July
31, 2017 Monday
Bedtime
Story
Understanding Predicate Grammatically and Syntactically
Last
night I left you with fascinating subject of predicate which can be studied at
the least under three different fields: mathematical logic as we have already
been through, grammar and linguistics.
The
traditional grammar perspective of predicate is perhaps well known and
understood whereas the second one, viz. semantics, which is more modern, takes
its inspiration from logic founded by Gottlob Frege.
By
the way, the name of this classic nineteenth century logician and mathematician
will keeps popping up whenever one goes into mathematical logic or foundations
of mathematics.
Seen
from the old grammatical perspective, a predicate is a property that an object
has.
In
other words, a predicate is associated with a true value of certain object.
Of
course, the way we as children were taught was slightly different though it
meant the same.
We
are taught that the predicate is one of the two pain parts of a sentence, the
other being the subject.
The
predicate provided information about the subject and in a way, tells something
true about the subject or at least, assumed to do so.
Consider
the sentence:
The
ape is enjoying listening to music.
So
here we have the declarative sentence that is linking the subject (the ape) to
a verb along with an adverb, the whole of second part being the verb phrase.
The
whole of the second part of the sentence, which is essentially a verb phrase,
is the predicate.
The
more modern view of predicate that comes from the influence of Gottlob Frege where
predicate is seen as assigning a property to a single argument or something
that relates two or more arguments to each other.
With
this much in your armory, let us return back to the concept of well-formedness
in language.
In
linguistics, well-formedness is that attribute of a sentence or a clause that
adheres to all the grammar of that language.
But
even here there can be a problem.
Consider
the sentence below that confirms to all the grammatical rules of English
language.
Colorless
green ideas sleep furiously.
This
is a famous sentence that was constructed by the most famous linguistic ever -
Noam Chomsky in his 1957 book “Syntactic structures”.
This,
by the way, was his first book which actually was more like a monograph of
about a hundred pages targeted particularly for the students of his field.
What
he wanted to prove was that a sentence can be perfectly grammatically
well-formed (no syntax errors) and yet can be semantically a nonsense.
Stay tuned to the voice of an average story storytelling
chimpanzee or login at http://panarrans.blogspot.com
Good night mon ami and my fellow cousin ape.
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Another great educator and a teacher that I am aware of is
Professor Subhashish Chattopadhyay in Bangalore, India.
While I narrate stories, Professor Subhashish an electronic
engineer and a former professor at BARC, does and teaches real mathematics and
physics.
He started the participation of Indian students at the
International Physics Olympiad.
Do visit him here:
All his books can be downloaded for free through this link:
For edutainment and English education of your children, I
recommend this large collection of Halloween Songs for Kids:
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