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The subject receives a privileged status in theories of sentence structure. In those approaches that acknowledge the binary division of the clause into a subject and a predicate (as is the case in most phrase structure grammars ), the subject is usually an immediate dependent of the root node, whereby its sister is the predicate.
The clause structure with an inverted subject and verb, used to form questions as described above, is also used in certain types of declarative sentences. This occurs mainly when the sentence begins with adverbial or other phrases that are essentially negative or contain words such as only , hardly , etc.:
A sentence consisting of at least one dependent clause and at least two independent clauses may be called a complex-compound sentence or compound-complex sentence. Sentence 1 is an example of a simple sentence. Sentence 2 is compound because "so" is considered a coordinating conjunction in English, and sentence 3 is complex.
A major sentence is a regular sentence; it has a subject and a predicate, e.g. "I have a ball." In this sentence, one can change the persons, e.g. "We have a ball." However, a minor sentence is an irregular type of sentence that does not contain a main clause, e.g. "Mary!", "Precisely so.", "Next Tuesday evening after it gets dark."
Like most types of inversion, subject–verb inversion is a phenomenon that challenges theories of sentence structure. In particular, the traditional subject – predicate division of the clause (S → NP VP) is difficult to maintain in light of instances of subject–verb inversion such as Into the room will come a unicorn .
The declarative sentence is the most common kind of sentence in language, in most situations, and in a way can be considered the default function of a sentence. What this means essentially is that when a language modifies a sentence in order to form a question or give a command, the base form will always be the declarative.
English clause elements are the minimum set of units needed to describe the linear structure of a clause. Traditionally, they are partly identified by terms such as subject and object . Their distribution in a clause is partly indicated by traditional terms defining verbs as transitive or intransitive .
The subject is defined as the verb argument that appears outside the canonical finite verb phrase, whereas the object is taken to be the verb argument that appears inside the verb phrase. [3] This approach takes the configuration as primitive, whereby the grammatical relations are then derived from the configuration.