The author states that the grammatical description of a language should be conceived in the frame of the theory: “meaning > form”. As an example to prove the adequacy of that statement she presents an outline of the semantic analysis of the grammatical category of person. The traditional grammar presents ‘person’ as an inflectional category of the verb, exponent of the formal congruency of the verbal predicate with its implied argument in the form of the nominative noun phrase. From the semantic point of view ‘person’ is the central category guaranteeing success full act of linguistic communication: it enables us to identify correctly active participants of the speech event, as also those active in the spoken of event.
The author states that there are in our vocabulary three, and only three, classes of semantic units: a) predicates, i.e. generic concepts – the result of our conceptualization of the world; they represent more than 90% of the vocabulary; b) operators of reference – a small, almost closed set bounding predicates to their concrete denotates; c) proper names, which are by definition referentially bound and are object of research of a specialized linguistic discipline. Thus, the main tasks of our grammar are (1) to define and to describe the scope of the grammaticalization in the language in question and (2) to present the semantic classification of predicates, the description of their – bound and/or free – functioning in the text included.