Predicatecentric

Predicatecentric is an adjective used to describe approaches, analyses, or systems that place predicates—typically verbs and relations—as the central units of analysis rather than the subjects or entities involved. In linguistics and related fields, a predicate-centric perspective focuses on the predication structure of sentences, including the predicate, its arguments, and the relations between them, to encode meaning, event structure, and semantic roles.

It contrasts with subject-centric or entity-centric analyses, which begin with the syntactic subject or the referents of a sentence. Predicate-centric frameworks view a sentence as a configuration of predication in which a core predicate links multiple arguments, modifiers, and adjuncts, capturing who did what to whom, when, where, and how. This emphasis aligns with predicate-argument structure, semantic roles, and event semantics.

Applications include natural language processing tasks such as semantic role labeling, information extraction, and event detection, as well as knowledge representation schemes that use predicate-based representations (for example, first-order logic or frame-based schemas). In computational linguistics, predicate-centric parsing and representation can support cross-linguistic analysis by focusing on the actions and relations encoded by predicates.

Critiques note that while predicate-centric models can expose semantic relations clearly, they may underplay morphosyntactic structure or subject-prominent phenomena in certain languages, and integrating both predicate and subject information can be beneficial for full linguistic analysis. The term predicatecentric is a descriptor rather than a single established theory, and its exact meaning can vary by discipline.

See also: predicate-argument structure, semantic role labeling, frame semantics, dependency grammar, event semantics.