The Classification of Words

§ 383. Of much greater importance are sentences of the type / live. The word / contains the person component of predicativity and the word live carries the tense and mood components. Thus the sentence / live has predicativity plainly expressed by a positive two-member predication.
The sentence / live regarded as a model is much more pro­ductive than the model Rain because the predication can express different relations to the situation of speech: differ­ent persons, different tenses, different moods. It is hardly necessary to say that in actual speech an almost limitless variety of sentences are built on this model by combining words of different lexemes.
§ 384. The main parts of the sentence are those whose func­tion it is to make the predication. They are the subject and the predicate of the sentence.
The subject tells us whether the predication involves the speaker (7, we ...), his interlocutor (you ...) or some other person or thing (he, John, the forest ...). The predicate may also tell us something about the person, but it usually does not supply any new information. It merely seconds the sub­ject, corroborating, as it were, in a general way the person named by the subject (I am ..., you are ..., he, John, the fo­rest is ...). Neither does the predicate add information as to the number of persons or things involved Here it again seconds the subject. In this sense we say that the predicate depends on the subject. But in expressing the tense and mood compo­nents of predicativity the predicate is independent.
§ 385. Since a person or thing denoted by any noun or noun equivalent (except /, we and you) is a 'third person' (see § 148) and a sentence may contain several nouns, there must be something in the sentence to show which of the nouns is the subject of the predication. The Indo-European languages use the follo'wing devices:

1. 
   the nominative case (Встретил зайца медведь),
   
2. 
   grammatical combinability (Цветы солнце любят,
   Цветы солнце любит ¹) Two windows has this house.
   (Nursery rhyme).
   

¹ A Martinet writes: "Everything would be simpler if the nomina­tive case were always unambiguously distinguished from the other cases There would then never be any need to resort to the mark of the plural agreement to indicate which noun is the subject". (A Functional View of Language, Oxford, 1962)
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с) the position of the noun (Б ы т ие определяет сознание).
In English the nominative case has been preserved only with six pronouns. Grammatical combinability, as shown in the previous paragraph, is important, but it plays a much smaller role than in Russian. It is not observed, for instance, in cases like / (he, she, they, John, the students) spoke ... So the position of the noun or noun-equivalent is of the greatest importance.
E.g. John showed Peter a book of his.
When position and combinability clash, position is usually decisive, as in the sentence G e о г g e' s is a brittiant idea, George's are brilliant ideas. The subject is George's, though the predicates agree in number with the nouns idea, ideas. Similarly in What are those things \ The above are samples of minerals, etc.
§ 386. It would be wrong to maintain that the only func­tion of the main parts of the sentence is to contain the syn­tactical meanings of predicativity. The latter has been defined as the relation of the thought to the situation of speech. So there must be some thought whose relation to the situation of speech is expressed in the sentence in terms of person, tense, mood. Naturally, the main parts of the sentence contain part of that thought, and if the sentence consists of the main parts alone, they contain al!⁴the thought. This is the case in a sentence like Birds fly. The subject birds does not only inform us that it is neither the speaker, nor his interlocutor, but some other person or thing that is involved. It does much more. As a noun it names that thing. The predicate fly does not only show the relation to the act of speech and reality. As a verb it names an action characterizing the thing named by the subject.
Thus we may speak of the (1) predicative (structural) and (2) non-predicative (notional) characteristics of the subject birds.

1. 
   It contains the person component of predicativity,
   
2. 
   It names the thing about which the communication
   is made. In other words, birds is both the structural aftd the
   notional subject of the sentence.
   

The predicate fly has similar characteristics;
¹ See § 390
224

1. 
   It contains the tense and mood components of predica-
   tivity.
   
2. 
   It names an action characterizing the thing denoted by
   the subject.
   

So fly is both the structural and the notional predicate of the sentence.