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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.:
Syntactic theories based on phrase structure typically analyze subject–aux inversion using syntactic movement. In such theories, a sentence with subject–aux inversion has an underlying structure where the auxiliary is embedded deeper in the structure. When the movement rule applies, it moves the auxiliary to the beginning of the sentence. [5]
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 .
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.
Contrary to the subject-auxiliary inversion, the verb in cases of subject–verb inversion in English is not required to be an auxiliary verb; it is, rather, a full verb or a form of the copula be. If the sentence has an auxiliary verb, the subject is placed after the auxiliary and the main verb.
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."
In linguistic typology, subject–verb–object (SVO) is a sentence structure where the subject comes first, the verb second, and the object third. Languages may be classified according to the dominant sequence of these elements in unmarked sentences (i.e., sentences in which an unusual word order is not used for emphasis).