Formigari Lia, Poole Gabriel. Sentence and its Parts. A Psycholinguistic Theory of Syntactic Value. Le tout et ses parties. Focusing on the works of Georg von der Gabelentz, Hermann Paul and Christoph Sigwart, the paper analyses the different ways in which logically or psychologically based categories are related to the structure of sentences.
I shall borrow from Giorgio Graffi , p. The mutual inherence of these two aspects had been taken for granted by traditional general grammar, which equated the grammatical structure of the sentence with the deep structure of categorical judgement. It was called into question by 19th century genetic psychology, which tended to take as a model for sentences apperception acts, that is, psychological acts of inclusion of new information in a representational aggregation already consolidated by past experience.
An identifi cation sentence does not necessarily imply a logical judgement or an ontological commitment on the part of the speaker Steinthal , p. At most a hint of the distinction between subject and predicate is contained in identifi cation sentences, because all apperception acts imply a connection between an already consolidated representation appercipiens and a new datum appercipiendum.
Thus, an apperception act contains in nuce the two terms that will verbally manifest themselves respectively as subject and predicate Steinthal , p. Every verbal expression, word or form, has a syntactic value: the living speech is never used to express a single concept but, rather, to communicate a group of concepts related to one another, a thought. The way in which, within this group, the concepts are ordered, connected and distinguished is crucial for the functions of the words and their parts, and for delimiting the parts of discourse Gabelentz , p.
In short, every apperception is based on two terms which, however, are articulated as the syntactic constituents of the sentence only after the threshold of language is crossed. For the followers of Steinthal, the joint presence of subject and predicate was the indisputable condition for the sentence to be complete. However, the two constituents were not identifi ed on the basis of their analytical order, but of their role in pre-verbal synthesis, as appercipiendum or appercipiens.
