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Predicates may also be collective or distributive. Collective predicates require their subjects to be somehow plural, while distributive ones do not. An example of a collective predicate is "formed a line". This predicate can only stand in a nexus with a plural subject: The students formed a line. — Collective predicate appears with plural ...
A predicative expression (or just predicative) is part of a clause predicate, and is an expression that typically follows a copula or linking verb, e.g. be, seem, appear, or that appears as a second complement of a certain type of verb, e.g. call, make, name, etc. [1] The most frequently acknowledged types of predicative expressions are predicative adjectives (also predicate adjectives) and ...
Syntactic predicate, in formal grammars and parsers; Functional predicate; Predication (computer architecture) in United States law, the basis or foundation of something Predicate crime; Predicate rules, in the U.S. Title 21 CFR Part 11; Predicate, a term used in some European context for either nobles' honorifics or for nobiliary particles
Verbless clauses are comprised, semantically, of a predicand, expressed or not, and a verbless predicate. For example, the underlined string in [With the children so sick,] we've been at home a lot means the same thing as the clause the children are so sick. It attributes the predicate "so sick" to the predicand "the children".
In the most typical cases, the predicand corresponds to the subject of a clause, and the predicate corresponds to a verb phrase (VP) that is the head of the clause. But there are also form-meaning mismatches, where the predicand is not a subject or where the predicate is not the head of the clause. Also, not every utterance has a predicand.
The light verb loses its own independent meaning and instead "lends a certain shade of meaning" [9] to the main or stem verb, which "comprises the lexical core of the compound". [10] While any verb can act as a main verb, there is a limited set of productive light verbs. [11] Some commonly used light verbs are shown in the table belowː
Similarly, the predicate drank selects an object argument that is a liquid or is liquid-like. A building cannot normally be understood as wilting, just as a car cannot normally be interpreted as a liquid. The b-sentences are possible only given an unusual context that establishes appropriate metaphorical meaning.
In most formalisms that use syntactic predicates, the syntax of the predicate is noncommutative, which is to say that the operation of predication is ordered. For instance, using the above example, consider the following pseudo-grammar, where X ::= Y PRED Z is understood to mean: "Y produces X if and only if Y also satisfies predicate Z":