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This paper discusses the nature of the syntactic relation of predication, whose linguistic validity has been assumed to be universal. According to this assumption, the sentence of natural languages consists of two major constituents, one of which functions syntactically as the subject, and the other, as the predicate. The relation of predication, viewed in this paper as a kind of sign, is given the usual triple properties of any typical sign (its own signifier, signified, and syntactics). It is argued here that the predication holds between the predicated (=subject) and the predicating (=predicate) such that the former, participating in the event described by the latter as a specific participant role, has the property of the latter. In English, the predication is a compulsory syntactic relation that must be instantiated at the sentence level, in which the subject has the primary status in a number of syntactic processes and phenomena. The current paper argues that Korean syntax is fundamentally different from English syntax, in that the sentence-level syntactic relation is comment, rather than predication. The relation of comment is defined such that an entity, participating in the speech event, is selected as the topic and is commented as having a property related to the topic. The topic needs not be linguistically expressed in Korean, which is one of the characteristic features. The fact that the syntactic relation in Korean is based upon the information status of the entity in the given discourse is argued to explain non-locution of “activated and given” information, non-subcategorizational possibility of the topic, alternation in focal element expressed by the prosodic emphasis, distribution of reflexive expression, and others.
