PREDICATE, OR PREDICATE AND ADVERBIAL MODIFIER

A long discussion has been going on concerning the structure of such sentences as He is here, or They are at home, etc. Two views have been put forward.

The traditional view, which had remained undoubted for a long time, was that these were sentences with a simple verbal predicate, expressed by a form of the verb be, and followed by an adverbial modifier of place expressed either by an adverb or by a phrase of the pattern "preposition + noun". According to this view, sentences of this type are grammatically quite different from such sentences as, He is tall, or They are on the move, which of course have a compound nominal predicate consisting of the link verb be and a predicative expressed either by an adjective or noun, or by a phrase of the pattern "preposition + noun".

However, this view began to arouse doubts and it was pointed out that there was no essential difference between the meaning and function of the verb be in one type and in the other; accordingly it would seem that the verb was a link verb in all cases, and whatever followed it was a predicative in all cases, too. It is this view that we find in Prof. A. Smirnitsky's book on English syntax. ¹ He considers the group is here in a sentence like He is here, and the group are at home in a sentence like We are at home to be a special kind of predicate, which he terms the adverbial predicate. In this way the types They are in London and They live in London are separated from each other: with the verb be the phrase "verb + preposition +', + noun" is an adverbial predicate, while with the verb live the verb alone is the predicate and the phrase "preposition + noun" is

¹ See А. И. Смирницкий, Синтаксис английского языка, стр. 115.

230 Secondary Parts in Detail

an adverbial modifier, that is, a secondary part of the sentence.

The type They are in London is thus brought closer together with the type They are glad, etc., where no doubt arises about the structure of the sentence.

It would seem that this is one of the questions winch do not admit of a definite solution that might be proved to be the only correct one. The answer which this or that scholar will give to the question is bound to be subjective, that is, some personal predilection of his for this or that way of treating language phenomena is sure to play some part in it. For instance, there is a strong argument in favour of the view that the phrase "preposition + noun" is part of the predicate, not a special secondary part of the sentence, and this is the fact that without the prepositional phrase the sentence with the verb be would not be possible: we could not say They are. This is an important point, and a point marking a real difference between the sentences They are in London and They live in London: in the latter sentence we certainly might drop the prepositional phrase, and the sentence would not on that account become impossible: They live is quite a normal sentence, though its meaning is quite different from that of the sentence They live in London: They live means much the same as They are alive.

The sentence They are in London is similar to the sentence They are glad, in so far as in both cases it is impossible to drop what follows the verb be: in both cases the result would be They are, which is impossible.

Those, on the other hand, who would prove that the prepositional phrase is an adverbial modifier, might point out that the phrase in London in both cases shows the place of the action (it answers the question Where?) and that the impossibility of leaving out the prepositional group is irrelevant for defining its syntactic function.

In this way the argument might be protracted indefinitely. In order to arrive at some sort of decision, we must give such an answer as will best suit our view of syntactic phenomena with its inevitable subjective element. So if we have to choose one of the above alternatives, it would seem that the arguments in favour of the group are in London being the predicate are more convincing than those given by the other side. So we will rather prefer to say that in the sentence They are in London there is only the subject and the predicate and no adverbial modifier at all.

A similar question would of course arise in a number of other sentences and the same sort of reasoning would have to be applied there.

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