2017-11-01
3892
A sentence can contain principal parts, secondary parts and independent elements. The principal parts of the sentence are the subject and the predicate. The secondary parts are the object, the attribute, and the adverbial modifier. The independent elements of a sentence are interjections, parenthesis, and direct address.
THE PRINCIPAL PARTS OF THE SENTENCE
THE SUBJECT
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 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. It can be expressed in the following way:
MEANS OF EXPRESSING THE SUBJECT
| PARTS OF SPEECH | EXAMPLES |
| NOUN (common case) | The waiter brought what we ordered. |
| PRONOUN (personal, possessive, demonstrative, defining, indefinite, negative, interrogative) | They invited you to the party, didn’t they? His dog is in the yard and ours is there too. What is this? Everybody already knows about his arrival. Somebody has broken the news to the papers. Nobody will mention it. Who has torn this book? |
| ADJECTIVE (substantivized) | The poor were under oppression |
| NUMERAL (cardinal and ordinal) | Two are company and three are not. The second will be yours. |
| QUOTATION (or quotation group) | “On” is a preposition. This “Why, Tom?” makes me furious. |
| GROUP OF WORDS as one part of sentence | The needle and thread is lost. |
| INFINITIVE INFINITIVE PHRASE INFINITIVE CONSTRUCTION | To live is to work. To be here is dangerous. For him to come was impossible. |
| GERUND GERUNDIAL PHRASE GERUNDIAL CONSTRUCTION | Reading is a good hobby. Reading books in the original is difficult. Tom’s coming is out of the question. |
| PARTICIPLE (substantivized) | The wounded were taken good care of. |
The subject is called compound when it consists of two components combined by the conjunction and
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The manager and the staff are at the meeting now.
It AS THE SUBJECT OF THE SENTENCE
When the pronoun it is used as the subject of a sentence and represents a living being or a thing, it is a notional subject. Sometimes, however, it doesn’t represent any living being or thing and performs a purely grammatical function. In this case it is a formal subject.
When it is a notional subject the pronoun it has the following meanings:
1) It stands for a definite thing or some abstract idea – the personal it.
The door opened. It was opened by a young girl.
2) It points out some person or thing expressed by a predicative noun, or it refers to the thought contained in a preceding statement, thus having a demonstrative meaning – the demonstrative it.
It is John. It was a large room with a great window.
In the last two cases it is close to this and is usually translated into Russian by это.
Sometimes the pronoun it is a formal subject, i.e. it does not represent any person or thing.
Here we must distinguish:
1) the impersonal it, 2) the introductory or anticipatory it and 3) the emphatic it.
1) The impersonal it is used:
· to denote the state of the weather or the state which characterizes the environment. In such sentences the predicate is either a simple one, expressed by a verb denoting the state of the weather, or a compound nominal one, with an adjective as predicative.
It often rains in autumn. It is often cold in winter.
· to denote time and distance.
