The catena unit is suited to an understanding of predicates and their argumentsFor a discussion and many illustrations of predicates as catenae, see Osborne (2005: 260-270)—a predicate is a property that is assigned to an argument or as a relationship that is established between arguments. A given predicate appears in sentence structure as a catena, and so do its arguments. A standard matrix predicate in a sentence consists of a content verb and potentially one or more auxiliary verbs. The next examples illustrate how predicates and their arguments are manifest in synonymous sentences across languages:
