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The stereotypical subject immediately precedes the finite verb in declarative sentences and represents an agent or a theme. The subject is often a multi-word constituent and should be distinguished from parts of speech, which, roughly, classify words within constituents. In the example sentences below, the subjects are indicated in boldface.
The subject complement is bold in the following examples: The lake was a tranquil pool. – Predicative nominal; Here, was is a copula (a concomitant form of be) that links the subject complement a tranquil pool (which has the head noun pool), to the subject the lake (which has the head noun lake). The lake is tranquil. – Predicative adjective
Subject + Verb (linking) + Subject Complement (adjective, noun, pronoun) Example: Abdul is happy. Jeanne is a person. I am she. Subject + Verb (transitive) + Indirect Object + Direct Object Example: She made me a pie. This clause pattern is a derivative of S+V+O, transforming the object of a preposition into an indirect object of the verb, as ...
The reference form (more technically, the least marked) of certain parts of speech is normally in the nominative case, but that is often not a complete specification of the reference form, as the number and the gender may need to be specified. Thus, the reference or least marked form of an adjective might be the nominative masculine singular.
In the sentence The man sees the dog, the dog is the direct object of the verb "to see". In English, which has mostly lost grammatical cases, the definite article and noun – "the dog" – remain the same noun form without number agreement in the noun either as subject or object, though an artifact of it is in the verb and has number agreement, which changes to "sees".
A finite verb is generally expected to have a subject, as it does in all the examples above, although null-subject languages allow the subject to be omitted. For example, in the Latin sentence cogito ergo sum ("I think therefore I am") the finite verbs cogito and sum appear without an explicit subject – the subject is understood to be the ...
[2] [3] Forms such as I, he and we are used for the subject ("I kicked John"), and forms such as me, him and us are used for the object ("John kicked me"). As a language evolves, cases can merge (for instance, in Ancient Greek, the locative case merged with the dative), a phenomenon known as syncretism. [4]
A compound subject consists of two or more individual noun phrases coordinated to form a single, longer noun phrase. Compound subjects cause many difficulties in compliance with grammatical agreement between the subject and other entities (verbs, pronouns, etc.). These issues also occur with compound noun phrases of all sorts, but the problems ...