Predicative nominative nouns as a special case of noun predicates, illustrated by the predicative noun ‘hope’

Abstract

The aim of the present article is to describe a specific form of noun predication. Structures of this type consist of at least two constituent elements: a predicavely empty verb and another part of speech – semantically constitutive, though formally subordinate. Most often this could be a noun, but it’s also possible that an adjective or adverb appears in this position. Since this noun takes on the predicative function, we speak of predicative nouns and noun predication, whilst the verb is referred to as a supporting verb. The author focuses on those cases in which the noun predicate occurs in the specific position of the subject of the sentence, and thus in the nominative case, and proposes the term ‘nominative predication’ (or ‘subject predication’ in non-inflected languages) for this phenomenon. The predicate noun in this analysis is ‘hope’. The research method involved comparing a list of supporting verbs found in existing Polish dictionaries with a list extracted from various online texts, mostly of a religious, artistic or stylised artistic nature, in which the predicate noun under study appeared in the nominative case. The issue of aspectual pairs of auxiliary verbs is also discussed, leading to the conclusion that auxiliary verbs undergo irregular aspectual changes, particularly those that form the perfect aspect through prefixation. Although these constructions are quite rare in the language and tend to be found in written and literary contexts, it seems worthwhile to analyse them in order to gain a complete picture of the language. As a result, a much more comprehensive list of supporting verbs for the predicative noun ‘hope’ in nominative predication has been compiled.