The Sentence is ...

Only connect! That was the whole of her sermon. Only connect the prose and the passion, and both will be exalted, and human love will be seen at its highest.
E.M. Forster, Howards End

We are relentless communicators. We have a passion for `reaching' people, for `connecting'. We tell one another where we, they and all the others are `at' or `coming from'. Even our refusal to speak is an act of communication: `I won't speak to you', it says. And it is understood as `This person won't speak to me'. We communicate in sentences even on this pre-speech level.

On speech level the sentence is openly with us, even when it is only a word of itself: When someone says `Milk!' a shopkeeper will understand something like `This rude slob is asking me to sell him some milk', having already understood the slob's Milk! to be an economical version of `I should like some milk, please'.

  There is no getting away from it: We communicate in sentences. They are to communication as oxygen is to breathing. The long and the short of it is this: When we say something, or understand what someone else has said, we make sentences whether we intend to or not. So did Neanderthal Man. The difference between his and our way was achieved in the interim that saw ever more refined structures assemble to make life easy. One of those was the prose-structure we now know as that sequence of words that raises a subject and says something about it: the sentence. We use it to transmit our passion for communicating, successfully or unsuccessfully, depending on how well we understand its capabilities.

This prose structure, our highly-refined contemporary sentence, manifests in two ways: as an independent sentence and as a dependent sentence.

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The independent sentence

The sentence that raises a subject and says something about it (or `predicates something of it’) is an independent sentence. It makes a statement that has sense and only one sense. Such a statement has only three structural models, or `basic-sentence’ types. They are the verb sentence, the copula sentence and the copular-verb sentence.

The independent sentence is the typical written sentence. It is the one we depend on when we write an essay, an article for a periodical, a thesis – in short, when we write in any genre that does not require us to represent casual-speech structures.

Subject and Predicate

The sentence raises a subject and says something about it. To put it another, more formal, way: The sentence predicates something of the subject. This is all that Traditional Grammar means when it declares that the sentence consists of a subject and a predicate.

The indispensable basic sentence

  No sequence of words is a sentence if it fails to make one unambiguous sense. No sequence of words makes one unambiguous sense unless it is a basic sentence or it contains one. Stripped of its basic sentence, this sequence makes no sense:

It becomes sensible only when a basic sentence holds it together:

My very best friend, a dog called Caesar, does not respect contemporary street sculpture.

  Writers must become so familiar with the three models of the basic sentence that one `jumps out' at them from every sentence they read. Such a level of familiarity will ensure that the sentences they write will never fail to meet the first and most important criterion of valid sentence-construction: the unmistakable presence of a basic sentence. It will ensure also that they are able to punctuate the longer sentences they write.

Before you read on …

In the course of reading about what sentences do, you will come upon quite a bit of `parts of speech’ vocabulary. If you are new to this, don’t let it worry you. This Chapter means to make only the point that every part of a sentence does something to contribute to the sense the whole makes. Observe this, and leave concerns about the precise meaning of `noun’, `adjective’, etc. until you read the second Chapter. (You will find that these terms `stick’ to you anyway. Don’t make heavy weather of it.)

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Verb model of the basic sentence

In the verb model of the basic sentence there always is a specific relationship between the subject and object  in a sentence. In every instance of a verb basic sentence the subject and object relate in one the following ways:

1. The subject acts upon the object.

  In this sentence:

Nationalism alarms minorities

the subject `nationalism’ perpetrates an act, denoted by the verb `alarms’, upon the object `minorities’. Traditional Grammar says of sentences in which the subject acts upon the object that they are active voice sentences.

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2. The object acts upon the subject.

 In this sentence:

A will to live is developed by the endangered

the object `the endangered’ acts upon the subject `a will to live’. The verb `develop’ denotes this act. Traditional Grammar says of sentences in which the object acts upon the subject that they are sentences cast in the passive voice mode. As all verb sentences, this one has an active voice too, as the grid shows:

`Infinitive’ complications and the complemented verb

There are infinitives that consist of more than `to’ and one word: `To set’ is one infinitive, `to set free’ quite another. Their meanings are different, just like the meanings of `to give’ and `to give up’ are different. They are the cause of structures such as `He set me free’, in which the object `me’ comes between the parts of the infinitive. These structures are otherwise ordinary active-voice verb sentences that typically also have a passive voice: `I was set free by him’. This situation is less obvious in the infinite that seems to have a `to make (someone) do’ structure. We meet this structure regularly in statements such as:

He made me clean the house/wash dishes/laugh (active voice).

There is no doubt that this, too, is a sentence in which the subject acts upon the object (active voice), or the object acts upon the subject (passive voice):

I was made to clean the house/wash dishes/laugh by him (passive voice).

So this is certainly a verb sentence. The curious thing is that in the passive voice sentence the verb changes to the phrase `was made to clean’. This reveals that the real object in this sentence is `the house’, not `me’. However, it is indisputable that the subject `he' acts upon the object `me'. (More will be said later about how `clean the house’ in the active-voice structure is the noun phrase that names the content of the verb `made’.)

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3. The activity between subject and object devolves upon a third party.

 As subject and object perpetrate an act upon one another, a third party is affected by the action. So in `He read me the Riot Act’ the subject `he’ perpetrated an act upon the object `Riot Act’: he read it. The `riot’ act is therefore the direct object of the subject’s activity that is denoted by the verb `read’. This subject acts also upon `me’. So `me’ is also an object. But it is not the direct object that the subject acts upon: it is the indirect object of the subject’s activity `read’:

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4. The activity between subject and object is named by the predicate noun complement.

 In this sentence:

He called them liars,

the subject `he’ acts upon the object `them’. To this extent, this sentence is of the type outlined in `1’. It differs from it markedly, however, in that the noun `liars’ is embedded into the `1’ sort of structure, `he called them’, to name the content of the activity `called’. That noun is not an object at all. It is therefore in no way possible to call it an `indirect object’. Other sentences of the same structure are:

The boy taught his grandmother Mathematics

The boy taught his grandmother to suck eggs.

The subject `the boy’ perpetrated the act denoted by the verb `taught’ on the object `his grandmother’. The content of the subject’s act is named by the noun `Mathematics’ in the first sentence, and by the infinitive-noun phrase `to suck eggs’ in the second.

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5. The subject acts upon the object to procure its existential or geographical state.

In this sentences:

The film had me laughing

the subject `the film’ acted upon the object `me’ to put it into a laughing state. The meaning here can be paraphrased as `he had me in a laughing state’. `In a laughing state’ names the existential state of the object `me’. The actual sentence, however, has truncated the noun phrase to `laughing’. The truncation nevertheless functions as a noun in this sentence, as the paraphrasing indicates that it must. It is a noun embedded into the basic sentence `he had me’. In another sentence:

He sat me in the front row

an embedded noun phrase with the same function, `in the front row’, is kept in entirety to name the whereabouts of the object `me’. It, too, is embedded into the verb basic sentence.

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6. The subject acts upon the object such that only the object is the experiencer of the act.

 In this sentence:

John interests Mary

the subject `John’ certainly perpetrates an act upon the object `Mary’. But only the object `Mary’ experiences the effect of that act. The subject `John’ may not even be aware that he has perpetrated that act. This situation exits because there are verbs that are inherently object-experiencer verbs. These are: annoy, irritate, amaze, provoke, impress, interest. Some of their synonyms might also prove to be object-experiencer verbs in some constructions.

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The `subject + verb’ sentence as the basic sentence.

 Where the basic sentence is a `verb + subject’ sentence nothing is predicated of the subject other than that the subject does, has done or will do something:

Mary teaches.

Mary has taught.

The Prime Minister will resign.

All that can happen in the `verb + subject’ sentence is that certain indicators describe the subject’s act. Those indicators are adverbs. They describe:

- when (time) the subject perpetrated an act:

She arrived early;

- how (manner) the subject perpetrated an act:

The girl answered slowly,

The girl came begging;

- the intensity (degree) of the subject’s act:

We could hardly see.

It has been claimed, thanks to the `subject + predicate’ sentence, that describing sentence structure is a sham. The claimants argued that Traditional Grammar holds that `Mother is cooking’ and `Dinner is cooking’ are sentences of the same syntactic structure. If Traditional Grammar’s system of analysis were constrained to do that, it would indeed be a sham. But it is not so constrained. The sentence `Mother is cooking’ (Mother is doing the cooking) is a `verb + subject’ sentence. `Dinner is cooking’ is a copula sentence in which the predicate adjective `cooking’ describes the subject `dinner’ (`the cooking dinner’).

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Copula model of the basic sentence

The copula model of the basic sentence makes a statement in which the copula assigns the subject either a description or a definition or a location (geographical or existential) or an occupier. In behaving thus, the copula basic sentence is completely different from the verb basic sentence. It has to be different because there is no relationship of subject and object in it. Indeed, the copula sentence does not have an object. It has instead a complement.

1. The copular assigns a description to the subject.

In the sentences that follow, the copular has the complement describe the subject. A description that occurs in this way is called a predicate adjective if it is achieved by a single word, and predicate-adjective phrase if it is achieved by a sequence of words. In the sentence:

John was ill/annoying/pleased

the copula assigns the description `ill’ (or `annoying’ or `pleased’) to the subject `John’. In the next sentence:

Walking to school might have been as bad as you say

the copula `might have been’ assigns the description `as bad as you say’ to the subject `walking to school’.