A predicative verb is a verb that behaves as a grammatical

adjective In linguistics, an adjective ( abbreviated ) is a word that generally modifies a noun or noun phrase or describes its referent. Its semantic role is to change information given by the noun. Traditionally, adjectives were considered one of the ...

; that is, it predicates (qualifies or informs about the properties of its argument). It is a special kind of

stative verb According to some linguistics theories, a stative verb is a verb that describes a state of being, in contrast to a dynamic verb, which describes an action. The difference can be categorized by saying that stative verbs describe situations that are ...

. Many languages do not use the present forms of the verb "to be" to separate an adjective from its noun: instead, these forms of the verb "to be" are understood as part of the adjective. Egyptian uses this structure: "my mouth is red" is written as "red my mouth" (/dSr=f r=i/). Other languages to use this structure include the

Northwest Caucasian languages The Northwest Caucasian languages, also called West Caucasian, Abkhazo-Adyghean, Abkhazo-Circassian, Circassic, or sometimes ''Pontic languages'' (from the historical region of Pontus, in contrast to ''Caspian languages'' for the Northeast Ca ...

, the Thai language, Indonesian, the

East Slavic languages The East Slavic languages constitute one of three regional subgroups of the Slavic languages, distinct from the West and South Slavic languages. East Slavic languages are currently spoken natively throughout Eastern Europe, and eastwards to Siber ...

, the

Semitic languages The Semitic languages are a branch of the Afroasiatic language family. They are spoken by more than 330 million people across much of West Asia, the Horn of Africa, and latterly North Africa, Malta, West Africa, Chad, and in large immigrant ...

, some

Nilotic languages The Nilotic languages are a group of related languages spoken across a wide area between South Sudan and Tanzania by the Nilotic peoples. Etymology The word Nilotic means of or relating to the Nile River or to the Nile region of Africa. Dem ...

and the

Athabaskan languages Athabaskan (also spelled ''Athabascan'', ''Athapaskan'' or ''Athapascan'', and also known as Dene) is a large family of indigenous languages of North America, located in western North America in three areal language groups: Northern, Pacific C ...

. Many adjectives in Chinese and

Japanese Japanese may refer to: * Something from or related to Japan, an island country in East Asia * Japanese language, spoken mainly in Japan * Japanese people, the ethnic group that identifies with Japan through ancestry or culture ** Japanese diaspor ...

also behave like this. In the

Akkadian language Akkadian (, Akkadian: )John Huehnergard & Christopher Woods, "Akkadian and Eblaite", ''The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World's Ancient Languages''. Ed. Roger D. Woodard (2004, Cambridge) Pages 218-280 is an extinct East Semitic language t ...

s, the "predicative" (also called the "permansive" or "stative") is a set of pronominal inflections used to convert noun stems into effective sentences, so that the form ''šarrāku'' is a single word more or less equivalent to either of the sentences ''šarrum anāku'' "I am king" or ''šarratum anāku'' "I am queen"."Akkadian and Eblaite" by John Huehnergaard and Christopher Woods" in ''The Cambridge Encyclopedia of the World's Ancient Languages'', edited by Roger D. Woodard (2004) , pages 245, 264, and 267.

References

Parts of speech Verb types {{Syntax-stub