The Nominal Sentence is a convenient code-name for a specific predicative pattern set primarily predicating nouns (that is substantives or adjectives) and pronominals, characterized, not by ‘the absence of a verb’, but as a distinct nexus type that is sometimes paradigmatically opposed (or, in given environments, opposition-neutralized) to both verbal and statal adverb-rheme nexus, and in any case one for which verbal nexus has no constitutive relevance. In the following pages I aim at a structural account — the système des valeurs (opposition and neutralization), definition, typology and documentation — of noun predication patterns on the basis of the Four Branches (Mabinogi) and Owein.

This article is the first in a series of corpus-based profiles or sketches of certain central subsystems of Mabinogi Middle Welsh grammar. These aim at putting pattern-sets, patterns and pattern details in their proper perspectives of values, relevancies and relationship network, by applying structural-analytic procedure to complex phenomena of synax hitherto not treated systematically in this approach. viz. in terms of oppositions and neutralizations, of paradigmatic (categorial constituency) and syntagmatic (compatibility) properties, commutabilities and compatiblities.