Conclusion
I gained a lot of information that I didn’t know while doing this course work. I also looked at a lot of information about features of the gerund that I didn’t know about. Including: The predicate of a sentence is the part that modifies the subject of a sentence or clause in some way. The predicate specifies what the subject is or does or tells what is done to the subject. Because the subject is the person, place or thing that a sentence is about, the predicate must contain a verb explaining what the subject does. It can also include a modifier, an object or a compliment.
The verb (or verb phrase) alone is the simple predicate.
The verb paired with all of the other words that describe its action form the complete predicate.
A predicate can be as simple as a single word that shows the action in a sentence. It is used to tell you what the subject of the sentence does. Look at a few of the shorter sentences in the English language. The subjects are underlined and the predicates are bold.
She danced. - The subject of the sentence is "she," the person being spoken about. But what is being conveyed or expressed about this person? She performed an action, of course; she danced. The word that modifies the subject "she" is the past-tense verb "danced," which is the predicate. Remy cooked a delicious soup and baked a mouth-watering ratatouille for the food critic.
In this sentence, not only are there compound predicates, but there are also two direct objects and a prepositional phrase, making this a complete predicate.
Predicates that describe a state of being are labeled as predicate adjectives or predicate nominatives.
Summary
An individual-level predicate is true throughout the existence of an individual. For example, if John is "smart", this is a property that he has, regardless of which particular point in time we consider. Individual-level predicates are more restricted than stage-level ones. Individual-level predicates cannot occur in presentational "there" sentences (a star in front of a sentence indicates that it is odd or ill-formed):
There are police available. — available is stage-level predicate.
*There are firemen altruistic. — altruistic is an individual-level predicate.
Stage-level predicates allow modification by manner adverbs and other adverbial modifiers. Individual-level predicates do not, e.g.
Tyrone spoke French loudly in the corridor. — speak French can be interpreted as a stage-level predicate.
*Tyrone knew French silently in the corridor. — know French cannot be interpreted as a stage-level predicate.
When an individual-level predicate occurs in past tense, it gives rise to what is called a lifetime effect: The subject must be assumed to be dead or otherwise out of existence.
John was available. — Stage-level predicate does NOT evoke the lifetime effect.
John was altruistic. — Individual-level predicate does evoke the lifetime effect.
Kind-level predicates
A kind-level predicate is true of a kind of a thing, but cannot be applied to individual members of the kind. An example of this is the predicate are widespread. One cannot meaningfully say of a particular individual John that he is widespread. One may only say this of kinds.
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