Subjects and Objects in a Sentence
Subjects
and Objects in a Sentence
We will now look more
closely at the ways in which words and phrases are grouped together and ordered
within clauses and sentences to convey a particular meaning.
The main elements of sentences
To begin this section,
we will, first of all, examine the two most vital parts of the clause structure
and then move on to the other elements. Again, it will be useful to use a few
examples to illustrate the grammatical ideas.
·
He sneezed.
·
Accidents happen.
·
Speed kills.
·
Yvonne left.
·
Snakes crawl.
These clauses are all simple sentences
consisting of only two words each. The first element in each sentence is called
the Subject, while the second is the Verb. (Notice that I am using a capital letter here
to talk about the verb as a clause element as opposed to the verb as a word
class.) The Subject and the Verb are the minimum requirements for constructing
a basic English clause (with the exception of directives like sit! and go!) and appear in that order in the vast majority of positive and
negative statements. Although single words have been used to fill the Subject
and Verb 'slots' in the examples above, much more complicated phrases can, of
course, be made:
Subject
|
Verb
|
The
tall, dark stranger
|
was
singing
|
The
retail prices index
|
has
been rising
|
Shouting
and screaming in arguments
|
doesn't
help
|
The
newly-arrived refugees
|
weren't
able to understand
|
Being
rejected by work mates
|
hurts
|
The
poor grasshopper
|
couldn't
sleep
|
The Subject
As noted earlier, the subject of a positive or
negative statement is usually the first element of a clause or sentence. The Subjects in the
following sentences are in bold and the type of Subject is given in brackets:
·
The tall, dark stranger was singing. (noun phrase)
·
She stood still.(pronoun)
·
To err is human. (verb)
·
What he told me turned out to be a lie. (subordinate clause)
By far the most commonly used types of Subject
are the noun phrase and the pronoun (I is the most frequently occurring word in the spoken language),
while the verb - more correctly the verbinfinitive with to - is seldom used in modern English. A subordinate clause as
Subject is quite common both in speech and writing and usually begins with what(ever)..., the fact that... or that...:
·
The fact that he likes skiing doesn't interest
me at all.
·
That Jane failed her exam is a great disappointment.
·
Whatever I hear about him surprises me.
The way to test whether
a clause is functioning as the Subject is to try replacing it with a simpler
grammatical element such as a pronoun or basic noun phrase and then checking
the grammaticality of the clause. Applying this test to the sentences above
would give:
·
It doesn't interest me at all.
·
It is a great disappointment.
·
It surprises me.
... all of which are
grammatically acceptable. Notice that, although the Subject may consist of
several words, a long phrase or even a subordinate clause, there can only be
one grammatical Subject per clause.
Up to this point we have been discussing only
positive and negative statements where the Subject is the first element of the
clause. However, there is one very common situation where this word order is
not used - namely, in questions. Here the Subject and part of the verb phrase
constituting the Verb element are inverted. From some of the examples above we get:
·
Was the tall, dark stranger singing?
·
Has the retail prices index been rising?
·
Doesn't shouting and screaming in arguments help?
·
Weren't the newly-arrived refugees able to
understand?
·
Couldn't the poor grasshopper sleep?
The Verb has a pivotal role in sentence structure.
As with the Subject, the Verb can, and often does, consist of more than one
word, but is treated as a single unit expressing not only the basic meaning of
the main word (run, decide, imitate etc.), but also, among other things, the time
that the action took place, whether the action is finished or not and the
certainty of the action. In the examples below, the Verb is in bold:
·
The cat sleeps all day.
·
He is talking rubbish.
·
We will be seeing each other next week.
·
The wallet might have been lost at the party.
So, although there may
be up to four, possibly even five words in the verb phrase of a clause, they
are usually analysed as one Verb as an element of the clause. To demonstrate
the importance of the Verb in a clause, try omitting the verb phrases from the
examples above. Having done that, now omit each of the other elements in turn
and see how the sense of the clause is affected.
The choice of the verb itself will often largely
dictate what other elements may or may not be used in the clause. Verbs like yawn, sleep and scratch would seem to require an animate Subject, whilelaugh, talk and read usually need human Subjects (although the
actions of animals are sometimes described in the same terms). Some verbs need
only a Subject to make a complete clause (he yawned, the cat is sleeping, Barry jumped), while others appear to need some more elements - *he hit..., *they like..., *cars cost...; we will look at these other elements in the next section.
Other elements in the clause
Apart from the two main clause elements, Subject
and Verb, there are three others which may or may not appear in the clause.
These are the Object, the Complement and the Adverbial. The following sentence contains examples of each of these:
·
The agency considered Harry indispensable for most jobs.
Using the definitions from the previous section, the agency is the Subject and considered is the Verb. The remaining elements are: Object
- Harry, Complement - indispensable, Adverbial - for most jobs. We will now examine these in turn.
The Object
Here are some more
examples of both people and things as Objects:
·
He loves football.
·
The dog bit the postman.
·
The police have arrested three people.
·
Sally opened the door to the dining room.
·
The company sacked one hundred of its employees.
·
Fifteen children from the school choir will be singing African
folk songs.
As with the Subject, the Object can be anything
from a single word (football) to a phrase (the door to the dining
room). You will notice that
the Object in each case directly follows the Verb. This is by far the most
common position for the Object element in English, although, again, there are
exceptions. English is, therefore, usually referred to as an SVO type language, meaning that the expected and
most natural order of clause elements is Subject + Verb + Object. If you are a
native speaker of English, this might seem so obvious as not to be worth
comment. However, there are many languages in the world that do not follow this
pattern; for example, Welsh and Irish are bothVSO languages, while Japanese and Turkish are SOV. It appears that this latter type is more
common than the English SVO.
The examples given so far contain what is
usually called a direct object; that is, there is only one object in the clause and this is the
main focus. But how do we analyse the Objects in the following sentences?
·
A young boy showed her the way here.
·
Several friends have told me the same story.
·
The shop is sending my father a replacement.
·
You gave them no warning.
The direct object is shown in bold; but that
still leaves us with an extra element immediately following the Verb in each
sentence which we have not accounted for. While the direct object is the main
focus of the verb action, the remaining elements (her, me, my father, them)
seem to be the recipients of the direct object. So, in the third
example, my father will be receiving the replacement. All of these sentences can in fact be
rewritten to illustrate this idea of recipient with very little change in meaning:
·
A young boy showed the way here to her.
·
Several friends have told the same story to me.
·
The shop is sending a replacement to my father.
·
You gave no warning to them
The preposition to indicates the target of the action of the verb.
These targets, given in bold, are referred to as indirect objects. Notice that in the second set of examples the
indirect object is formed by using a prepositional phrase with to and also follows the direct object, whereas in
the first set the indirect object precedes the direct object without to.
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