12.4 Predicates without Verbs

In grammar, a predicate refers to everything after the subject in a sentence.

In English, the predicate of a sentence usually has a verb (e.g., I like you. I am 31 years old.). In Cantonese, the predicate of a sentence sometimes doesn’t have any verbs. We will encounter two sentence structures like this in this lesson.

To indicate someone’s age, we use the following sentence structure. Notice we put the person and the age right next to each other, without adding any verbs in between.

We can add 今年 gam1 nin4 (‘this year’) before the age.

To indicate someone’s birthday, we use the following sentence structure. Notice we put the person, the date and the noun 生日 saang1 jat6 (‘birthday’) right next to each other, without adding any verbs in between.