Basic Sentence Patterns
Every sentence in English (except interjections) has a subject and a verb. The subject is either a noun or a pronoun. The verb is either an action verb or a helping verb.
There are several basic sentence patterns in English.
Basic Sentences
Subject | Predicate |
---|---|
Noun/Pronoun | Verb |
Carol | swims. |
They | are laughing. |
Subject | Predicate | |
---|---|---|
Noun/Pronoun | Verb | Noun/Pronoun |
Their teacher | is | a book. |
ice cream. | ||
Noun/Pronoun | Verb | Adjective |
Mary | is | smart. |
He | is | quite tall. |
Noun/Pronoun | Verb | Prepositional Phrase |
James | studied | for the GRE test. |
The dog | waited | for its owner yesterday. |
Noun/Pronoun | Verb | Adverb |
Melissa | swims | daily |
We | are walking | slowly. |
All other sentences in English can be longer if the writer wants to add more information to a sentence or combine short sentence patterns using a conjunction (and, but) into one long sentence. For example: Carol is smart, likes ice cream and likes to swim every day at Gallaudet.