1. It is the word with the greatest weight in a sentence, representing the information of the subject (name or pronoun of the person performing the action) structured around the verb (action) in the predicate.
Examples: a) Maria she is kind to everyone. Subject Core: Maria
Maria is kind to everyone. Head of the predicate: is
b) Raul Help your child with math homework. Core of the subject: Raúl
Raul help your child with math homework. Predicate core: help
Etymology: core, from Latin nucleusin the sense of ‘centre’, ‘main’, rooted in nux, nuciswhich refers to ‘nut’.+ Subject, from Latin subiectusparticiple of go upas ‘to place under’, ‘to hold’.+ Predicate, by Late Latin praedicatumon the prefix pre-, from ‘forward’, the verb sayin the sense of ‘to indicate’, ‘to highlight’, and the suffix -ado, from the Latin form -to yoursdue to substantiation.
Grammatical category: masculine noun
Subject and Predicate Core
In sentences with two members or bimembers there is a subject (the person who performs the action) and a predicate (what describes the action performed by the subject). This implies that the subject answers the question who and the predicate the question what. Both the subject and the predicate of a sentence have an essential word, that is, a nucleus.
The core of the subject
The fundamental element of the subject of a sentence is its head. In other words, the core is the most important word in any subject.
In the sentence “Isabel dances”, if we ask the question who, the answer is Isabel and it becomes the nucleus of the subject of the sentence. As is logical, the word dances constitutes the predicate of the sentence.
It should be noted that the subject of a sentence is the person, animal, or thing that performs the action of the verb. Thus, in the sentence “My dog is seven years old”, the subject is formed by My dog and, therefore, its nucleus is the word dog.
In the sentence “My brother’s neighbors have prepared a farewell for him”, the subject is My brother’s neighbors and the head is the word neighbors. In any case, the head of the subject is always a noun.
It must be taken into account that, sometimes, the subject appears omitted. Thus, in the sentence “didn’t”, the subject does not appear explicitly, but logically the subject is the personal pronoun he. In order to know what the nucleus of the subject has to be in these cases, it is necessary to look for the personal pronoun that agrees with the verb form of the nucleus of the predicate.
The core of the predicate
People, animals or things perform actions, which are expressed through a type of words, verbs. In this way, in every sentence the nucleus of the predicate is always a verb. In the sentence “The team won the championship”, the subject head is the word selection and the predicate head is the word won.
The predicate is a syntactic function that is carried out by a verb or by a verbal group. In this sense, a verbal periphrasis can act as the nucleus of the predicate (for example, in the sentence “My friend is arriving” the nucleus of the predicate is arriving, since it is the main verb form).
It is convenient to first identify the head of the predicate
In parsing it is useful to first establish what the head of the predicate is. In this way, it is easier to discover which is the subject that performs the action.
In the sentence “My friend takes care of the plants” the action that is carried out is to take care of the plants and when we have already identified the core of the action it is possible to ask the question who (who takes care of the plants? my friend).
Photos: Fotolia – Konstantin Yuganov / XY
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