Introductions
Don’t worry, I’m not reintroducing myself. These introductions are the ones you first heard in school. Parts of Speech. It’s like when you meet someone you don’t remember and they remember you, a little embarrassing because you should know this. But really it happens, people forget things. Then they relearn them, like we’ll do now.
This is the first part of a series. This is a dry topic, so we’ll split it up into several posts.
Now the question often asked is why bother learning this. Well there are two main reasons. Firstly, if we want to write better, it helps to understand the rules. In order to understand the rules we all speaking need to speak the same language when speaking about language. We need to know what a noun is in order to learn the rules regarding nouns. You get the picture. Secondly, you sound incredibly clever when you say things like, ‘Actually when you use a gerund in this context you...’ You also sound condescending but ignore that for now and focus on the clever part.
The building blocks of sentences are clauses.
What is a clause?
A clause is a collection of grammatically-related words including a predicate and a subject (though sometimes the subject is implied).
The obvious question – what is a subject and predicate?
The subject is what (or whom) the sentence is about, while the predicate tells something about the subject.2
For example: She runs.
She = subject
Runs = predicate.
To find the subject, locate the verb and ask who is doing it. This is overly simplified, but serves us for now.
Wrapping it up
So, we’ve learnt why we should be grammar nerds and we’ve met the following terms:
1. a clause;
2. a subject; and
3. a predicate.
I think we should also pour a glass of wine to celebrate!
References:
1. http://www.uottawa.ca/academic/arts/writcent/hypergrammar/bldcls.html#clause
2. http://www.uottawa.ca/academic/arts/writcent/hypergrammar/subjpred.html#predicate
