predicate
To announce, assert, or proclaim publicly.
Adjective
- Of or related to the predicate of a sentence or clause.
- Predicated, stated.
- Relating to or being any of a series of criminal acts upon which prosecution for racketeering may be predicated.
Origin
From Middle English predicat(e), from Old French predicat (French prédicat), from Medieval Latin praedicātum (“thing said of a subject, predicate”), substantivized from the nominative neuter singular of praedicātus, the perfect passive participle praedicō (“to proclaim”), see -ate (noun-forming suffix); see also Etymology 2 below. The adjective was derived from the noun by metanalysis, see -ate (adjective-forming suffix).
Forms
Derived
compound predicate word monadic predicate logic nominal predicative nonpredicate predicatable predicate adjective predicate calculus predicate logic predicate noun predicative adjective predicatively
Noun
- The part of the sentence (or clause) which states a property that a subject has or is characterized by.
- In the light of this observation, consider Number Agreement in a sentence like: (120) They seem to me [_S — to be fools/^✽a fool] Here, the Predicate Nominal fools agrees with the italicised NP they, in spite of the...
- Thus, in (121) (a) persuade is clearly a three-place Predicate — that is, a Predicate which takes three Arguments: the first of these Arguments is the Subject NP John, the second is the Primary Object NP Mary, and the...
Coordinate Terms: subject
- A term of a statement, where the statement may be true or false depending on whether the thing referred to by the values of the statement's variables has the property signified by that (predicative) term.
- A propositional variable may be treated as a nullary predicate.
- A predicate is either valid, satisfiable, or unsatisfiable.
- An operator, expression, or function that returns either true or false.
- Predicates are usually found in a query's WHERE or HAVING clauses, though they can be located elsewhere (e.g. in CASE expressions). - 2000, Ken Henderson, The Guru's Guide to Transact-SQL, Addison-Wesley Professional,...
Forms
Derived
Verb
- To announce, assert, or proclaim publicly.
- To assume or suppose; to infer.
- There was a character about Madame Defarge, from which one might have predicated that she did not often make mistakes against herself in any of the reckonings over which she presided. - 1859, Charles Dickens, “The...
- Of anyone else it would have been said that she was finding the afternoon rather dreary in the vast halls not of her forefathers: but of Miss Power it was unsafe to predicate so surely. - 1880–1881, Thomas Hardy,...
- To base (on); to assert on the grounds of.
- The law is what constitutes both desire and the lack on which it is predicated. - 1978, Michel Foucault, The Will to Knowledge, trans. Robert Hurley (Penguin 1998, page 81)
- Cryptocurrencies, after all, are in many cases not so much currencies as speculative thingamabobs — digital tokens whose value is predicated largely on the idea that someone will take them off your hands at a higher...
- To make a term (or expression) the predicate of a statement.
- To assert or state as an attribute or quality of something.
- 1911, Encyclopedia Britannica, Conceptualism This quality becomes real as a mental concept when it is predicated of all the objects possessing it (“quod de pluribus natum est praedicari”).
Origin
From Latin praedicātus, perfect passive participle of praedicō (“to publish, declare, proclaim”) (see -ate (verb-forming suffix)), further from prae- (“before”) + dicō (“to proclaim, dedicate”), related to dīcō (“to say, tell”). Doublet of preach.