Every complete utterance, in that language [English], centres around a core of two monemes, one of which, as Sapir says, ‘is something to talk about’, and another which is what ‘must be said about this subject of discourse’. Since, in English, the subject is never an autonomous phrase as, for instance, in Latin, when a noun, the predicative phrase is always made up of at least a subject and a predicative moneme, whose only possible function is the predicative function, and which we call verb.
- Martinet (1962), Pag. 48-49