Topic One: The Simplest Bits of Sentences

As most people can state, a sentence is composed of a subject and predicate. 

The subject refers to the part of the sentence that serves as the topic or focus of the action or description. 

The predicate refers to the part of the sentence that says something about the subject.

Let’s look at an example.

Snails watch football.

Alright.  The first question we can ask to determine the subject is: Who is doing something in this sentence?  In this case it is the snails.  So, the subject is snails.

Now to determine the predicate, we ask: What are the snails doing?  They are watching football.  In this way, the “something about the subject” that the predicate offers concerns the action in which the snails are taking part.  Here’s a different example.

Snails are delicious.

Again, the Who of the sentence is the snails, but in this sentence we do not have such an obvious action.  (This gets into the difference between transitive an intransitive verbs, but I’ll explain that later.)  Anyhow, the question we must ask ourselves to determine the predicate here is: What am I learning about these snails?  We learn that they are delicious.  The quality of taste is something about the snails that we learn, and therefore constitutes the predicate of the sentence.

Lindblom differentiates between these types of verbs by calling the verbs that refer to the condition or quality of the subject as linking verbs.  In his words, they “lack concrete exactness,” meaning they need further information to make sense. 

Examples of these words include: is, are, was, were, seem, become, or other verbs that connect the subject to the predicate in a necessary relationship.

Now, I want to caution over generalization of the predicate; there are other units in more complicated sentences that provide information that makes the sentence clearer but does not directly say anything about the subject.  The predicate refers to all of these smaller units as a whole, but separately, they have their own names.  Here is an example.

The snails slithered across the kitchen floor when my Aunt Sally dropped the aquarium filled with Tommy’s slimy pets.

The subject is still the snails, but the predicate becomes much more complicated.  Instead of stating a simple action the snails commit, the predicate describes where the action occurred as well as under what context.  All of this information as a whole remains part of the predicate, but individually different grammatical units are coming together to paint a more detailed picture of the event.

Some Basic Parts of Speech

Nouns name people, places, things, qualities, or ideas.

Proper nouns are capitalized and refer to specific people, places, or groups.

Pronouns serve as substitutes for a noun.  Pronouns come in a number of classes: Personal, demonstrative, indefinite, possessive, intensive/reflexive, or reciprocal.

Personal: replace definite people or things (I, you, he, she, it, etc)

Demonstrative: replace things pointed out (this, that, these, those)

Indefinite: replace unknown things (each, neither, either, one, anyone, everything, etc)

Possessive: replace things possessed by someone or something (mine, yours, his, hers, etc)

Intensive/Reflexive: “self” words that add emphasis (yourself, himself, etc)

He hurt himself.  You yourself kicked the potato.

Reciprocal: describes a mutual relationship (one another, each other) Be aware that this is not the same as the indefinite case, though some words are shared.  These two pronouns are both a group of two words, but together treated as one unit.

The tricky thing about pronouns is that occasionally a word that on its own appears to be classified as a pronoun can instead take on a different role and will then be classified as something else.  This is a warning, I’ll get to that another day.

Verbs demonstrate action, existence, or occurrence.