Predicativeonly

Predicativeonly is a linguistic term used to describe a class of adjectives or adjective-like predicates that occur exclusively in predicative position, rather than as attributive modifiers of a noun. In languages with rich adjective placement rules, predicativeonly items are those that cannot or typically do not appear before a noun, and are instead licensed only after a linking verb or in a copular clause.

In English, examples commonly cited as predicative-only include adjectives like afraid and asleep. The phrase the child is afraid is natural, whereas an afraid child is generally judged unidiomatic. By contrast, adjectives such as old, red, or interesting can appear both attributively (a red car, an interesting book) and predicatively (the car is red, the book is interesting). This dichotomy helps illustrate how predicativeonly items contrast with freely attributive adjectives in terms of distribution and syntax.

Predicativeonly items are often associated with stative or result-state meanings, and many arise from participial or verb-derived forms. However, cross-linguistic variation is common: some languages permit limited attributive use for certain predicative-only forms, while others strictly confine them to predication. The concept is of interest in theories of syntax, morphology, and semantics because it highlights how copular constructions, adjective classes, and agreement interact to shape word order and interpretation.

In practice, predicativeonly can influence language teaching, lexical classification, and natural language processing, where models must account for distributional constraints that separate predication from attributive modification. See also predicative complement, copula, and attributive adjective for related topics.