This issue addresses questions surrounding predication. Predication is typically defined as making a claim or statement — that is, saying something that is truth-evaluable. The canonical manner of achieving predication would appear to be the sentence, made up of a noun phrase (NP), e.g., [Np Sandy] and a verb phrase (VP), e.g., [vp plays the fiddle].

Two central questions arise concerning this basic view of predication. The first has to do with what varieties predication comes in. The second is about various ways of achieving predication.

The Turkic language Sakha (Yakut) uses a copular verb with predicate nominals but not with predicate adjectives or verbs in certain environments, including relative clauses, nominalized clauses, and complements to nouns. Previous work takes this as evidence that adjectives but not nouns are true one-place predicates. However, unaccusativity diagnostics show that adjectives pattern with nouns in Sakha, as in other languages: neither is inherently predicative without a predicative functional head. The need for a copula with predicate nominais in certain environments can be explained using Richards’s distinctiveness condition. Relative clauses, noun complements, and nominalization structures all bring a nominal head in close contact with the predicate. If the predicate itself is nominal, a verbal copula must intervene to separate the predicate from the embedding head of the same category.

This article presents new data from a number of Germanic languages concerning the agreement patterns found in copular clauses that contain two nominais; in both clauses with specificational readings (such as The problem is your parents) and those with what are here termed readings of assumed identity (such as If I were you or In my dream I was you). It is argued that the specificational sentences involve asymmetric equative structures where one nominal is interpreted as in a concealed question, and that the cross-linguistic differences in agreement patterns found in the languages considered follow from the copula lexicalizing either Tense or a lower head.

This article addresses inversion in an inverse (VSO) language, Niuean, focusing on two issues. First, it has been proposed that in certain types of copular sentences, such as pseudo-cleft constructions (PCCs), the predicate rather than the subject may move into the specifier position of TP. This raises the question of PCCs in a language in which the predicate normally moves there. Such sentences might exhibit their normal inverse order or the inverse of this. The second issue is what constitutes the predicate in a PCC. The headless relative (and not the DP) is usually analyzed as the predicate because, in standard theories of predication, a referential nominal cannot be a predicate. However, in Niuean PCCs, the DP is usually analyzed as the predicate. I propose that it is in fact a reduced headless relative with a null predicate. It becomes clear that there is no special copular inversion: the inversion requirement is taken care of by the general predicate-fronting process. The analysis thus sheds new light on the general nature of copular inversion and allows Niuean PCCs to fall into the standard view of predication theory.

This article discusses semantic theories of generic sentences that seek to tie their meaning closely to their use, rather than giving more traditional truth-conditional semantic treatments. It focuses on McConnell-Ginet’s recent work and defends truth-conditional approaches combined with a traditional semantics-pragmatics distinction.

“Simple generics” with bare plural subjects (e.g., dogs bark) predicate of a kind a property that the kind “inherits” from its individual members. But what does that inheritance amount to if it is not, like most dogs bark, based on how many individuals have the property. My conclusion: there is no determinate account of which (fundamentally individual-level) properties can be truly predicated of a kind: generics are not quantificational, and language users’ interests guide judgments on their truth-conditions. At the same time, even “canonical” predications of ordinary predicates of ordinary individuals are not so straightforward as they might appear. Generic claims about social groups show the indeterminacy of truth conditions for simple generics and the relation to stereotypes and sometimes conflicting interests.

Predication is widely considered to be a fundamental feature of human language and conceptual structure. This article offers a reassessment of the central role that predication plays within current theories of grammar, by calling into question the universality of predication and its nature as a primitive, irreducible notion. It proposes a new definition of predicate, as a complex emergent entity derived from the alignment of two independent elements of conceptual structure: thematic role assignment and headedness.