April 4, 2007

• I’m in bed sick working on my laptop (coincidentally, it’s perched on the top of my lap). This isn’t anything serious – I just feel chilled and tired and a little cruddy. My precious wife is always so nice to me when I’m sick.

  I figure this would be a good time to discuss one of the most crucial issues facing our society today – predicate nominatives and predicate adjectives.

  Basically PNs (not to be confused with PMS – they are not the same! ) and PAs come after words of being or feeling, etc. A PN is pretty much the same as the subject and a PA describes the subject. Never fear, I will provide examples! I’ll use “being verbs” first.

  The car was a Ford.

  Subject = car
  Verb = was (a being verb)
  PN = Ford (a proper noun)
  “car” and “Ford” are effectively the same thing.

  The car was ugly.
  Same as above except that “ugly” is an adjective and it describes “car”.

  Here is where this gets tricky – verbs of feeling, especially with “good” and “well”.

  
  

  “Hi, Brian. How are you?”
  “I feel well.”
  That would be incorrect (unless I was talking about the sensation in my hands working the way it’s supposed to work). Well is an adverb so it describes the verb feel, not the subject I. The correct answer would be “I feel good.”

  One final example:
  ” I feel bad.” (i.e., “I’m sick.”)
  “I feel badly.” (This would be correct if, for example, your friend’s husband died and you were saying, “I feel badly for her.” Why, class? Because in this case badly is modifying/describing the verb feel not the subject I.)

  Why do I have a feeling that very few people are really going to care about this?

  • 6:26 pm
  • 6 Comments