Abstract:

The Nominal Sentence is a convenient code-name for a specific predicative pattern set primarily predicating nouns (that is substantives or adjectives) and pronominals, characterized, not by ‘the absence of a verb’, but as a distinct nexus type that is sometimes paradigmatically opposed (or, in given environments, opposition-neutralized) to both verbal and statal adverb-rheme nexus, and in any case one for which verbal nexus has no constitutive relevance. In the following pages I aim at a structural account — the système des valeurs (opposition and neutralization), definition, typology and documentation — of noun predication patterns on the basis of the Four Branches (Mabinogi) and Owein.