What is a Complete Predicate?

When you create a sentence, there are two things that must be present: a subject and a predicate. You can include other things as well, but if one of those pieces is missing, your sentence is incomplete.

In this video, we’re going to focus on predicates. Specifically, we’ll take a look at what simple predicates and complete predicates are.

Let’s get started!

Simple Predicates

First, let’s define what a simple predicate is.

A simple predicate is the main verb or verb phrase of a sentence. This means that the simple predicate will almost always be just one or two words.

Let’s take a look at a couple of examples.

In this sentence, the verb is the word walked, so walked is the simple predicate.

Let’s try another sentence.

In this sentence, there are two verbs: was and spent. The simple predicate will always be the main verb or verb phrase of the sentence, which is the verb that is most directly connected to the subject. In this case, the main verb is was, so that is the simple predicate.

Now that you’ve got the hang of simple predicates, let’s take a look at complete predicates. A complete predicate contains the main verb and all of the words that are attached to the verb. This would include things like adverbs, adverb phrases, and prepositional phrases.

Let’s look at our previous example sentence:

We figured out that the main verb is was, so we need to look for all of the words that are attached to the word was in some way. In this case, tired is a predicate adjective that describes what Amber was, and “because she spent all night studying” is an adverbial phrase that describes why Amber was tired, so we know the complete predicate must be “was tired because she spent all night studying.”

Let’s try a different sentence:

In this sentence, the main verb is swam. The prepositional phrase “in the pool” describes where Caleb swam, and the adverb phrase “all day” describes to what extent Caleb swam, so the complete predicate here is “swam in the pool all day.”

Ok, let’s look at another, slightly more complex example.

This sentence contains a compound predicate, which means it contains two verbs that both share the same subject. The two verbs are finished and played. If we gather all of the words and phrases that are connected to this simple
predicate, we get the complete predicate: “finished his homework and played video games for a few hours.”

Ok, to wrap things up, let’s go over a couple of review questions.

Review Questions

1. What is the simple predicate in the following sentence?

The dog waited by the door for his owner to return home.

1. return
2. waited
3. to return
4. The dog waited

2. What is the complete predicate in the following sentence?

Chloe and Dave arrived early and helped set up the decorations.

1. arrived early and helped set up
2. Chloe and Dave arrived and helped
3. arrived early and helped set up the decorations
4. Chloe and Dave set up the decorations

All right, that’s all for this review. Thanks for watching, and happy studying!