Subjects and Predicates

Abstract

When I say that the cat is hungry, I seem to be doing two things; referring to a certain thing, namely the cat, and saying something about it, namely, that it is hungry. That which is referred to in asserting a proposition is called the subject of the proposition, and that which is said to characterize the subject—in this example, hunger or the state of being hungry—is called the predicate. The sentence itself may then be correspondingly divided into two parts, the subject expression and the predicate expression. Thus in the sentence “The cat is hungry” the subject expression is “the cat” and the predicate expression is “is hungry.”