Section: Writing and Language

147) View Additional Information

Identify the predicate of the following sentence in paragraph 3. 

Jan—as Captain Mossel and the crew on the ship called him, or Juan as he was known in Santo Domingo, or João as he had once been called by his Lusitanian sailor father and those like him among whom he worked, the kingdoms of the Iberians being the same in those days, and before that M______, the name his mother had summoned forth from her people and sworn him never to reveal to another soul, not so distant, it struck him, from the Makadewa the envoy of the first people had begun to call him—had turned his ear around and around like a tuning fork until he captured it, and with the key of this language that most of the Dutch on the ship assured him they could not fully hear, he had himself unlocked a door.

1. Jan
2. begun to call him
3. as he had once been called
4. had turned his ear around and around like a tuning fork until he captured it; had ... unlocked a door

The predicate is the action of the subject, so the key is to first find the subject and then reduce the sentence to its simplest parts (i.e. the necessities of being considered a sentence).