complete predicate in English grammar

complete predicate in English grammar Definition In traditional English grammar, a  complete predicate is made up of a verb or verb phrase along with its objects, complements, and/or adverbial  modifiers.  Ã‚   A verb by itself is sometimes called a simple predicate. Complete predicates are all the words in a sentence that are not part of the complete subject. Examples and Observations The four boys in the back row of the classroom  giggled helplessly. Dr. Mabel stood up and blushed and  giggled and  looked flustered. -(Robert A. Heinlein,  Time for the Stars. Scribners, 1956)The engineers struck oil. He sat down and  struck a match  to light his pipe. -(Paul Goodman, The Empire City, 1942)   Exactly at six, Martha  struck a small silver bell  with a silver fork and waited until its clear note had died away. -(Pam Durban, Soon. The Southern Review, 1997) The telescreen struck fourteen. He must leave in ten minutes.  He had to be back at  work by fourteen-thirty. Curiously, the chiming of the hour seemed to have put new heart into him.(George Orwell,  Nineteen Eighty-Four, 1949)Department stores, with their  escalators and clouds  of perfume and ranks of nylon lingerie, were like Heaven itself. -(John Updike, Self-Consciousness, 1989). Momma  opened boxes of crispy  crackers and we sat around the meat block at the rear of the Store. I sliced onions and Bailey opened two or even three cans of  sardines and allowed their juice of oil and fishing boats to ooze down and around the sides. -(Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, 1969)   After exercising, Stuart  would slip on his handsome wool wrapper, tie the cord tightly around his waist, and start for the bathroom, creeping silently through the  long dark hall  past his mothers and fathers room, past the hall closet where the carpet sweeper was kept, past Georges room and along by the head of the stairs until he got to the bathroom. -(E.B. White,  Stuart Little, 1945)      Testing to Find the Complete Predicate To figure out which words make up the complete predicate: (1) Examine the sentence: The pain from a headache generally persists for about a day.(2) Ask yourself what the subject ( The pain) does.The answer is the pain generally persists for about a day. That is the complete predicate.(3) Make up a sentence with a subject and a complete predicate. (Pamela Rice Hahn and Dennis E. Hensley, Macmillan Teach Yourself Grammar and Style in 24 Hours. Macmillan, 2000)Fronting In some alternatively ordered sentences, the subject is not the first element to appear in the sentence. Some element of the complete predicate is fronted or placed at the beginning of the sentence in front of the subject. Fronting shifts emphasis from the subject to the fronted element in the sentence: At the beach, I always feel content. Never could I have imagined the horrors that awaited us. The first sentence begins with the adverbial at the beach. Though the phrase precedes the subject I, it is still a part of the complete predicate. At the beach modifies the verb feel. . . . The second sentence begins with the adverb never and the modal auxiliary verb could. Though it precedes the subject, could is still a part of the verb phrase could have imagined. - (Michael Strumpf and Auriel Douglas, The Grammar Bible. Owl Books, 2004)