Predicate

✎ This article/section is a stub — some half-sorted notes, not necessarily checked, not necessarily correct. Feel free to ignore, or tell me about it.

Perhaps more generally, a predicate is "a thing said of a subject".

This appears in many fields, often with meanings like the things/properites you're trying to claim, the properties you have, the things you are predicated on (conditions), dependency/component of a larger thing, placeholders.

In linguistics, predicate is more specific, but has two different takes:

• the part of the sentence that states a property of a subject - basically everything but that subject
• ...or just the verb, the one that does the heavy lifting

It helps not to forget people use it in either meaning.

There is also a related, but somewhat more precise meaning in parsers [1]

Predicate forms

✎ This article/section is a stub — some half-sorted notes, not necessarily checked, not necessarily correct. Feel free to ignore, or tell me about it.

Predicate somethings refer to being part of the predicate of the clause/sentence, rather than e.g. in the attributive form.

For example, predicate adjectives are adjectives that are linked via a copula, such as in "The idea seems great" and "The sky is blue". The attributive adjective forms would be "The great idea" and "The blue sky." .

predicate nominatives (a.k.a predicate nouns) refer to nouns and pronouns that are used as objects, refer back to the subject, and identify or describe it/them. For example:

• Ms. Hayes is our teacher.
• Is our teacher Ms. Hayes or Ms. Rose?
• Our teacher is who?