 |
 |
 |
 |
|
 |
 |
233
There may come a time when you’ll regret this.
b) There seemed to be only two people in the room.
There did not appear to be anything of importance in what he said.
There are said to be those who are “unfit for living”.
Negative sentences with introductory there are formed in the usual way for the verbs which are their
predicates, that is, by means of appropriate auxiliaries for all the verbs but to be. In the latter case two negative
constructions are possible:
a) either with the negative pronoun no, as in:
There was no sign of him in the hall.
There is no knowing when he will come.
b) or with the negation not, often followed by the indefinite pronoun any, or without it, as in:
There weren’t (were not) any flowers on the balconies.
There isn’t a cloud in the sky.
The sentence is also negative if the subject itself is a negative pronoun:
There was nobody in.
There was nothing to say.
The predicate
§ 46. The predicate is the second main part of the sentence and its organizing centre, as the object and nearly
all adverbial modifiers are connected with, and dependent on, it.
The predicate may be considered from the semantic or from the structural point of view. Structurally the
predicate in English expressed by a finite verb agrees with the subject in number and person. The only
exception to this rule is a compound modal and a simple nominal predicate, the latter having no verb form at all
(see § 49).
According to the meaning of its components, the predicate may denote an action, a state, a quality, or an
attitude to some action or state ascribed to the subject. These different meanings find their expression in the
structure of the predicate and the lexical meaning of its constituents.
Structural classification of the predicate
§ 47. From the structural point of view there are two main types of predicate: the simple predicate and the
compound predicate. Both these types may be either nominal or verbal, which gives four sub-groups: simple
verbal, simple nominal, compound verbal, compound nominal. Compound verbal predicates may be further