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Let us take a look at the following examples and try to guess what is common to 
the terms highlighted on red in comparison to the ones in green: 
 
1. "Grammar is the logic of speech, even as logic is the grammar of reason." 
(Richard Chenevix Trench) 
2. The way a crow 
Shook down on me 
The dust of snow 
From a hemlock tree 
 
Has given my heart 
A change of mood 
And saved some part 
Of a day I had rued 
 
"[Robert] Frost's 'Dust of Snow' 
 
 
3. "Every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it, and the writer learns how to know it 
when he finally gets there." 
(Don DeLillo) 
There is a common pattern occurring here. Do you agree? Don’t the red words and fragments 
are the part of the sentence or clause about which something is being said? Don’t the green 
highlighted parts describe or talk about the red ones having verbs within it? 
Certainly this noticeable pattern reveals the basic components that are the basis of languages 
themselves – SUBJECT and PREDICATE. The basic parts of a sentence are the subject, 
the verb, and (often, but not always) the object. 
Aiming to organize our studies, it would be good build up a concept that defines both the 
previously mentioned basic terms. According to Greenbaum and Quirk (2006) “Subjects, 
objects, and adverbials will be referred to as elements of sentence structures. (…) sentences 
differ widely as to which elements and how many elements they include” 
The part of a sentence or clause that commonly indicates what it is about, or who or what 
performs the action (the agent) is called subject. It is typically a noun, a noun-phrase 
or pronoun. In a declarative sentence, the subject usually appears before the verb . In 
interrogative sentences , the subject usually follows the first part of a verb. 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
The traditional definition of subject as referring to the 'doer of an action' 
(or agent), though it is adequate for central or typical cases, will not work for all 
cases. For example, in passive sentences, such as John was attacked, the 
subject is John, but John is certainly not the 'doer' of the attacking. Again, not all 
sentences, even those with transitive verbs, express any action. Examples 
are This book cost fifty francs and I loathe relativism. But such sentences have 
always traditionally been held to have subjects (in these cases, this bookand I). 
(James R. Hurford, Grammar: A Student's Guide. Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994) 
Continuing, we can understand predicate as the portion of a clause, excluding the subject, that 
expresses something about the subject. It is also referred to as predicator. 
"The predicate typically describes a property of the person or thing referred to by 
the subject, or describes a situation in which this person or thing plays some role. 
In elementary clauses describing an action, the subject normally indicates the 
actor, the person or thing performing the action, while the predicate describes the 
action, as in Kim left and People complained." 
(Rodney Huddleston and Geoffrey K. Pullum, A Student's Introduction to English 
Grammar. Cambridge Univ. Press, 2006) 
The perfect relation between the subject and the predicate to which it is connected guarantees 
a successful communicative process. 
"The conventional placement of subject and predicate in conversation helps with 
the identification. We expect to find the subject (the who or what a sentence is 
about) at the beginning of the sentence, and once that is identified, we expect the 
rest of the sentence to tell what the subject does or is like." 
(Thomas P. Klammer, Muriel R. Schulz, and Angela Della Volpe, Analyzing 
English Grammar. Pearson Education, 2007) 
 
Language is a chain system and to cope perfectly with it implies in linking contents and 
concepts that help you to actually understand it as a whole. Being so, to complement and 
amplify the notions of subject and predicators it is undoubteddly necessary to understand what 
VERB TRANSITIVITY is.

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