Verbalpredikat

Verbalpredikat, also known as a verbal predicate, is a grammatical term used primarily in linguistic descriptions of languages with subject‑object‑verb (SOV) or verb‑final word order, such as Turkish, Finnish, Japanese, and many Austronesian languages. The verbal predicate consists of the main verb and any affixes or auxiliary elements that together express tense, aspect, mood, voice, polarity, and agreement with the subject or object. Unlike nominal predicates, which are formed with a copula or nominal element, a verbal predicate directly encodes the action or state without requiring a linking verb.

In descriptive grammar, the verbal predicate is contrasted with the noun phrase (NP) or noun predicate, which may serve as the clause’s predicational component in languages that allow both constructions. For example, in Turkish “Ali kitabı okudu” (“Ali read the book”), “okudu” is the verbal predicate, incorporating the verb root “oku‑” and the past‑tense, third‑person singular suffix “‑du”. In Japanese, “田中さんは本を読んだ” (“Tanaka‑san read a book”) the verbal predicate is “読んだ” (yonda), formed from the verb stem “読ん” plus the past tense suffix “‑だ”.

Verbal predicates often carry morphological markings for subject agreement (person, number) and may include clitic pronouns, reflexive markers, or causative morphemes. In languages with rich inflection, a single verbal predicate can encode multiple grammatical categories that would be expressed by separate words in analytic languages like English. Understanding the structure and function of verbal predicates is essential for syntactic analysis, language teaching, and computational parsing of morphologically complex languages.