• Predicates may be “basic” or “derived”. They are basic if they must be known as such if they are to be used in appropriate ways. […] • Basic predicates can be stems, words, or combinations of words. If a basic predicate consists of a combination of words, it will be an “idiom”: although it consists of a combination of different words, it cannot be semantically derived by productive rule. • All basic predicates are listed in the “lexicon”. The lexicon thus contains the full stock of basic predicates of a language.
- Dik (1989), a pag.54

We saw that predicates can be basic or derived. In the former case they are contained in the lexicon, in the latter, they are produced through predicate formation rules. […] When a predicate is basic, this means that the speaker must learn and know it as such in order to be able to use it correctly . It does not mean that the predicate has no internal semantic structure. Indeed, the meaning of most basic predicates is such that it can be analysed in terms of combinations of the meanings of semantically simpler predicates. Thus, the English predicates “die”, “kill”, and “murder” are basic predicates, since there is no rule of English by means of which they could be formed; they therefore belong to the lexicon of English.
- Dik (1989), a pag.68