Talk:Predicate (grammar)

message: I agree that the term 'traditional grammar' as used in this article is gratuitous, confusing, and perhaps intentionally dismissive. All the stuff about linguistic semantics should be taken out and put into a separate article. Furthermore, the notion that a predicate describes what may be true of the subject is a definition fraught with cultural and political minefields that are completely unnecessary to understanding English grammar. If I say 'Black people are evil.', is that therefore 'true'?! And if it isn't 'potentially true', is it therefore not a predicate? If not, then what is it? All of these issues are avoided when the predicate is simply what the speaker/writer says about the subject, and the issue of 'truth' is left out. Natcolley (talk) 15:59, 11 April 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  disambiguation requested

message: I think that this article conflates the different ideas of predicates in logic and linguistics. I think it should be clear which is which. In traditional European grammar, as the article says, the predicate is the part of the sentence following the subject (ie verb, objects and adjuncts). Later, in logic, it came to be used for the class of units that in languages roughly correspond to verbs and adjectives. In Modern linguistics the word was borrowed back again from logic, and used by people like Vendler to refer to verbs (*not* including objects). So, I think the first sentence of the article is misleading. Linguistics, per se, does not have the notion of propositional truth. The statement that a predicate is something that has a truth value, could be dropped altogether. If it is retained, I suggest it is introduced with something like "On the other hand, in logic ...". Secondly, I think the statement is factually incorrect. It is a proposition, rather than the predicate that it contains, that has a truth value. Here's a supporting quote from R. L. Trask, 1993, "A Dictionary of Grammatical Terms in Linguistics":
"1. That constituent of a sentence, most typically a verb phrase, which combines with the subject NP to make up the complete sentence. ... 2. A verb, or a complex structure consisting of a verb or auxiliary plus a closely bound meaningful element, when this is considered as linguistic unit which can or must combine with specified arguments or participant roles to make up a clause. Grammatically, they are classified in terms of their valency, the number and types of uints which they require. There are also grammatically relevant semantic classifications, the best-known of which is that of Vendler (1967). ... 3. In formal logic, an element which must combine with a specified number of arguments to make up a well-formed expression; the linguistic use of 'predicate' in sense 2 is directly derived from this logical usage."
This is my first time contributing to Wikipedia, so please excuse me if my wiki-ettiquette is lacking. Brian.Murphy@cs.tcd.ie
: I agree that there is a discrepancy between the notion of a predicate in trad grammar and that in current linguistic theory, but I disagree that there's any conflation in the article as it was. The point is that current semantic theory is a branch of applied mathemetical logic. And this is not just a parochial view, but rather the mainstream approach to the meaning of natural language these days. Also the statement in the first paragraph is not that a predicate  has a truth value but rather, that it is  true of something. This is perfectly in keeping with practices in both logic and linguistics, and it's not controversial.  But the previous version did downplay the traditional notion by not mentioning it in the first paragraph, and I agree that that needed improvement. So I've tried to remedy that in the new version. Concerning the Vendler classes, it's true that Vendler himself used them to classify verbs, not predicates, but there is consensus now that the classification applies to predicates rather than verbs.  In fact, the paragraph about the Vendler classes discusses this, and there are references below to back it up.  I've also removed the flag. Neither 13:48, 20 October 2006 (UTC)
replies: text:  You have missed a crucial concept; Mathematics, and formal Logic also, are both languages.  Mathematics is a language, or several languages, one might argue.  As a language(s), Mathematics suffers from most of the geopolitical ills of the world, and is often poorly spoken and even more poorly taught in schools.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 50.72.100.79 (talk) 04:38, 26 February 2013 (UTC)
replies: text: yeah, you're right, things change with tenses. But what happens when you use "in an hour" with future tense is that it takes on a slightly different meaning from what it normally has, something like, ``an hour from now." That seems to be a property of the expression "in an hour" in English. Other languages have separate expressions for those meanings of "in an  hour."  The Vendler classes are supposed to apply to any language, so one has to be careful what tense one puts the predicate in. Future is a bad choice, since it will influence the result, as we have just seen, and the present progressive (John is running) is another bad choice. The best choice of tense to carry out the in an hour test in English is simple past.  That doesn't show that the test is wong, though! Neither 04:25, 16 March 2007 (UTC)
thread_title:  Predicates in logic and linguistics 

message: I don't follow the argument here.
"John is hungry" is given as an example of an s-l predicate. However, in the section on i-l predicates, we have:
There are firemen available. ("available" is s-l) 
*There are firemen altruistic. ("altruistic" is i-l) 
This leads me to conclude that "There are firemen hungry" is well-formed, which it isn't. Of course, we can say "There are hungry firemen", but we can also say "There are altruistic firemen".
It isn't clear to me in these "There are..." sentences what the subject is - 'there'?
--Nyelvmark 19:38, 8 June 2007 (UTC)
replies: text: Nope, in a sentence like "There are firemen available." the subject is "firemen" and "there" is an adverb.  This is a peculiar construction, to be sure, but very common in English. 24.27.31.170 (talk) 18:26, 11 June 2011 (UTC)

text: I wouldn't say "There are firemen hungry", but on the other hand, as a child growing up in the 1950s, my parents occasionally repeated what their parents said to them, when we didn't finish the food we'd been served: "There are children starving in China." So perhaps "There are firemen altruistic in China" is okay. 208.54.85.172 (talk) 07:02, 10 May 2014 (UTC)
thread_title:  s-l versus i-l predicates, and k-l predicates 

message: Okay, "traditional" is being used often throughout the grammar wiki pages.  Since "modern" grammar is not discussed, either we need to state "In traditional and modern grammar..." or drop "traditional".
I suggest dropping "In traditional grammar," and simply begin with "A predicate is...".  Lets use the active voice.
:What on earth is "modern grammar"?   Grammar that violates traditional rules, perhaps?  Also, the use of the the phrase "In traditional grammar" to begin the sentence has nothing to to do with voice -- the sentence uses the active voice with that phrase in place.  24.27.31.170 (talk) 18:29, 11 June 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Traditional grammar is a tradition among speakers of a language of a particular grammatical analysis of their language, sometimes specifically traditions based on comparisons with Latin grammar. Traditional grammar does not contrast with "modern grammar," but with modern linguistic analyses of grammars. Hence the mention of verb phrase, which is a construct of modern linguistics. ᛭ LokiClock (talk) 07:32, 14 June 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  "In traditional grammar..." 

message: I'm seeing a possible split of the first paragraph into two, given that 2 definitions are being listed. The first definition also appears to need more beef. I've worked out the following and will post it here since my revision may need discussion and further revision:
:In traditional grammar, a predicate is one of the two main parts of a sentence (the other being the subject, which the predicate modifies). For the simple sentence "John [is yellow]," John acts as the subject, and is yellow acts as the predicate, a subsequent description of the subject headed with a verb.
:In current linguistic semantics, a predicate is an expression that can be true of something. Thus, the expressions "is yellow" or "is like broccoli" are true of those things that are yellow or like broccoli, respectively. This notion is closely related to the notion of a predicate in formal logic, which includes more expressions than the former one, like, for example, nouns and some kinds of adjectives.
The second definition is very unclear to me as it relates to "formal logic," I hope I'm not mistaken in thinking that "like broccoli" is only part of a predicate, which was the original error that brought me to this revision.Xetxo (talk) 20:07, 23 April 2009 (UTC)
thread_title:  Definition / intro 

message: There are some bold bits in the examples, which goes unexplained. "In the following examples, the predicate is underlined." - the bold parts seem to be subsets of the underlined sections, usually contain a noun, sometimes a preposition, but otherwise seem to have no rhyme nor reason. "me", "the book", "to the radio", "president", "in the park". What's being illustrated here? Needs clarification. 70.116.64.148 (talk) 17:45, 30 January 2010 (UTC)
thread_title:  Bold bits 

message: This page exhibits an extremely aggravating tendency in Wikipedia: useless redirections. I entered the search term "ascription", I was redirected here and there is no mention of ascription anywhere on the page. What is the point of a redirect if the term the searcher is looking for is not covered on the page he/she is directed to? Could someone who knows what they are talking about please at least cover "ascription", or take out the redirect, because at the moment the redirect is worse than useless. I now have to try to find another site that will tell me about "ascription", because Wikipedia can't. Zythophile (talk) 10:43, 28 March 2011 (UTC)
replies: text: Zythophile, I recommend you post the unnecessary redirections to Wikipedia:Redirects for discussion. Thanks! --Michaelzeng7 (talk) 00:58, 7 December 2011 (UTC)
thread_title:  Ascription 

message: The recent additions to the article by an unnamed user seem to have been performed by a knowledgeable person with good intent. Unfortunately, the additions are not coherently integrated into the entirety of the article. For instance, they include links to unrealized pages. I am now going to undo the revisions, but I encourage the person who performed the edits to register as a user and to respond here. The article can indeed be improved in the direction of the edits. --Tjo3ya (talk) 20:46, 30 November 2013 (UTC)
thread_title: Recent additions

message: "...the purpose of the predicate is to modify the subject." I don't believe that at all. I can say "She dances" without the least intention of affecting her ("She") in the least. Modification is out of the question. Whatever happened to the notion of a "verb", signifying "action" or "state of being"? 172.56.26.93 (talk) 06:46, 10 May 2014 (UTC)
thread_title: Purpose

message: Concrete has no reflexes, or it would be useless for sidewalks. Isn't there another way to get the idea across? 172.56.27.175 (talk) 07:49, 10 May 2014 (UTC)
thread_title: Concrete reflex!?

message: Consider the following paragraph:
"The subject NP is shown in green, and the predicate VP in blue. This concept of sentence structure stands in stark contrast to dependency structure theories of grammar, which place the finite verb (= conjugated verb) as the root of all sentence structure and thus reject this binary NP-VP division."
In the illustration and description, there is no difference between "the subject NP" and "subject", nor between "the predicate VP" and "predicate". The older concept makes no mention of 
"the root" of sentence structure. So it isn't shown, at least here, that dependency structure theories of grammar "reject" anything. In fact, the illustration seems to imply that the binary division is conserved!
I can see how it might be considered unnecessary, if one puts the emphasis on finding out what the "root" is, rather than where the phrases are, but not how either theory contradicts the other. 172.56.27.214 (talk) 08:13, 10 May 2014 (UTC)
replies: text: This comment is difficult for me to understand. Dependency grammars do not acknowledge the initial subject-predicate (NP-VP) division of clause structure that is the starting point for traditional phrase structure grammars. Have another look at the dependency trees in the article. Not one of them is acknowledging the initial binary NP-VP division. Not one of them shows the finite VP constituent as a complete subtree. The matter is profound, since it leads to a much different view of and approach to syntactic strucures.--Tjo3ya (talk) 17:43, 10 May 2014 (UTC)
thread_title: Unwarranted conflict

message: > Who did Jim give his dog to?
Is the preposition at the end not part of the predicate? If it weren't a question, it would be "Jim did give his dog to Sally", and it being a question surely doesn't change that? Fedjmike (talk) 13:55, 13 March 2015 (UTC)
thread_title:  Modern grammar example 

message: Hi all, when coming across this article I was a bit frustrated. When you read an article on a sentence on Wikipedia it tells you it's made up of a subject and a predicate. If I'm anything like most people, I've never heard of a Predicate and want a quick snappy definition when I click on the article it links to. I notice this is the case on the Simple English wikipedia. However this article opens with "There are two competing notions of the predicate in theories of grammar.[1] The competition between these two concepts..." - completely alienating to the vast majority of the people who want to know what, in basic terms, a predicate is. Especially kids who are maybe new to the topic. 
So please, please, please can someone write an introduction that isn't too technical and neatly sums up the most popular understanding of the word, so that people who are only looking for a quick summary can get on with their day! Thank you. 
Whistler (talk) 23:24, 11 August 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Intro too complex - need simple summary

message: I don't know whether stuff like the below is common in writings about theories of grammar, but it's not great:
Ben *reads the book*. - verb + direct object predicate
Due to operator precedence, in the expression LHS + RHS, stuff either side of the plus is evaluated and then added together. If you evaluate the RHS in that thing above, you get "direct object predicate". So you can only mean "a verb plus a direct object predicate." What you're trying to mean is "a verb-plus-direct-object predicate". So I strongly suggest that you write it that way if you want folks to understand.  — Preceding unsigned comment added by 24.22.165.103 (talk) 23:07, 14 December 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Poor notation, inconsistent with arithmetic and computer language 

message: Instead of Carlson classes, consider's Schank's primitive actions.  See https://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/handle/2027.42/30278/0000679.pdf;jsessionid=B8039541E82D2A2EB49A7E14548F33E7?sequence=1 Figure 1.  What is a predicate set?— Preceding unsigned comment added by 66.172.251.198 (talk) 06:07, 23 March 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  How many types of action =

message: If a person can form a company or a government why can’t one form a line?
Like being in charge of convincing  a bunch of people to queue up in a line... Mramosch (talk) 15:22, 5 July 2019 (UTC)
thread_title:  Collective vs. distributive predicates - Form a line... 

message: Jdhm 190.108.215.70 (talk) 22:57, 18 September 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Gffigx hg 

message: Quote: "On the other hand, dependency grammar rejects the binary subject-predicate division and places the finite verb as the root of the sentence." -- Oddly enough, the dependency tree does have a binary distinction in which the subject is opposed to a "predicate" subtree. The latter just does not contain "may"... and in this way, it mirrors the NP-AUX-VP structure of pre-IP Chomskyan phrase structure grammar. So, the text somewhat overstates the differences. Alazon (talk) 15:17, 3 October 2022 (UTC)
thread_title:  Dependency grammar