Predicates and arguments

Predicates and arguments are major building blocks of sentences. The underlined parts of the following sentences are referred to as predicates.

Meg is an attorney. Nominal Predicate The sky is blue. Adjectival Predicate Wesley cried. Verbal Predicate

Predicates express ideas concerning some entities, e.g. about Meg, the sky, and Wesley in these examples. Such focal entities are called arguments. Some

1 _{Almost all native speakers of Japanese automatically assume that the protagonist of this poem}

is a young woman. In my translation course, many assume this, too, but some consider the protagonist to be a young man. Although women as well as men stay out at night drinking, Japanese sensibility precludes such a reading as non-poetic. One may counter that the assump- tion of a female protagonist is due to the fact that the author is female. However, even if the author were anonymous, I believe Japanese readers would still assume the protagonist to be female. Is this a refl ection of sexism?

arguments are obligatory, while others are optional. Understanding a predicate includes the ability to recognize how many and what kind of entities must be included as arguments. For instance, if one thinks that the verb to put requires two entities – someone who performs an act of putting and some- thing which is put – his/her understanding of to put is inadequate because it also requires an expression for specifying the location of the something.

Nominal and adjectival predicates typically require only one argument and rarely two, whereas the arguments of verbs vary between zero and three. Some meteorological predicates require no argument; however, in order to comply with the strict grammatical constraint of English, “it” is used as a dummy subject, called the expletive subject.

It’ll snow tomorrow. Zero-place Predicate Steve Jobs is the CEO of Apple. One-place Predicate Alaska is cold.

Joan dances well.

Chris is a brother of Kate. Two-place Predicate Hana is fond of red wine.

Julius resembles his mother. Sue bought a house.

Bill donated one million to the charity. Three-place Predicate

EXERCISE 5.1

Identify the number and the nature/characteristics of the obligatory argu- ments of each predicate and translate into Japanese or English.

1. be the employer of 6. 眠る

2. buy 7. 便利だ

3. admire 8. 壊す

4. invite 9. 行く

5. be boring 10. 寄贈する

English grammar is rigid as to whether the argument can be omitted or not, e.g. *They went yesterday, *I bought from Jean (the asterisks indicate ungrammatical sentences). By contrast, Japanese employs omission as a major means of textual cohesion (cf. Section 3.4: Textual meaning). This strategy is demonstrated by the opening of Shimizu Yoshinori’s hilarious novel, Kokugo nyEshi mondai hisshDhD (Japanese Entrance Exams for Earnest

Young Men), in which the protagonist, Ichiro, is introduced in the fi rst sentence,

followed by an examination question.2 _{Ichiro is named again, and then for}

the next six sentences, no overt mention of him as the subject is made.

意欲がわかなかったが、とにかく浅香一郎は最初の問題に目を通 した。 • 次の文章を読んであとの問いに答えなさい。 積極的な停滞というものがあるなら、消極的な破壊というものも あるだろうと人は言うかもしれない。なるほどそれはアイロニー である。濃密な気配にかかわる信念の自浄というものが、時とし て透明な悪意を持つことがあるということは万人の知るところで あろう。 ここまで読んで一郎は頭がくらっとした。 何が書いてあるか皆目わからないのだ。現代文の論説文を読むと いつも必ず同じ気分を味わわされる。何を言いたいのかまるっき り理解できないのだ。 ひとつひとつの言葉は、ほとんど知っているものばかりである。 積極的、もわかるし、停滞もわかる。ところが、積極的な停滞と やられると、さっぱりお手あげである。頭にイメージが何も浮か ばない。(清水義範『国語入試問題必勝法』pp. 33–4）

The following is a list of the predicates (double-underlined) and their argu- ments (single-underlined). The ellipted arguments are marked by a “Ø”: 1. (浅香一郎は）意欲がわかなかった

2. 浅香一郎は最初の問題に目を通した（me o tDsu is a complex predicate that takes two arguments.）

3. 文章を読んで (Because this should be interpreted as an imperative clause, the subject omission is structurally permitted.)

4. あとの問いに答えなさい (This is an imperative clause.) 5. 積極的な停滞というものがある

6. 消極的な破壊というものもあるだろう (darD is an auxiliary.)

7. [積極的な . . . あるだろう］と人は言うかもしれない (ka mo shirenai is an auxiliary.)

2 _{Shimizu Yoshinori (b. 1947) is often associated with the idea of pastiche (imitating previous}

works). “He assumes the exact verbal color of everything from scholarly tomes to bestsellers to advertising pamphlets with painfully absurd results” (Translator Hunter’s comment in Shimizu 1991: 259). Kokugo nyEshi mondai hisshDhD ridicules pointlessly abstruse styles of reading-comprehension test materials in college-entrance examinations and “teaches” how to determine the correct answers without even reading the examination texts. It won the Yoshikawa Eiji New Writer’s Award in 1988.

8. それはアイロニーである

9. [濃密な気配にかかわる］信念の自浄 (A relative-clause construction. The subject of kakawaru is the head of the relative clause, shinnen no jijD.) 10. [濃密な . . . というもの］が、時として透明な悪意を持つことがある

(koto ga aru is an auxiliary.)

11. [濃密な . . . ということ］は万人の知るところであろう(tokoro de arD is an auxiliary. Banjin is the subject of shiru; [nDmitsuna . . . to iu koto] is its direct object.)