On the boundary between syntax and logic

Abstract

The subject of the present article is the assertion that the main categories of internal syntax which appear within a simple sentence, such as subject, predicate, object and other modifiers, are not grammatical but logical means. The ground for such an opinion may be the fact that the above-mentioned categories of syntax are not expressed by grammatical means in most languages best known and investigated. They are, then, not expressed grammatically in the Indo-European, Semitic and Ural-Altaic languages. The opposite pole of our conception, however, is the assertion that the mentioned syntactical categories may be denoted with grammatical means and that there are languages in the world in which they are just in such way uttered.