theoretical primitives of grammatical description, attempting to reduce them to formal notions, and the notion of sentence has not fared better. This is manifest in how early generative grammar in the era of Phrase Structure Grammar (PSG) registers the puzzle that the sentence causes in a rule such as (3), where the category ‘S’, unlike the ‘lexical’ categories N or V, stands in no inherent relation to the categories of its parts. Neither the noun nor the verb‘projects’:
(3) S!NP VP
While stipulative, this rule brings out the fact that a sentence is not a part of speech, or projected from the lexicon. This same insight is later brought out in Moro’s (1997; 2000) configurational analysis of predication, which maintains that ‘all and only bare small clauses instantiate predicative linking’ (Moro, 2000: 71), where the form of such a Small Clause is as in (4), where X and Y are categories and XP and YP are their respective maximal projections, none of which projects further or lends its label to the structure as a whole:
(4) [SCXP YP]
If predication is not lexical, it should have no label within PSG. On this view, no predicative linking exists where a head takes a complement (5), or a head combines with another head (6)2:
(5) [X YP] (6) [X Y]
Moro’s hypothesis is highly restrictive: it gives us a specific grammatical correlate of predication, before one element of the Small Clause moves out of it and a sentence- level predication is generated. If Moro is right, we may therefore conclude that predication does indeed have a grammatical signature to it.3 We might as well conclude that predication is the relation that is realized in the [XP YP] configuration, since no other system appears to exhibit a similarly specific signature for this relation. Logic, in particular, presupposes a classification of primitive symbols into terms and predicates in its lexicon. Thus, in a logic class onfirst order predicate logic, a student might be given a sentence like‘Socrates flies’. He is then told to look for the argument and the predicate. The sentence is viewed as containing two lexical items. As long as proper names are regarded as referential, the choice is clear:‘Socrates’ is the argu- ment and‘flies’ is the predicate. So the ‘logical form’ is flies (Socrates). The lexical entries for these two words tell us that Socrates is mapped to an object, flies to a set or property. This approach not only takes predication for granted, but it misinter- prets it as lexical: as the denotation of a designated set of lexical items. This is the logical version of the lexicalist misunderstanding of parts of speech distinctions: ‘predicate’ does not mean the same as ‘verb’. No word is a predicate lexically; nor is any part of speech.
2 A form of combination that is the grammatical origin of the noun–verb distinction, hence the parts of
speech, according to Kayne (2011).
3 Whether Moro’s analysis is ultimately successful in reducing the notion of predication configuration-
ally is another question, discussed in Rosselló (2008), who however agrees with the need for a configur- ational analysis.
Moro’s analysis brings out this latter point formally as well: being the predicate in a predicational relation is not an intrinsic property of YP. For YP as such also occurs in, say, (5), where it functions as an argument. YP thus is the predicate in question only relationally, relative to a subject. The same then applies to the notion of subject. Nothing is a subject because of its phrasal status, say as a DP, or its lexical status, say as a nominal, or its semantic status as being‘about some object’. Thus, a subject need not be a DP, it need not be a nominal, and it need not pick out some object: rather, it is a grammatical notion. The same is true again for the logical opposite of predica- tivity, namely referentiality. Referentiality is not a property determined by a phrase in isolation, let alone a lexical item in isolation.‘Man’ does not refer to any particular man; ‘the man’ can. The former is a lexical item; the latter is not. Even a definite description need not be singularly referential. ‘The bus’ can be used to refer to a specific bus (‘the bus is here’), but it need not be (‘I always take the bus after work’). The point is reinforced once more, and in a more dramatic way, if we realize that the same phrase can play different grammatical roles at different stages of the derivation. Thus, a DP like ‘this man’, looked at in isolation, certainly seems to be both referential and a paradigmatic argument. But as an argument it is nonetheless interpreted as a thematic role, which is technically a predicate. Similarly, a CP like ‘this is the man’, looked at non-relationally, is referential in the sense of denoting a truth value when asserted. But embedded as an argument, it will act as a predicate applying to a mental event, as in ‘believes [this is the man]’, and it will not be interpreted as a truth value.
The combination of a subject with a predicate resulting in a predication with a truth value moreover does not have the nature of either a subject or a predicate, any more than it is a noun or a verb. This is also what the traditional semantic intuition suggests that a YP (e.g.‘loves Mary’) predicated of an XP (‘John’) denotes neither what X denotes nor what Y denotes, but a truth, which is neither X nor Y and formal- ontologically distinct from either of them. A grammatical relation, then, again, cannot be captured lexically. A predication, rather, has no conceptual-lexical content at all, and it is no lexical category, in the sense of reflecting processes of categorization of environmental features.
If so, we would not expect predication to be illuminated by ‘mapping’ such a configuration to any kind of external and non-relational and non-grammatical object, such as some ‘relation of predication’ (perhaps a set-theoretical construct) or a metaphysical object, such as a state of affairs. In fact, the search for objectual or conceptual correlates for the structural relation in question—for something out there in the world that corresponds to subjects, predicates, grammatical Tense, and syntactic configurations—will seem misguided.
Such an attempt can be found in Russell’s (1903) attempt to map ontology from the parts of speech rather than grammar: in this framework, ‘substantives’ denote objects, adjectives denote properties, and verbs denote relations. For example, in
‘A is different [differs] from B’, the verb denotes the relation of ‘difference’ (Russell, 1903, }54). The verb, Russell suggests, accounts for the character of the sentence as truth-evaluable. This leads Russell to consider (and leave unresolved) the immediate puzzle of why, in a list consisting of A, the relation of difference, and B, no truth value arises, and of why, in a nominalization such as‘A’s being different from B’, a verb should be present and yet evaluability for truth is absent. If predication and truth evaluability is due to a lexical fact, it should be present when the relevant lexical item is present. This puzzle illustrates the problems of a lexicalist and intrinsicalist approach, which regards grammatical function as intrinsic to lexical items or phrases. Such an approach, which is maintained throughout much of the history of analytic philosophy and in formal compositional semantics, is also illustrated in Davidson’s (1967) suggestion to replace the Russellian ‘verb-as-relation’ view with the ‘verb-as- object’ view, where the object in question is said to be an ‘event’. We come back to semantic compositionality more systematically in the next subsection.
As noted, when X-bar theory replaced PSG, it‘corrected’ the ‘defect’ noted in (3) by making sentences come out as projections of a lexical inflectional feature after all, namely Inflection/Tense (I/T), with subjects as specifiers of the node that these head. But as we would expect from the above discussion, the X-bar theoretic conception of the sentence as a projection of I/T has never seemed particularly illuminating, inviting the suspicion of some contemporary thinkers that perhaps grammatical theory should not regard the sentence as an explanandum at all. Pietroski (2011), in particular, on the basis of a Neo-Davidsonian semantic motivation, suggests that the sentence is not the central organizing principle of grammar, and that notions such as singular reference and truth should be relegated to post-syntactic components. Recent Merge-based syntax has even less to say about the notion of sentence than PSG or X-bar theory, continuing the traditional tendency and bringing it to a peak: if we deplete the structure-building algorithm of any category-specific elements, redu- cing it to recursion, what PSG left out can be accounted for even less.
The insight from (3) and from Moro that we want to maintain is that predication is not a relation between a lexical category label and itself: it is not the result of projection. It is, rather, a relation between two lexically specified and functionally fully expanded/projected categories, the combination of which, in the right configur- ation, takes us somewhere else: the grammatical. The question of the content of grammar now arises again: What cognitive transition does it mark? With grammar at our disposal, we now can, as Frege famously noted, refer to a given concept (as in‘the concept horse’), in which case it will be an object (of reference), and it will then be correct to say, as Frege famously did, that‘the concept horse is not a concept’. But we can also use it as a predicate (as in‘Ellie is a horse’ or ‘every horse’), in which case it will be a function, in Frege’s terminology. So is ‘horse’ a function or an object? Is‘Vienna’ an object (a city)? It certainly can be, as in ‘Vienna is a city’, but it need not, as in‘Trieste is no Vienna’, where it, in ontological parlance, ‘denotes a property’ (the property of being Vienna). So does‘Vienna’ denote a property, then, as on the
‘predicate’ view of proper names (Burge, 1973)? Does a verb denote a relation, as on Russell’s view, or an object, as on Davidson’s? These questions, we argue, are meaningless, since they involve a category mistake: questions of denotation are answered by an analysis of grammatical function on an occasion of language use, not lexical content. Grammar enables the forms of reference in question, depending on what structures it generates.
A percept lexicalized as a lexeme makes as such no predictions about how it will be grammaticalized—whether it becomes a noun or a verb, a predicate or an argument, etc. Imagine a creature that perceives and can form equivalence classes of perceptual inputs, applying them adaptively. One such class—let us call it water—will be applied to things that we would call water when it perceives this substance, and in these moments it will be connected causally to H2O, as a chemical analysis reveals.
With another such concept, horse, it will be connected causally to a certain natural kind, a species. But no such creature need thereby be able to refer to something as a substance as opposed to an object, say, as we can when we use the bare noun water as opposed to the phrase a drop of water; or to refer to an object as opposed to a property, as when using a proper name such as‘Ellie’ or a referential DP such as ‘this horse’, as opposed to using a verb phrase predicatively, such as ‘BE a horse’; or to put the two together to obtain a judgement with a truth value (‘Ellie is a horse’), which could be asserted or denied and will reflect the way the world is, if asserted and indeed true. Unlike the question of whether a particular substance we call‘water’ is indeed H2O, or whether H2O exists, the availability of a system of such formal- ontological distinctions is not a question of material existence or empirical inquiry: we cannot investigate the non-linguistic material world so as to find out. The question of ‘whether there are properties’ out there, along with tables, water, and horses, cannot be decided by empirical inquiry. Grammar, in inducing such distinc- tions, is foundational for experience, not itself given in experience.
With the notion of truth, a notion of‘world’ arrives, and the same considerations apply here. The world, as Wittgenstein (1922) put it in the opening proposition of the Tractatus,‘ist alles, was der Fall ist’ (all that is the case). What is the case is what is true. But truth requires predication (in the present sense), and thus the sentence (viewed as a grammatical object). It follows logically that there is no‘world’ without the sentence (though, obviously, there always is an ‘environment’, in which the animal behaves adaptively in its niche). Whatever a chimpanzee might think, he doesn’t think about ‘the world’ as such, as philosophizing hominins tend to do. The arrival of the sentence, for these reasons, or the transition from a perceptually and conceptually given world to one that is grammaticalized, is a truly momentous one. Only in such a world can there be such a thing as a metaphysics, or science.
Nothing we have got so far accounts for this transition. Predication has no conceptual content; there is nothing to visualize it; and it is not a part of speech. We could say that it is‘purely structural’, but then again it is not, for it is not purely structural, in the way that a fractal geometric pattern is, say. And it is crucial to the
approach above that any predication has content and is unthinkable without it: a predication at the sentential level gives rise to a unit of structure that can necessar- ily—or ipso facto—be evaluated for truth. A person uttering: ‘John left’, with normal intonation, would be contradicted by someone else replying:‘That is not true’. Hence he did assert something as true, even if no lexical concept of truth was used (a point to which we return in Chapter9).4But this means that it will in some sense co-vary with the world: if the world is as the sentence says, then the sentence is ipso facto true. Predication as a grammatical relation therefore comes with content, and indeed with the most paradigmatic form of content that there is: truth conditional content. Ultimately, any account of predication will have to respect this double constraint: it is structural and relational, and hence not a part of speech or a concept, but it is contentful, and indeed it has a content that no part of speech has, and no lexical item. One could, of course, simply abstract from the intrinsic content of grammar—the whole and vast expansion of the space of meaning that it comes with—and restrict oneself to a‘formal’ analysis of it. One could talk of grammar solely, say, in terms of Merge, recursion, uninterpretable features, their elimination under Agree, and local- ity domains. In a similar way, one could analyse a cooking recipe purely formally in terms of a computation of symbols embedding others in a hierarchy of steps, perhaps leaving the connection of this analysis to the actual recipe and the ingredients to an ‘interface’. Foundational problems in our understanding of semantics may well make such a formal treatment of grammar advisable, and they did so in the 1960s, as Chomsky (1965) convincingly argued. The increasing importance, however, of the C-I interface in Minimalist grammar leads to more probing questions about its nature, and the search for a more‘principled’ explanation of grammar in the sense of Chomsky (2004) leads to the re-emergence of this issue. And as Chomsky (1965) suggested, the formal treatment of grammar at the expense of semantics was never meant to be principled or axiomatic: instead, the‘boundary separating syntax and semantics (if there is one)’ should ‘remain open until these fields are much better understood’ (Chomsky, 1965: 77, 159).
Ultimately, the formal strategy will only work if the ‘content’ that we locate on the‘other’ (non-linguistic) side of the interface in question does not itself depend on the ‘form’ that we posit on the linguistic side. It cannot work, if the form
4 A sentence fragment lacking the relation of predication will not be truth bearing in the same sense.
A large literature on‘fragments’ maintains that even sub-sentential units can be evaluated for truth, either because they contain elided material (Merchant,2004) or because such material is unneeded (Stainton, 2006). Hinzen (2013a) argues that both views can only be maintained by ignoring semantic differences between the fragment and the grammatical structure that would be truth-evaluable. For example, the content of‘Nice shirt!’ is not that of ‘This is a nice shirt’ or ‘You are wearing a nice shirt’, which are both grammatically distinct from the fragment in question, and differ in meaning. In particular, they can both be embedded, while the fragment cannot be; and the fragment carries affect, which its propositional renderings do not convey. Of course, one can develop notions of meaning that abstract from such differences.
of language is the form of a content that does not exist without language—as of course we argue here. The opposite has been the traditional assumption, where semantic content has been taken to be independent of linguistic form—the very rationale for adding a‘semantic component’ to grammar that is in charge of content and generates it via non-grammatical operations such as functional application or predicate modification (see e.g. Heim and Kratzer, 1998; see also Jackendoff, 2002). Historically, the assumption has been so influential that it is by now firmly institu- tionalized, with philosophers solely focused on ‘content’ to the near-exclusion of syntax (‘form’), while syntacticians are involved with ‘pure form’, leaving semantics—matters of truth and reference—to the philosophers and logicians.5
Accounting for the content that grammar has in a separate‘semantic component’ seems to be impossible, however, if this content is relational. Suppose we deny this, and we postulate an ontology of‘properties’ qua entities ‘denoted’ by the relational or predicative part of a sentence or thought. If there were such entities, then expressions functioning predicatively become‘names’ of such objects, eliminating the relational character of predication in the sense above and seemingly solving our problem—all content is now intrinsic to the lexical items involved, nothing is relational, and insofar as meanings are complex and propositional, what puts lexical meanings together is nothing in the grammar but composition operations in our semantic component. But, of course, the problem is then not solved, for if one now asks what these new‘objects’—properties—are, the answer is that they are in every respect like objects, except in that they do not behave like objects precisely insofar as they behave as predicates that apply to objects.6
We would then have come full circle: the existence of predicative units in linguistic expressions led us to postulate a new entity, a property, but in answering the question what kind of ‘object’ this is, the best we could do is to point to the relation of predication (or a relation such as ‘instantiation’). Not only is this circular, but the theoretical advance is purchased at the cost of a well-known paradox known since