ENGL000: Pre-College English

There are three things a sentence must have in order to be complete.

1. A subject
2. A verb
3. A complete thought

We are only going to be talking about the first two (jot down the third, but don't worry about it for now).

Subjects

Subjects are nouns, specifically nouns that are "doing" verbs (verbs are generally going to be actions - we'll talk about them later).

A noun is a person, place, thing, or idea – keep in mind that not all nouns are subjects. 

Take for example the following sentence:

The dog chased the cat. 

Both "dog" and "cat" are nouns, but in this case "dog" is the subject because it is doing the verb "chased".   

When there is more than one noun in a sentence, the easiest way to find the subject is to find the verb first and then ask yourself who or what is "doing" the verb.

Also, a way to rule out nouns that are not the subject is to look for words called prepositions.

Prepositions are words that show relationships between nouns.

Any noun that follows a preposition is part of what is called a "prepositional phrase".  A noun that is part of a prepositional phrase cannot be the subject of the sentence. 

For example:

The word "to" is a preposition. This makes the phrase "to the store" a prepositional phrase. This means that while the word "store" is a noun (a person, place, thing, or idea), it cannot be the subject because it is part of a prepositional phrase. 

Once we cross off that prepositional phrase, it is much easier to determine the subject, particularly in this case seeing as there is only one noun remaining, "Miguel". In addition to ruling out "store" as a possible subject, we can also determine that Miguel is the subject when we find the verb "walked" and ask ourselves, "who or what walked to the store?"

If there are two or more subjects, this is called a "compound subject".

For example:

I can cross off the prepositional phrase "on the field" (because the noun "field" is part of a prepositional phrase, I know it cannot be my subject), and if I find my verb "lined" and ask who or what lined, I find that I have the compound subject "coaches" and "teams" because both the coaches and the teams are doing the verb "lined". 

A final fact to keep in mind regarding subjects is to remember that words like he, she, they, it, we, I, and you (called pronouns – we'll talk more about these types of words later) are considered nouns that can be the subjects of sentences.

Verbs

Verbs are words that indicate action or being. In the above examples, "walked" and "lined" are the verbs.

There are two types of verbs.

• Verbs of action – run, think, jump, sleep, play, study, eat, etc…
• Verbs of being (also called "linking verbs" – you can use these names interchangeably)

is, was, were, are, am, be – these verbs don't really imply any action and what is most                important to remember is that they are proper verbs

Verbs of being are a bit trickier to spot, so be sure to get them into your notes.

There are two types of verbs that cannot function as the primary verb of a sentence.

1. Verbs that end in "ing" – running, jumping, thinking, sleeping, playing, etc…
2. And verbs that have the word "to" in front of them – to run, to jump, to think, to sleep, to play, etc…

Like subjects, if there are two or more verbs, this is called a "compound verb".
For example:

Because the puppies are doing both the verbs "ran" and "played," this is called a compound verb.

A final note about verbs is that sometimes you will see shorter words like: will, will be, has, have, have been, had, are, was, were, am, or is in front of a verb of action. Note that many of these words are verbs of being (or linking verbs, whichever you prefer to call them). These words, when paired with action verbs, are called "helping verbs". They are generally used to show when a verb is happening (also called tense, a word we will talk more about later). Consider them part of the verb and below when you are identifying subjects and verbs, plan to include helping verbs when you place a double underline under a verb. 

For example, using the verb "walk" (and its past tense form "walked), I might say will walk, will be walked, has walked, have walked, had walked, are walked, was walked, were walked, am walked, or is walked.

It is also important to note that there are a lot of words that can function both as nouns and verbs. For example, the word "walk" can mean the action verb of putting one foot in front of the other to move forward (such as: I walked to the store), but "walk" can also be used as a noun.

For example, I might say:

Note in the above sentence, the word "walk" is not an action. The verb in this sentence is "went".

Please remember that longer and more complex sentences may have a number of subjects and verbs. When you are finding subjects and verbs in a sentence (a skill that will be very important for future topics we are going to discuss), no matter how long or complex the sentence is, you will still use the same process.

Source: Erin Severs
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