Thus she can move spatially from present to past and back again. A nominal is the name of something or someone. A predication is something said about something else. So the language universal defined above sounds pretty obvious. In fact there are only a few types of predications, and they all involve verbs.
Nominals do, or nominals are.
Or, as the old-time grammar books used to say, subjects may be followed by two kinds of verbs, action and linking. The real point of the language universal above is, generally speaking, if a structure doesn't have both a nominal and a predication, it isn't a sentence. Language doesn't happen. Take a moment to figure this out. Wallace is walking down the street and meets Mary Lou.