Sidi Mohammed Ben Abdellah University S1 Grammar

Faculty of letters-Dhar Al Mahraz

Department of English

M. El Biadi, A. Fassi Fihri, S. Madani Alaoui, G. Taoufiq

The simple sentence and its elements:

The Nature of sentence constituents

I- The simple sentence

A sentence is a group of words expressing a complete thought, starting by a capital letter and
ending up by a period. It is the largest unit of a language, having usually a subject and a
predicate.

For example:

-The importance of the minority party in American politics must be understood.

(Subject) (predicate)

A sentence has to have what we call a central core (nucleus). This central core has to be
there for the sentence to be a complete sentence in the grammatical sense. So, it needs to have
Nouns/pronouns and verbs.
For example:

The hunter caught a lion.

-He caught a lion
*The hunter caught…(incomplete sentence)

What the predicator contains and the way it is structured also depends on the type of verb
used in the sentence. Verbs can be divided into action and state verbs

Action and state verbs

Main verbs can describe events (actions) and states. The distinction between events and
states is important because we generally avoid using state verbs in continuous tenses.

‘Break’ and ‘eat’ are event verbs. They are also referred to as action verbs because they
describe an action, something we consciously do:

I broke the vase.

Mary spilled coffee on her skirt.
The man who is standing next to tree gave an interesting speech.

There are verbs which are said to describe a state rather than talk about an action like ‘to
know’, ‘to belong’. These are called state verbs:
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Sidi Mohammed Ben Abdellah University S1 Grammar
Faculty of letters-Dhar Al Mahraz
Department of English

M. El Biadi, A. Fassi Fihri, S. Madani Alaoui, G. Taoufiq

I don’t know the tune

This belongs to you.

Some main verbs need another element after them; something is missing in the following
examples (what did he spill? What did John give?):

He spilled…
John gave…

In order to have a complete sentence, you have to add another sentence constituent after the
verbs ‘spill’ and ‘give’. Both verbs are transitive verbs which need a direct object (DO):

He spilled the beans.

(DO)
John gave his coat to the man.
(DO)

There is a category of verbs which are called complement verbs. They must be followed by a
subject complement. Verbs such as ‘to be’ ‘to feel’ ‘to look’ ‘to become’ are complement
verbs.
- She felt uneasy.
- They became millionaires.

‘uneasy’ and ‘millionaires’ are subject complements and not direct objects. (See the handout
about the grammatical function)

Some other verbs do not need anything after the verb like in the following:

Time elapsed.
The baby cried.

The examples above show that there is another important distinction we need to make
concerning verbs:

V-Transitive vs intransitive verbs

Intransitive verbs

When a verb has no object in the sentence, it is called an intransitive verb. They can be divided into
two types:

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Sidi Mohammed Ben Abdellah University S1 Grammar
Faculty of letters-Dhar Al Mahraz
Department of English

M. El Biadi, A. Fassi Fihri, S. Madani Alaoui, G. Taoufiq

a-Pure intransitives:

They are almost exclusively intransitive, such as:

arrive, elapse, fade, vanish, rise, materialise, rain, snow.

Many of these verbs express behaviour which is typically involuntary or semi-involuntary like, cough,
collapse, blush, die, cry, sleep, slip, smile, sneeze, scream, tremble, yawn.

The following are some examples:

e.g. It is snowing/ raining.

The money vanished.

Her dreams materialised.

She is coughing .

Mary arrived late.

b- Verbs that are used both transitively or intransitively:

a- The Direct or Indirect Object may be left unexpounded when its referent is understood by
social convention (drive, park):

-Mary was driving (her/the car) when she saw them crossing the road

-He drinks.

Transitive verbs:

They are the type of verbs which prototypically take one Object (Direct or primaryObject) (They are
also referred to as monotransitive verbs) or a Prepositional Object (object of preposition).

Mary broke the cup

The cat ate the fish

Ditransitive verbs:

These are verbs which take a subject and two objects. These objects may be called direct and
indirect, or primary and secondary.

He sent a letter to his daughter.

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Sidi Mohammed Ben Abdellah University S1 Grammar
Faculty of letters-Dhar Al Mahraz
Department of English

M. El Biadi, A. Fassi Fihri, S. Madani Alaoui, G. Taoufiq

He sent his daughter a letter

Exercise 1:

Identify the main verb in the following sentences. Is the main verb an action verb or a state verb?

Are the verbs transitive or intransitive?

1-They didn’t take their mountain bikes with them.

2-He gave Mary ten dollars.

3-The audience laughed.

4-Everyone likes her.

5-He passed Paul the ball.

6-She knows everyone.

7-Jean read him the books.

8-The students memorized the lesson.

9-She is baking him a cake.

10-I am mailing Sam the article.

11-The wall collapsed yesterday.

12-The person who sent us the letter has arrived.

Exercise 2

Circle the subject and underline the predicate of the clauses above.

Other additional words can be used to modify the main elements of the sentence: their
function is to tell us more about these elements which belong to the central core of the
sentence. These other elements are labelled , ‘adjectives’ and ‘adverbs’ and also adjective
clauses. The following are some examples:

The courageous hunter quickly caught a ferocious lion.

He carefully opened the door.
The man who is walking down the street is a doctor.

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Sidi Mohammed Ben Abdellah University S1 Grammar
Faculty of letters-Dhar Al Mahraz
Department of English

M. El Biadi, A. Fassi Fihri, S. Madani Alaoui, G. Taoufiq

I am extremely grateful to you.

The underline elements are used to modify either the head-nouns (‘hunter’ and ‘lion’ in the
first sentence. These two head-nouns are modified by the adjectives ‘courageous’ and
‘ferocious’ respectively.
‘the man’ in the third sentence is modified by a clause (‘who is walking down the street’).
This type of clause is called an adjective clause as it is used to provide more information
about the head-noun.
Modifiers can be adverbs like in the 2nd and the 4th examples above . The adverb ‘carefully’
modifies the verb ‘opened’ and the adverb ‘extremely’ modifies the adjective ‘grateful’ which
is a subject complement in the sentence.

The underlined elements, which are used as modifiers can be omitted and the sentences would
remain grammatical. The following are the same sentences without the modifiers:

The hunter caught the lion.

He opened the door.
The man is a doctor.
I am grateful to you.

Exercise 3

Underline the elements used to modify the main sentence constituents in the following. Are
these modifiers adjectives, adverbs or adjective clauses.

1-All new foreign students are welcome to join the clubs and societies.

2-Your work is beautifully presented.

3-Every room was painted in different colours.

4-The economic policy of this government has failed.

5-That was an exciting game.

6-A diesel car is usually more economical than a petrol one.

7-Ivory trinkets lay scattered about.

8-Trinkets, which were carved from ivory lay, scattered about.

9-He behaved calmly.

10-The plain through which this river flows is marvelously fertile.

11-Treeless spots were plainly visible.

12-Spots where no trees grew were plainly visible.

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Sidi Mohammed Ben Abdellah University S1 Grammar
Faculty of letters-Dhar Al Mahraz
Department of English

M. El Biadi, A. Fassi Fihri, S. Madani Alaoui, G. Taoufiq

13-The architect who designed this building was a man of genius.

II- Sentences, clauses and constituents

A sentence can sometimes be divided up into two or more shorter sentences (independent
clauses). The following is an example:

I’ll see you on Friday but all of us will be keeping our fingers crossed.

(Clause A) (clause B)

Clause A and clause B are two independent clauses. They are considered independent
because each one of them can stand alone as a sentence. You can say:

I’ll see you on Friday. (It is independent because it can stand by itself as a simple
sentence)

Clause A and B above are connected together by the conjunction ‘but’ making one big
sentence. Conjunctions such as ‘but’ ‘and’ ‘or’ have this function of connecting sentence
constituent/elements or parts and they are called Prepositions and Conjunctions. Example:

The courageous hunter and his helpers quickly caught a ferocious lion and locked him
up inside a big cage.

In the sentences above ‘but’ and ‘and’ are considered constituents whose function is to
connect two clauses. It does not form part of a clause.

Exercise 4

Underline the independent clauses that the following contain:

1-They knocked down all the houses and they built a car park.

2-Are there four or five people living in that house?

3-The shoes that I bought look great but are not very comfortable.

4-There are seats outside but some people don’t like sitting outdoors.

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Sidi Mohammed Ben Abdellah University S1 Grammar
Faculty of letters-Dhar Al Mahraz
Department of English

M. El Biadi, A. Fassi Fihri, S. Madani Alaoui, G. Taoufiq

Clauses can further be divided into constituents (clause constituents). Each constituent may
consist of one or several words. These are basic units such as noun phrases (NPs), verb
phrases (VPs) and prepositional phrases (PPs), adjective phrases and adverb phrase. These are
called sentence constituents, each of which fulfill a grammatical function in the sentence.

III- Clause constituents

At the simplest level, a sentence constituent is any word or group of words which can be
replaced by another word or group of words.

We have to consider sentence constituents from two perspectives

- What they are in terms of the words that make them up. (Nature)
- The function they perform in sentences. (grammatical function)

Some constituents that have the same form can appear in different parts of the sentence with
different functions.

People need people

Henry eats snails.

No one wants to eat snails with butter and garlic.

IV- Types of clause constituents

Depending on whether we are looking at constituents from the perspective of what they are or
what they do, we choose different terms, even though they may describe the same thing.

For example a noun phrase may be a subject, object, complements depending on its function
(and position) in a clause.

Examples :

That man is a doctor. John bought his friend a present.

A- Form

A noun phrase (NP) consists of a noun or pronoun, which is called the head (also the head-noun), and
any dependent words before or after the head. Dependent words give specific information about the
head-noun. (Cambridge online dictionary)

1- Noun phrases (henceforth NPs)

a- One-word NPs

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Sidi Mohammed Ben Abdellah University S1 Grammar
Faculty of letters-Dhar Al Mahraz
Department of English

M. El Biadi, A. Fassi Fihri, S. Madani Alaoui, G. Taoufiq

Noun phrases can consist of one word such as a name, pronoun or noun. Examples :

Names (proper nouns ) : Angela, Bolivia, Casablanca Pronouns : She, us, that

Nouns (common nouns) : People, book-shelf, trees, water

b- Complex NPs
i- A main noun + a word/ group of words

These are groups of words connected to and including a main noun (the headword).
Example :

An illness ; an old, rather bent woman

We often find the following elements in noun phrases (usually in this order) :

This (determiner) old (modifier) kettle (headword/ head noun)

A (determiner) fast (modifier) car (headword/ head noun)

Determiners include articles, quantidfiers, numbers, possessive adjectives (my, your,

their) and demonstrative adjectives (this, that , these, those)

Modifiers may be :

Adjectives, e.g. old kettle Nouns, e.g. brick house

Possessive forms : child’s toy Adverb- adjective combinations : carefully

painted wall.

ii- Complex NPs including a subordinate clause

The following is an NP (and NOT a sentence) made up of a headword and a subordinate

clause.

The woman (the headword) I told you about last Thursday (subordinate clause)

What we have in this example is an adjective clause ‘I told you about last Thursday’ which
is used to modify the head-noun ‘woman’.

iii- NPs including Prepostional phrases (PPs) :

The trouble with young people

iv- NPs including –ing phrases

The boy talking to Angela

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Sidi Mohammed Ben Abdellah University S1 Grammar
Faculty of letters-Dhar Al Mahraz
Department of English

M. El Biadi, A. Fassi Fihri, S. Madani Alaoui, G. Taoufiq

v- NPs including to-infinitives

I've got no decent shoes to wear

Exercise 5

What type of NPs are the following:

This fantastic building

The man we met yesterday
The man in the white shirt
The house that Jack built
John’s team
The woman who discovered radium
The blue dress
An eight-year-old boy who caught a fish
the man standing over there
Some food to eat

2- Verb phrases (VP)

Verb phrases can consist of :

A single-word main verb : …wept

A multiword main verb : … stood up.

One or more auxiliary verbs and a main verb : … has been weeping ; ought to stand
up.

Two main verbs : …want to speak ; recommend staying.

The VP may include ‘not’ or ..n’t : …doesn’t drink.

3- Prepositional phrases (PP)

These are groups of words that begin with a preposition and contain a NP.

Examples :

On the corner

(Preposition) (NP)

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Sidi Mohammed Ben Abdellah University S1 Grammar
Faculty of letters-Dhar Al Mahraz
Department of English

M. El Biadi, A. Fassi Fihri, S. Madani Alaoui, G. Taoufiq

With many additional features

(preposition) (NP)

PPs may also be part of a larger NP :

The house on the corner New software with many additional features

4- Adjective phrases

Adjective phrases contain an adjective, which may follow one or more adverbs :

Not very old really quite glamourous

5- Adverb phrases

Adverb phrases contain an adverb which may follow one or more other adverbs

Rather unwisely only once

Exercise 6

Are the following complete sentences? Do all the complete sentences contain one clause?

1-I heard a noise

2-The importance of American politics
3-The book which we are reading at the moment
4-Dreams often come true
5-Give me the money
6-My brother bought a new car yesterday and he is very excited about it.
7-Their daughter who lives in South Africa
8-You can take Route 14 to get there, but it may take you a little longer.
9-Grace is an excellent athlete, although she injured her leg recently.
10-We’ve still enjoyed our holiday, although it rained a lot.

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