ABSTRACT
Hopper and Thompson point out that the opposition between nouns and verbs as two basic lexical categories is universal across human languages, and that there are no clear-cut boundaries between the two categories of words. This chapter devotes to the study of extension and intention in actual referential use, i.e., whether the speaker is emphasizing the properties of something or the differentiation of one thing from others. The predicative is often a nominal that exhibits the properties of the predicate. It is also referred to as the “essive”, used to indicate the subject’s affiliation, and thus the default syntactic slot for non-referential nouns to occur. The predicative does not represent any entity or any alleged participant in discourse. The head noun is generally the semantic focus, and under normal circumstances it cannot be non-referential. Only one special configuration seems to be designed for non- referential elements.
