A predicate is the secondary aspect of a sentence consisting of a verb or adjective that completes the sentence. It can be simple or complex, depending on the sentence’s structure and whether it requires direct and indirect objects.
A predicate is part of a sentence or clause in English and is one of the two main components needed to complete the sentence effectively. Sentences are made up of two main components: subjects and predicates. The subjects are the main “thing” in a sentence which the rest of the words then describe either through a direct description or by indicating what kind of action that subject is performing. The predicate is this secondary aspect of the sentence and usually consists of a verb or adjective, although complicated sentences may have multiple verbs and a range of descriptions involving the subject.
It can be easier to understand predicates by first understanding the subjects and how sentences are constructed. A sentence almost always has a subject, although it may be implied in some way and not necessarily directly stated. In a simple sentence like “The cat has slept”, the subject is “the cat”, which is a noun phrase made up of the direct article “the” and the noun “cat”. Topics can be longer and more complicated, but are usually quite simple in nature.
The predicate of a sentence is therefore basically the rest of the sentence, although this is not always the case for longer and more complicated sentences. In “The cat was asleep,” the predicate is quite simple and consists simply of the word “slept.” This is simple because “slept” is an intransitive verb, which means it doesn’t require any further description or object to make it complete. The sentence could be expanded as “The cat slept on the bed”, but this is not necessary and simply adds a descriptive component to the predicate through the prepositional phrase “on the bed”.
In a somewhat more complicated sentence, such as “The man gave the ball to his son,” the subject of the sentence is still quite simple: “The man.” The predicate in this sentence, however, has become substantially more complicated and consists of the rest of the sentence: “he gave the ball to his son.” This has been made more complicated because the verb “give” is transitive, specifically ditransitive, indicating both a direct object and an indirect object.
The act of “giving” requires that there is a direct object, which is the object given, and an indirect object, which is to whom or what is given. In this case, the predicate consists of the verb “to give” and the direct object “the ball” with a connecting preposition “to” and the indirect object “his son of him”. Predicates can get even more complicated as an idea expands, such as a statement like “The rock rolled off the table, landed on a skateboard, and kept rolling down the hill until it was stopped by a wall”. In this sentence, the subject is only “The rock”, which means that the rest of the sentence is the predicate.
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