Abstract:

Plato used a dichotomy to divide a sentence into its name components (ōnoma) and its declarative components (rhēma), Aristotle analyzed a proposition as the combination of a subject (hypokeimenon) and a predicate (katigoria), and Apollonius regarded nouns and verbs as the main parts of a sentence – all of these became the blueprint for the subject-predicate dichotomy in syntax. In the early 5^th century, the Roman scholar Martianus proposed the dichotomy of subject (subjectiva) and predicate (declarativa), which influenced French Carolingian scholars in the 9^th century. In the second half of the 8^th century, the Arab scholar Sibawayhi analyzed a noun sentence into the topic and the description, and a verb sentence into the agent and the action. After that, Speculative Grammar (including Modistae) and Universal Grammar accepted subject-predicate dichotomy, but did not further refine it. Through the examination of more than a dozen works on English grammar (in the 18^th and 19^th centuries), Lane introduced logical subject-predicate terms into English sentence analysis for the first time (in 1700), while Greene firstly established refined English sentence components analysis (in 1848).

Key words: subject-predicate dichotomy, Martianus, component analysis, English grammar, Greene