The Subject
Date: 2015-10-07; view: 522.
X. 3. Point out two-member sentences (say whether they are complete or elliptical) and one-member sentences.
1. He stared amazed at the calmness of her answer. 2. We must go to meet the bus. Wouldn't do to miss it. 3. Obedient little trees, fulfilling their duty. 4. Lucretius knew very little about what was going on in the world. Lived like a mole in a burrow. Lived on his own fat like a bear in winter. 5. He wants to write a play for me. One act. One man. Decides to commit suicide. 6. A beautiful day, quite warm. 7. "What do you want?" "Bandages, stuff for wounded." 8. "How did he look?" "Grey but otherwise much the same." "And the daughter?" "Pretty." 9. And then the silence and the beauty of this camp at night. The stars. The mystic shadow water. The wonder and glory of all this. 10. "I'll see nobody for half an hour, Macey," said the boss. "Understand? Nobody at all." 11. "Mother, a man's been killed." "Not in the garden?" interrupted her mother. 12. Garden at the Manor House. A flight of grey stone steps leads up to the house. The garden, an old-fashioned one, full of roses. Time of year, July. Basket chairs, and a table covered with books, are set under a large yew-tree.
| Parts of the sentence | |
| principal | secondary |
| subject | object |
| predicate | attribute |
| adverbial modifier |
The subject is the principal part of a two-member sentence which is grammatically independent of the other parts of the sentence and on which the second principal part (the predicate) is grammatically dependent, i.e. in most cases it agrees with the subject in number and person.
The subject can denote a living being, a lifeless thing or an idea.
| Ways of expressing the subject | ||
| noun in the common case | The fog is thinning. | |
| pronoun (personal, demonstrative, defining, indefinite, negative, possessive, interrogative) | She is very beautiful. This is the last straw. One learns by experience. Nothing can be done about it. Hers was the final judgement. Who told you this? | |
| substantivized adjective or participle | The wounded were taken good care of. | |
| numeral (cardinal or numeral) | Seven can be divided by two. The third was a young man with a dog. | |
| infinitive, an infinitive phrase or construction | To live is to work. To be a rich man, is not always roses and beauty. For him to come was impossible. | |
| gerund, gerundial phrase or construction | Talking mends no holes. Winning the war is what counts. Ann's being French might upset him a little. | |
| any part of speech used as a quotation | No is his usual reply to any request. | |
| syntactically indivisible group | The needle and thread is lost | |
| quotation group | There is a lot of truth in that. | |
| Note: There are sentences where the subject is introduced by the construction there is, e.g. there is nothing on the table. In this case nothing is the subject and there is part of the predicate. |
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| Ex. 1. Define the kinds of the sentences according to the purpose of the utterance. | | | Ex. 4. Point out the subject and say by what It is expressed. Translate into Kazakh. |