R1 Basic Sentence Structure

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Instructor's Notes

LearningCurve activities on sentence structure are available at the end of the Review of Sentence Structure section of this handbook.

As you write, your primary concern will be with the ideas you want to convey to your audience, not parts of speech or sentence structure. Still, writing clear and correct sentences is an important part of communicating effectively with your audience. This and the other sections in the Handbook will help you achieve that goal.*

This review of basic sentence structure will look first at the elements that make up simple sentences and then at how simple sentences produce compound and complex sentences.

R1-a Words, Phrases, and Clauses.

The basic building blocks of sentences are, of course, words, which can be combined into discrete groupings or phrases.

Words and phrases are further combined to create clauses, groups of at least two words that both name a topic and make some point about that topic; every clause can be divided into a subject and a predicate. The subject identifies the topic or theme of the sentence — what is being discussed — while the predicate says something about the subject and is the focus of information in the clause.

R1-b Sentence Units.

A simple sentence includes a single independent clause made up of a subject and a predicate. The subject and the predicate may each be a single word or a group of words. In addition to its verb, the predicate may include objects, complements, and adverbial modifiers.

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Simple sentences, then, are composed of some combination of these basic units:

Subject (S) The simplest subject can be a single noun or pronoun, but a subject may also consist of a noun phrase (including adjectives and other sentence elements) or even a noun clause. Subjects may also be compound when two or more nouns or pronouns are linked by a conjunction. (See R2 for definitions and examples of these various elements.)

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Verb (V) These can be classified as transitive, when they occur with an object, or intransitive, when they occur without an object. Intransitive verbs that occur with complements are often called linking verbs. Like subjects, verbs may be compound.

Objects (DO, IO) These include direct objects (DO) and indirect objects (IO), which, like subjects, can be nouns, noun phrases, noun clauses, or pronouns. Objects usually follow the subject and verb.

Complements (SC, OC) These are either subject complements or object complements: Subject complements (SC) refer to the subject, object complements (OC) to an object. Like subjects and objects, complements can be nouns or pronouns, noun phrases, or noun clauses (sometimes referred to as predicate nominatives). Complements can also be adjectives or adjective phrases (sometimes called predicate adjectives). Like objects, complements usually follow the subject and verb. They also follow any objects.

Adverbial (A) These are modifiers that refer to the verb in the sentence. They can be adverbs, adverb phrases, or adverb clauses.

Of these seven units, two — subject and verb — are required in every sentence.

R1-c Types of Simple Sentences.

The basic sentence elements listed in R1-b can be put together in various ways to produce seven general types of simple sentences.

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R1-d Combinations and Transformations.

The simple sentence patterns shown in R1-c can be combined and transformed to produce all of the sentences writers of English need.

Two or more clauses may be combined with a coordinating conjunction (such as and or but) or a pair of correlative conjunctions (such as either . . . or) to create a compound sentence:

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Writers create complex sentences by combining independent clauses with a subordinating conjunction (such as although or because) or by linking two clauses with a relative pronoun (such as which or who):

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Clauses that contain subordinating conjunctions or relative pronouns are dependent clauses and cannot stand on their own as simple sentences.

Clauses can also be combined to produce compound-complex sentences, compound sentences that contain dependent clauses:

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(Conjunctions and dependent clauses are discussed in more detail in R2.) Simple sentences can take the form of declarations, questions, commands, and exclamations:

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(In addition, sentences that are in the active voice can generally be transformed into the passive voice if they have transitive verbs and objects.)

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