Predicate Swapping: Let’s Get Weird

A dog and a man swap heads. Only one of them appears to have given the arrangement some thought.

On the grand stages of the English sentence, grammatical subjects hog the glory. Initially, at least, readers focus on what and whom while the remaining syntax waits in the wings. But damn it, predicates give body to the whole production, and without them, subjects would be standing there stunned, unable to hear the music and devoid of any purpose or meaning.

Of course, barring an unwieldy subject, most of a sentence takes place in the predicate, so it’s prime for celebrity. Like Sally Rooney, you can omit your subjects entirely, then dismember your predicates and dangle their severed extremities like jewels on a necklace, as in this line from Intermezzo: “Down the staircase and into the room without seeing any of the others.” Or you can pull from David Szalay and write them straight, minimalist, and achingly clear, like this sentence from Flesh: “And then the moment passes, and she’s standing at the end of the jetty looking down into the water.”

If you’re searching for some panache between the two, you can learn a trick that hinges on broad manipulation of the predicate category—that is, forcing an action verb to dance like a linking verb so you can swap a predicate adjective out of the dressing room and into the spotlight.

Depending on how into grammar you are, you might wither at the sight of those words, but even if you don’t know what they mean, you’ll surely be familiar with what they describe: Think “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night” by Dylan Thomas. Or maybe, like me, you’ve recently read Notes on an Execution by Danya Kukafka, a massive lit thriller from 2022 that’s just bursting with this technique, as in this sentence near the start: “When you remember Blue Harrison, and your time in the Blue House, you recall how she could never walk by the surface of a window without glancing nervous at her own reflection.”

So what’s going on here? At first, it smacks of little more than odd ornamentation, maybe a sleight of hand to keep the adverb police from shooting up the whole production. But look a little closer—under the stage, in the dressing rooms, and out back where the theatre techs smoke—and it reveals itself as something deeper, something we want to deconstruct and figure out.

And so we nerd.

The Five Predicates

First, it helps to get clear on what a predicate is, which is basically everything the subject isn’t: the verbs and adverbs; the direct object, indirect object, and their adjectives; and a whole slew of phrases, from prepositional to participle. As a sidebar, it’s important to note that some phrases attach only to the subject, and the subject can even be an entire clause—two complications we’ll leave aside for simplicity’s sake. If you’re trying to find the predicate, you can usually assume it’s the entire cast of words to the right of the subject, unless the sentence is a question (e.g., “Did you remember to feed the dog?”), there’s a poetic inversion in play (e.g., “Cook him four chicken breasts I did today”), or an adverbial element is fronting the sentence (e.g., “After waiting too long for the chicken to cool, Hank ate fertilizer from a terracotta pot”). And you seldom see every cast member at the same time. Depending on the routine, performers show up variously in each of a sentence’s dependent and independent clauses, all of which have their own subjects and predicates (in most cases, subjects and verbs are mandatory for clauses to be clauses).

Next, predicates come in five categories that explain what a subject is or does. To get a grip on these, it’s easiest to look at sentences comprising just one independent clause. The most obvious category is the simple predicate, which is a single verb on its own, as in “Alicia runs.” Next, we have the complete predicate, which is the verb plus any objects or modifiers, as in “Alicia runs wildly down the street.” Further complicating things is the compound predicate, which has two verbs stemming from the same subject: “Alicia runs wildly down the street and vaults a utility van.” All these predicates feature action verbs, a broad category that refers to verbs of doing, not being.

Verbs of being are linking verbs, which have two of their own predicate categories: the predicate adjective and the predicate nominative. An example of the first might be “Donny is bankrupt” or even the unfairly maligned “I’m good” in response to “How are you?” The predicate adjective is a lexical invitation welcoming a subject, or a noun, to some description of its state, quality, or condition: an adjective. If you smell well, you’ll enjoy lounging in gardens, and if you also smell good, I’ll enjoy lounging with you. Verbs like “be,” “feel,” or “look,” when used in their linking senses, aren’t modified by adverbs—they all precede adjectives, like the depressing “jaundiced” or the infamous “bumfuzzled.” The predicate nominative, meanwhile, uses another noun or noun phrase to offer a description of the subject, something like “Priya is a Wheel of Fortune enthusiast.”

The Two-Step Swap

With that out of the way, we can better understand what’s going on with our technique. As mentioned, it has two steps, one of which draws our attention right away, while the other is both smoother and more complex. For the first, in the Kukafka number, we expect the adverb “nervously,” not the adjective “nervous,” and in the Thomas bit, we expect “gently,” not “gentle.” The first step is the simple substitution, which alone has a dramatic effect, and even though most of our brain tells us it’s objectively wrong, it works in part because we dimly recognize the manoeuvre from a perfectly standard piece of choreography we often see elsewhere: the aforementioned predicate adjective, blinking now in the spotlight. We think of sentences like “I feel great in February” or “They became evil after eating the pastries.” We say to ourselves, “Okay, this is pretty cool. Maybe I should try it.”

But is it enough for the adjective to simply muscle the adverb off stage and start ripping pirouettes? No, it isn’t, and here’s where the subtler, second step bids for our attention. This technique works best when the imposing adjective both complements the subject and modifies the verb, basically smearing the disgraced adverb’s modification not entirely off the verb and exclusively onto the subject but rather equally across both. In other words, the chimeric adjective does its standard duty of complementing the subject even as it apes the lost adverbial performance by modifying the verb.

In the Kukafka example—“you recall how she could never walk by the surface of a window without glancing nervous at her own reflection”—we understand the nervous state of being within “she,” and we see the nervous nature of “glance.” There’s an embellished action expressed through the roughly modified verb, and the subject’s inner state is described by the predicate’s adjectival cosplay. The meaning of “nervous” lands everywhere. It’s a great word choice. Meanwhile, in the Thomas example, we see the negated “gentle” tweaking both the implied subject of the imperative verb (i.e., “you”) and the action of going, which is further supported by the images in the poem: all that burning and raving, and of course all that raging.

Picking the Right Adjective

This double impact is important to note because the swap doesn’t always play out so nicely, and when it doesn’t, it’s best avoided. Here, it helps to look at starkly horrible example, so witness the following: “Jack climbed pimpled up the beanstalk.” Sucks, eh? It’s not that we can’t turn “pimpled” into an adverb. We can, and who cares if affixing the “-ly” nudges us into neologism? We’re already way out here in the big weird, and we trust that, encultured to understand morphology, our readers will accept an implied coinage if it’s the right one.

No, the reason this substitution fails is because of my half-baked word choice: the adjective tells us something about poor, greasy Jack, but it has nothing to say about the climb. Compare it to “frantic” or “lethargic.” If we’re sticking to participle adjectives, set it alongside “frazzled” or “exhausted.” To avoid a pointlessly dramatic swap, you need a word that has a meaningful impact on both the subject and the verb.

Once you find one, you’ll want to practise a little restraint. If you overdo steps like this, you tend to stumble around, and everyone watching becomes embarrassed. Instead, you want to reserve these stunts and deploy them strategically; otherwise, you’ll take to your desk and write so clever hoping that all your readers will recommend enthusiastic, and then you’ll give up for a while and resurrect keen only to reread exhausted and give up furious all over again. Nobody wants that.

What most readers—and editors—do want is to see a writer’s well-honed awareness play out in their standard and non-standard choices. You can go the Szalay route and pen it largely straight, omitting a little punctuation while everything else comes through in hypnotic sentences that cast maximalist spells with minimalist constructions. If that’s not of interest, you can go the Rooney route and get all hyper-fragmentary, producing a stream-of-consciousness effect that feels almost like real thought. Or you can do what Thomas and Kukafka did (among other things, of course) and blur the lines between predicate categories by replacing adverbs with well-considered adjectives.

All things being subjective, different readers will respond differently to what could, in every case, be reduced to affectation, and the more style you have, the more you risk upstaging your story or affronting people who just don’t like the way you move. But with a little restraint and some formal knowledge of where to look, the Thomas and Kukafka technique—let’s call it “predicate swapping”—can help enhance your writing just when your story needs a little more swing.