[1] The notion of a predicate in traditional grammar traces back to Aristotelian logic.
This classical understanding of predicates was adopted more or less directly into Latin and Greek grammars; from there, it made its way into English grammars, where it is applied directly to the analysis of sentence structure.
In English, the subject and predicative nominal must be connected by a linking verb, also called a copula.
[citation needed] On the other hand, dependency grammar rejects the binary subject-predicate division and places the finite verb as the root of the sentence.
Barring a discontinuity, predicates and their arguments are always catenae in dependency structures.
[7]: 329–335 The term predicate is also used to refer to properties and to words or phrases which denote them.
Individual-level predicates cannot occur in presentational "there" sentences (a star in front of a sentence indicates that it is odd or ill-formed): Stage-level predicates allow modification by manner adverbs and other adverbial modifiers.
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.
One cannot meaningfully say of a particular individual John that he is widespread; one may only say this of kinds, as in Certain types of noun phrases cannot be the subject of a kind-level predicate.
Singular indefinite noun phrases are also banned from this environment: Predicates may also be collective or distributive.
Note that the last one (carry the piano together) can be made non-collective by removing the word together.