From: Moon-Ryul Jung (moon@saint.soongsil.ac.kr)
Date: Mon Jan 08 2001 - 22:14:51 EST
[Moon]
> > You have two choices from which to choose the subject or predicate, that
> > is, POU and hH KAUCHSIS.
[Steve]
>
> The major thrust of my question was whether there really are two choices.
> What I'm driving at is whether it is legitimate to view an adverb (or
> prepositional phrase) as either the subject or predicate when it may be
> perfectly natural to take it as simply modifying a verb (in this case an
> implied ESTIN). I realize that there are occurrences of adverbs (and
> prepositional phrases) with the article that function substantivally, but is
> it correct to understand a simple adverb to be the subject or predicate? If
> so, how can one distinguish between an adverb that is simply modifying the
> verb and one that is the subject or predicate?
[Moon]
Aha! I get your point. Adverbs modify ordinary verbs, but I never
thought that they modify copulative verbs like ESTIN.
Consider "Mary is in the garden". In this case,
"Is in the garden" is predicate to the subject "Mary".
Adverbial "In the garden" does not seem to modify "IS".
If so, "Mary is" itself should be
able to form a complete sentence and make sense. But it is not.
In fact, "is" simply links "Mary" and "in the garden", so that
"in the garden" is really a predicate to "Mary".
In Greek, copulative verbs are not needed to say "Mary is in the
garden". In Greek, we would have a sentence "Mary in the garden".
Here, it is more obvious that "Mary" is the subject and "in the
garden" is the predicate, or vice versa. Any sentence has
the subject and the predicate.
In sum, in the case of copulative verbs, adverbials do not
"modify" them, but are predicates linked to the subjects via
the copulative verbs.
[Moon]
> > In POU hH KAUCHSIS, POU is indefinite whereas hH KAUCHSIS is definite.
> > In this pattern, the definite part is the subject and the indefinite part
> > predicate, at least typically. I am not sure if there are no
> > counter-examples.
>
[Steve]
> Yes, I understand that when we have two words from which to choose, the more
> definite one will be the subject. What I am really wondering, though, is
> whether POU (as an adverb) is truly a candidate for either subject OR
> predicate.
>
[Moon]
Because POU hH KAUCHSIS is a complete sentence in itself, one of the two
parts should be either the subject or the predicate.
So, the whole problem comes from the assumption that ESTIN is omitted from
POU hH KAUCHSIS. Here POU itself is a predicate. Perhaps I am in a better
position to understand this problem, because my mother tongue, Korean,
has sentences of the forms SUBJECT ADJECTIVE and SUBJECT VERB.
In contrast, in English, the form SUBJECT ADJECTIVE is ungrammatical.
But don't kids at 4 or 5 often use such forms?
Moon
Moon-Ryul Jung
Sogang Univ, Seoul, Korea
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