The notions of subject matter and aboutness have been objects of considerable attention among philosophers over the last few years. Current theories of subject matter take sentences to be the primary bearers of subject matter: “sentences have aboutness properties if anything has” (Yablo, Aboutness, Princeton University Press, 2014). However, some subsentential expressions can also be thought of as being about something. Moreover, it appears that the subject matters of sentences depend in a systematic way on the aboutness properties of their subsentential components. In this paper, we focus on the question of what predicates are about. We provide an account of predicative subject matter in which subject matters are assigned to predicates in a natural way, and which can be smoothly integrated with some existing accounts of sentential subject matter. We also argue that the notion of predicative subject matter is a worthy object of study, both within the current debate on subject matter and in its own right.

在过去的几年里，主题和关于性的概念一直是哲学家们相当关注的对象。当前的主题理论认为句子是主题的主要承载者：“如果有的话，句子就具有关于性属性”（Yablo，Aboutness，普林斯顿大学出版社，2014）。然而，一些子句表达式也可以被认为是关于某事的。此外，句子的主题似乎系统地依赖于其子句成分的有关属性。在本文中，我们关注谓词是什么的问题。我们提供了一种谓语主题的描述，其中主题以自然的方式分配给谓词，并且可以与一些现有的句子主题的描述顺利地集成。我们还认为，无论是在当前关于主题的辩论中还是就其本身而言，谓语主题的概念都是一个值得研究的对象。