A means of establishing correspondence between the grammatical and psychological predicate has been incidentally illustrated in the foregoing discussion. It is the periphrastic construction with is, of which instances are very numerous. It is to you, young people, that I speak; What I most prize in woman, is her affections, not her intellect (Longfellow); It is thou that robbest me of my Lord (Shakespeare, 2 Hen. VI., IV. ii.); It was not you that sent me hither, but God (Gen. xlv. 8).
This construction is quite common in many other languages: French—C’est a vous que je m’adresse (= ‘It is to you that I myself address’); German—Christen sind es, die das getan haben (lit. ‘Christians are it, that that done have’ = ‘It is (the) Christians that have done this’).
In English, another construction often serves the same purpose: As to denying, he would scorn it; As for that fellow, we’ll see about him to-morrow. Or (with the psychological subject simply in the nominative, without any verbal indication of its connection with what follows), Husband and children, she saw them murdered before her very eyes; My life’s foul deed, my life’s fair end shall free it (Shakespeare, Rape of Lucr.); The prince ... they will slay him (Ben Jonson, Sejanus, III. iii.); That thing, I took it for a man (Lear, IV. vi. 77). Antipholus, my husband ... this ill day a most outrageous fit of madness took him (Com. of Errors, V. i. 138). When, in this construction, the words which head the sentence stand for the same thing as the subject pronoun of the following clause, the result, of course, is not a readjustment of the parts, but an (often useless) emphasis: cf. John, he said so; The king, he went, etc. When the psychological subject would, in the simpler constructions appear as a genitive, this is indicated by the pronoun standing, in that case, e.g., ’Tis certain every man that dies ill, the ill is upon his head (Henry V., IV. i. 197). That they who brought me in my master’s hate, I live to look upon their tragedy (Rich. III., III. ii. 57); And vows so born, in their nativity all truth appears (Mid. Night’s Dream, III. ii. 124).
In Chapter VI. we have discussed the point that in reality an adjective is psychologically a predicate: an expression like The good man containing, in fact, a statement that the man is good. There is a construction, however,—and one, too, not unfrequent,—in which the adjective contains the psychological and logical subjects; e.g., The short time at my disposal prevented me from calling upon him—‘The shortness of the time prevented,’ etc. Though this construction may perhaps be due to a contamination between, say, The shortness of the time prevented and The short time did not allow, it still remains certain that in the construction, as it stands, a displacement has occurred.
It might a priori be expected that all this uncertainty and vagueness would cause parts of a sentence which grammatically belong together to cohere but loosely, and eventually to get separated, whilst other grammatical connections, which at first did not exist, would thereby arise. It is clear, for instance, that in the sentence I sit on a chair, the preposition on is as closely connected with the verb to sit as with the noun a chair. Nay, it may be said that the ties which connect it with the noun in this and similar cases must once have been, and perhaps in the linguistic consciousness of some speakers still are, stronger than those between the preposition and the verb. This would appear from the fact that the various prepositions used to govern in English—as they still do in German, for instance—various cases, while these ties would be strengthened by the common occurrence of the preposition with a noun, unaccompanied by any verb; e.g., That book there on the chair; The man in the garden, etc. It is, however, evident in many constructions that the noun has separated from the preposition, and that the latter has entered into closer connection with the verb. We owe to this, e.g., the Latin and German ‘compound verbs,’ as excedere, ‘to go out from,’ anliegen, ‘to be incumbent on,’ etc., which used to govern, or still do govern the case which would have followed the preposition if used immediately before the noun and detached from the verb. In English, this or a similar displacement has given rise to such constructions as And this rich fair town we make him lord of (K. John, II. i. 553); a place which we have long heard of; Washes of all kinds I had an antipathy to (Goldsmith); Logic I made no account of (Smollett, Rod. Random, 6); This house I no more show my face in (She stoops to conquer, IV.); The false paiens stood he by (P. Langtoft).
A careful study of the above examples will show that in these and several of the following, the construction has the effect and is most likely due to a desire of bringing the psychological subject to the head of the sentence. It is at present chiefly employed in relative and interrogative clauses, and in sentences in the passive voice: The intended fire your city is ready to flame in (Coriolanus, V. 2); An idle dare-devil of a boy, whom his friends had been glad to get rid of (Green, Short History, p. 732); Stories of the lady, which he swore to the truth of (Tom Jones, bk. xv., ch. 9); He was such a lover, as a generous friend of the lady should not betray her to (ibid., xiii. 2); A pipe in his mouth, which, indeed, he seldom was without (ibid., ii. 2): The eclipse which the nominal seat of Christianity was under (Earle, Anglo-Saxon Liter., p. 25); Such scruple of conscience as the terrors of their late invented religion had let them into (Puttenham, Arte of Poesie, Arber’s reprint, p. 24); An outrage confessed to on a death-bed (Liv. Daily Post, Aug. 1, 1884, p. 5, col. a.); He was seldom talked of, etc. What humour is the prince of? (Hen. IV., II. iv).[162]
In the sentence I will never allow you to read this book, there is no doubt that every speaker feels this book as object of read, and read this book as object of allow. If, however, in order to make this book if it is psychological subject, appear also as the grammatical subject, we say This book I shall never allow you to read, we can very well understand how a speaker’s linguistic sense may come to connect this book directly as object with the entire group allow to read, nay more, with the verb allow; as if it stood for I will never allow you this book to read. This may arise all the more easily that, in a clause like I have to read this book, the words this book are historically the object of have and not of the infinitive to read, and that, in the form this book I have to read, the noun is in close proximity to its historical government I have. Hence, such transference of government from the infinitive to the group finite verb + infinitive and finally to the finite verb has occasionally really taken place, as can be shown by the way in which such clauses have sometimes been turned into the passive voice. A sentence like The judge allowed them to drop the prosecution can, strictly speaking, be turned into the passive only in one or other of the following ways: They were allowed to drop the prosecution, or, The judge allowed that the prosecution should be dropped; in each of which cases, the object of the verb has become the subject of the same verb in the passive voice. If, however, aided by such constructions as The prosecution which the judge allowed them to drop, the object (prosecution) of the verb to drop becomes, first, object of the syntactical combination allow to drop, and, finally, in the illogical thinker’s consciousness or linguistic sense, object of the verb to allow,—there may arise a passive construction something like the following: The prosecution which was allowed to be dropped. This construction is indeed incorrect in English, but its parallel may be occasionally heard from careless speakers, and a careful study of it will illustrate and make intelligible such phrases as the German, Hier ist sie zu spielen verboten, literally = ‘Here is she (i.e., Minna v. Barnhelm, i.e., the play of that name) to play forbidden’ = ‘Here it has been forbidden to play her (sc. it),’ as passive of ‘They have forbidden to play it here;’ Die stellung des fürsten Hohenlohe wird zu untergraben versucht = ‘The position of the Prince Hohenlohe is to undermine attempted’ = ‘An attempt is being made to undermine the position, etc.;’ or again, the Greek χιλίων δράχμων ἀπορρηθεισῶν λαβεῖν (Demosthenes), lit. ‘One thousand drachms having been agreed to receive’ = ‘It having been agreed that I should receive one thousand drachms.’ Similarly, the Latin Librum legere cœpi = (‘I begin to read the book’) is turned into the passive, Liber legi cœptus est = (‘The book to be read has been begun’), the perfect parallel of our somewhat fictitious English example.
In our examples, ‘He has got the toothache,’ etc., we saw that the grammatical predicate often has, in reality, no other psychological function than that of mere copula, or, as it is often called, connecting word. The regular and constant use of certain words in that manner has led some grammarians to group these together as a separate grammatical category, a grouping or distinction to which many others vigorously object. The view which one takes in this question is mainly influenced by (a) what we call a ‘connecting word,’ and (b) a clear distinction between the grammatical form and the function of a word. Now, a connecting word is a word which serves to indicate the connection between two ideas or conceptions, and which accordingly can neither stand alone, nor have any definite sense if placed with only one such conception. Such a connecting word between subject and predicate we have in the verb to be, the copula, in most of its uses. It is said by some that the word is never has any other function than that of true predicate, and that the predicatival adjective or noun is always to be considered a determinant of the predicate. This, whilst true as to grammatical form, is certainly incorrect as to function. In the first place, we have already discussed (Chap. VI.) how sentences like Borrowing is sorrowing, contains no less, but also no more than Borrow sorrow, in which the latter word contains the true psychologic predicate. Further, if we were to attribute to the word is in such sentences the same force as, for instance, in God is, i.e., God exists, we should necessarily have to explain a sentence, This is impossible, as ‘This exists as something impossible;’ which every one will at once perceive to be nonsense.
We must recognise in sentences like Borrow sorrow an original construction, by the side of which there sooner or later arose clauses truly denoting existence, such as God is, or even God is good, in which, at first, is had its full meaning of exists, and good had consequently such the function of an adverb. When once, in the latter and similar sentences, a displacement and redistribution of the function began to take place, and the adjective good (or, e.g., the noun king in He is king) acquired the force of a true logical predicate, the fuller construction with the copula is more and more frequently ousted the shorter one, which had no such link between subject and predicate. The reluctance of some grammarians to admit this is perhaps partially due, also, to the fact that the copula has always retained the full inflectional forms of a true predicatival verb. Hence they did not so easily realise the displacement which had occurred—a displacement which, in other sentences, where the part thereby affected is flectionless, is easier to demonstrate.
We shall first discuss one more instance of how a displacement affects inflected parts of speech, and then one or two in which the words concerned have no longer any inflection to connect them with other forms, and to protect them from isolation and change of function.