DIFFERENT PARTS OF SENTENCES

§1. The building of sentences is called syntax, and this is one of the most important of the parts of grammar. Syntax tells us how sentences are made up of parts, and give names to these parts. Syntax tells us how to put these parts together, and what sorts of words are found in them.

§2. The very first thing that we have to learn about syntax is that a sentence has two chief parts to it – one called the subject and the other called the predicate. Here are some sentences divided into their two parts.

You will have seen at once that the subject names the person or thing that does something, that is something or get to be something, and that the predicate tells you what he (or it) does, is, or get to be.

§3.  What other things do we notice when we look at these sentences?

§4. Well, we see that both a subject and predicate may be made of one word only or of two or more words; in fact they may each be as long as you like or as short as you like.

§5. We notice, too, that each predicate begins with a finite.

§6 We notice that the subject may be:

1. A single noun.

2. A noun with the (or some other determinate) in front of it.

3. A noun with an adjective in front of it.

4. A personal pronoun

5. A pronoun.

6. A gerund, such as seeing

7. An infinitive with to before it.

8. A noun modified by a subordinate clause.

§8. We notice that the predicate may be:

1. One single word (and that must be a finite)

2. A finite with one or more words after it.

3. That the words coming after the finite may be of almost any sorts.

§9. But there are other sorts of sentences which are not arranged in this way. You may have found some sentences with no subject:

You will notice that each of them begins with an imperative finite; they are the sort of sentences that we use when we tell people to do things; they are imperative sentences.

So we may make the rule: in imperative sentences there is generally no subject.

§ 10. Here are some sentences in which the subject comes after the predicate:

§ 11. Here are some sentences in which the subject comes in the middle of the predicate.

§ 12. But there is one sort of questions in which the subject comes before the predicate like this:

For we must remember that question-words like what, who, which, whose may be the subject of a sentence.

§ 13. But the first word of a predicate is not always a finite.

Adverbs like always, often, still, never are put in front of the finite but after 24 anomalous finites. Look at the following sentences and you will see.

Here are those adverbs at the beginning of the predicate, coming before the finites.

§ 14. but there are two cases in which other finites come before the subject. The common case in which this happens is when we begin a sentence with in, out, away, up, down, on, off  and the other adverbial particles.

We noticed, too, that we can do the same thing with here and  there.

§ 15. There is another (and not so important a ) case in which the subject comes after a finite that is not anomalous. But this is only in the sort of English used in telling stories. Here are some examples:

In these cases the subject is generally not a personal pronoun.

§ 16. We have examined all sorts of sentences and have seen how they can be divided into two parts: subject and predicate. We have seen that the predicate is sometimes a finite with no words after it:

And that sometimes the predicate is a finite with other words coming after it. The words in the predicate that come after the finite are called the complement (because they make the sentence complete)