Cartography and Predication: Why we (still) need exocentricity

Predication has been recognized as the fundamental grammatical relation defining clausal structures in all (and only) human languages ever since the canonical model of Ancient Greek linguistics. This notion is by definition compositional, since either component – the subject and the predicate – cannot be defined without referring to the other. The central question addressed here is whether predication is a lexical property or can instead be unambiguously associated to a dedicated configuration, in keeping with the cartographic guidelines. Capitalizing on copular sentences with predicative noun phrases, which allow us to factor out non-essential aspects of this phenomenon, such as the morphological asymmetry between verbs and nouns, a new approach is illustrated based on the notion of symmetry. This analysis has a deep impact on the cartographic model by reintroducing exocentric phrases into the clausal spine, qualifying the clausal fields and avoiding ad hoc solutions that stipulate ‘predicative features’.