The system of members of sentence was initially a syncretic description of form and meaning of elements of a sentence. The meaning of a sentence was identified with a logical union and namely the judgement. The very names of the sentence elements were borrowed from logics. We find such terms as subject, predicate, object, attributes and modifies. Moreover, the very name of the sentence in different linguistic traditions is also of logical origin. In English it is Latin sententia which means judgement. In Russian the term ïðåäëîæåíèå is a morphemic translation of another Latin word for the same proposition. In French sentence is called le proposition. The Byelorussian term ñêàç is a reflection of the central element of the judgement — praedicatum.
We find this logical influence in the definition of the subject and the predicate we know from school. The subject was defined as the thing spoken about in the sentence. The predicate is something said about the subject. These definitions practically coincide with definition of the topic and comment. At the same time the subject and the predicate were defined with the reference to their form. The subject must be in the Nominative Case or occupy the first position in the sentence. The predicate must be in so-called finite form, that is have a certain mood and tense and agree in number and person with the subject. Other members of the sentence were also defined with the reference to their meaning and their form. But the meanings of other, secondary members of the sentence were drawn not so much from the logical structures, but from our knowledge of reality. The object is defined according to its participance in the state of affairs described in the sentence. As a result we find many different sorts of objects: direct objects, objects of instrument, objects of result, objects of addressee, etc. The same is true for adverbial modifiers and attributes. We may find in this system not only attributes of quality and property but also of the creator, the material, the instrument, etc. Sometimes we may find statements according to which some nouns may have not only attributes but also objects. It wouldn’t be surprising if objects, attributes and adverbial modifiers were defined only semantically, but the system of members of the sentence presupposes that members of the sentence should be defined both with view to their meaning and form. The outcome of such demand is that in a number of occasions it is impossible to differentiate adverbial modifiers of manner and instrumental objects (John went there by bus— the subordinate member here may be a good answer for two questions: How? and then it is an adverbial modifier, and By what? which makes it an object).
We may say that method appears to be inconsistent and very often produces arbitrary answers. The reason of this inconsistency is an implicit assumption that form and meaning are connected directly. Yet, this type of semantic description of a sentence in fact illustrates the semantic features which became prominent in other methods of presenting the semantic feature of sentences. We may say that the method of members of sentence has the seeds of all other ways of describing sentence both from the formal and semantical points of view.