A GUIDE to BASIC ENGLISH GRAMMAR

Chapter 1: THE SENTENCE

As mentioned earlier, this book will cover almost everything, right from the very basic of English grammar. So, keeping that in mind, let us begin the first chapter.

✨ THE SENTENCE ✨

The most basic thing that we use as we write or speak are the words. Words, indeed, one of the most powerful weapons that we have been blessed with. But can we make any sense just by using a couple of words? Or do we need a particular format?

As an example, let us take a few words first:

sweet, how, rose, this, smells

Now, let us try to assemble the words and make two arrangements:

Arrangement 1: Sweet this smells how rose!
Arrangement 2: How sweet this rose smells!

In here, does the first arrangement make any sense?

Well, not exactly.

And if we talk about the second arrangement, then, yes, of course. The speaker, in here, is appreciating the fragrance of the rose, stating that the flower has a very sweet smell.

In short, we can say that the second arrangement makes complete sense. So, out of the two arrangements of the words above, we can call only the second arrangement as a sentence. However, the first arrangement is just a group of words.

Deducing from the example above,
A group of words that makes complete sense is called a Sentence.

Each of the words in a sentence can be used in particular ways to form sentences. So, each can be allocated to a word class (or, often known as the ‘part of speech’). This word class will be discussed in the upcoming chapters.

PARTS OF A SENTENCE

By putting the words into classes, we can know about how the words are used, but it doesn’t tell us much about how sentences are constructed. To do that we need to look at sentences in a different way. We can do this by looking for patterns in which the sentences are constructed.

Every sentence consists of two major parts:

I)The first part is the one which names the person or thing we speak about. This part of the sentence is called the Subject.

II)The second part tells us what is said of the person or thing denoted by the subject. This part of the sentence is called the Predicate.

For example,
A bad workman blames his tools.

In the above sentence, we are talking about a person who is a bad workman. So, a bad workman is the subject of the sentence.

What a bad workman does? He blames his tools. So, blames his tools is the predicate of the sentence.

TYPES OF SENTENCES

We can use sentences for four main purposes in communication. Depending on these four purposes, sentences have been broadly classified into four types.

So, to begin with let us see what all a sentence can do. A sentence can:

I)Make a statement. For example,

a)The sun rises in the east.
b)The car is traveling very fast.

A sentence that states or declares something is called an Assertive or Declarative sentence. A period or a full stop (.) is always placed at the end of such a sentence.