Introduction:
One of the most important elements of strong writing is the ability to construct quality sentences. To do that, you have to understand what make a sentence a sentence in the first place. From studying complete sentences in the past, your definition of a complete sentence is probably that it has to have a noun and a verb. This is not incorrect, but it’s only partially true. To understand a complete sentence you’ll have to learn about a special type of noun and a special type of verb. You should have demonstrated an understanding of basic parts of speech before working on this lesson. This is a long lesson, so you may want to break it down into smaller parts.
Part I:
The Subject:
In order to understand what makes a sentence a sentence, you need to understand the concept of a subject. The subject of a sentence is a special type of noun, so it’s a good idea to begin by finding the nouns in a sentence. In the following sentence, there are several nouns that you should be able to identify:
The dinosaur stomped the trees and bushes on the way up the mountain.
Hopefully, you identified ‘dinosaur’, ‘trees’, ‘bushes’ and ‘mountain’ as nouns in the sentence. You will also need to be able to identify the verb(s) of the sentence. In this case there is only ‘stomp’.
The question that you will need to ask to see if a noun is the subject of the sentence is:
“Who or what is verb-ing?”
This, of course, means that one of the most important steps to figuring out the subject of a sentence is to be able to locate the verbs in a sentence. You will need to replace “verbing” with the verb from the sentence in order for it to make sense. So, for our example, you should ask,
“Who or what is stomping?”
Your answer should be ‘dinosaur’ which means that ‘dinosaur’ is the subject of your sentence. The formal definition of the subject is:
Ø The noun or nouns that perform the action of matching verb.
You can also have what is called a compound subject, in which two nouns perform the action of a verb.
The lion and the giraffe live on the same continent.
You question should be “Who or what is living” and your answer is lion and giraffe, which means that the verb live has two subjects.
Also, there can be a different subject for more than one verb in a sentence.
Start by identifying the nouns and verbs in the following sentence:
The dinosaur stomped the trees, and the algae grew on the pond.
Hopefully, you’ll come up with the following (Nouns will be bold and verbs will be in italics):
The dinosaur stomped the trees, and the algae grew on the pond.
Then, ask yourself the subject question based on the two verbs you’ve found:
Q: Who or what is stomping? A: Dinosaur
Q: Who or what is growing? A: Algae
Therefore, this sentence has two subjects and two matching verbs.
Part II:
The Conjugated Verb:
All verbs in English have their basic form which, to use the fancy term, is called an infinitive. Infinitive verbs in English have the word ‘to’ in front of them. Some examples include:
to sing to talk to eat
to run to dream to play
to be to feel to see
However, when you talk, you don’t say things like
I to eat pizza.
He to play tennis.
Neither of these are sentences that can work in English. If you have grown up speaking English, you know how to change these to make them work with the subject of “I” and “He”. You would say these sentences as:
I eat pizza.
He plays tennis.
And lo and behold, you have conjugated a verb without even knowing it.!To be honest, conjugating a verb is fairly simple in English when compared with some other languages. Look at a table that shows the standard conjugated forms of the English verb to sing:
Sample Conjugation Table
When you learn a new language, you spend a lot of time practicing conjugations to make sure they match the subject. To a Spanish speaker, “El cantas” would sound just as odd as “He sing” in English.
Important Note:
The “ing” form of a verb by itself does NOT count as a conjugated verb.
Betty singing on a rock is NOT a complete sentence because you did not conjugate singing to match Betty.
To turn this into a complete sentence you have a couple of options. You can either conjugate the verb “to sing” or you can add a form of “to be” that is conjugated.
Betty sings on a rock.
Betty is singing on a rock.
In the second example, is has been conjugated to match Betty, so this serves as the conjugated verb. English does this a lot, so get used to seeing it. For your reference here is a table of what the conjugate forms of “to be” look like. (The subjects are in bold)
Infinitive: to be
Singular Subjects:
I: am
You: are
He/She: is
Plural Subjects:
We: are
You’all: are
They: are
Part III:
Complete Sentences:
For now, our definition of a complete sentence is the following:
Ø A complete sentence must have a subject and a conjugated verb that matches that subject
To achieve mastery of this lesson, you should be able to:
Ø Remember the question you need to ask to determine the subject of a sentence.
Ø Locate subjects in sentences.
Ø Remember the term conjugation.
Ø Explain the process of conjugation.
Ø Locate conjugated verbs in sentences.
Ø Understand that an “ing” verb by itself does not make a complete sentence.
© kmcelliott 2008