On the Linguistic Status of Predication

The paper offers a case against any general philosophical or conceptual account of predication that seeks to explain or otherwise undergird the semantic significance of linguistic structure. First, a traditional philosophical approach that analyses the subject/predicate distinction in terms of a primitive notion of ‘aboutness’, i.e., a predicate expresses something about the subject, is rejected on the grounds that it fails to respect the structure of natural language in fairly trivial ways. Secondly, a more sophisticated account of predication offered by Liebesman (2015) is assessed. The phenomena Liebesman presents as evidence for his account are readily explicable in ways that precisely turn on the particular linguistic structures at issue rather than upon the general notion of predication Liebesman offers. We have, the paper concludes, good reason to give up on a substantive account of predication as one that tells us, semantically or conceptually, what predication amounts to in general, for all cases, but none of the foregoing affects the potential for structural accounts of predication that tie the relation to particular otherwise sanctioned semantic-syntactic relations.