Do you know how to build a sentence in English In this lesson you will learn the basic parts of a simple sentence or independent clause Knowing this will make it easier to understand any sentence in written English Understanding how these different parts of a sentence work together to form meaning will help you write better in English The knowledge in this lesson is essential for any Independent User or Proficient User of English Quiz yourself here again Im Adam Welcome back to wwwengvidcom Today I have a very important lesson I think for all of you that will help you very much with your reading but especially your writing skills Okay
Today were going to look at the sentence What is a sentence Now I know that all of you are saying Well we know what a sentence is Weve learned this a thousand times before Right I know what youve learned and I know what you havent learned many of you some of you have of course The sentence has a very basic structure theres a very basic component that must be involved or included in a sentence and a lot of grammar teachers a lot of English teachers dont teach this Okay All of you Im sure have by now heard of SVO but have you heard of SVsC Have you heard of SVC Maybe yes maybe no But Im sure a lot of you are going What Ive never heard of these things before Well were going to talk about this in one second
Before we talk about a sentence we have to talk about a clause Now what is a clause Im sure youve heard this word before as well but just in case a clause is any subject verb combination Its a group of words that must include a subject and a verb Now also very important to remember it must be a tense verb meaning that it must take a time past present future Okay No base verb no infinitive verb So that is a clause Now there are two types of clauses Okay We have independent clauses and we have dependent clauses The These are sometimes called subordinate clauses Now every sentence in English to be a grammatically correct sentence must have an independent clause It doesnt need a dependent clause but it could have one The independent clause could include a dependent clause as the subject or object Well talk about that after
So an independent clause has a subject and a verb and it can stand by itself It can contain a complete idea by itself Okay So technically the shortest sentence you can have in English will be a Will be an independent clause with a subject and verb What is the absolute shortest sentence that you can think of Think of a sentence the shortest you can possibly make it Okay Heres an example Go Is this a complete English sentence Yes Why Because it contains an independent clause Where We have the implied subject you and the tense verb go the imperative tense go So this your basic English sentence
Now we have three other types three basic types and we can of course play with these after Subject verb object Some independent clauses must have an object well talk about that in a second Excuse me Subject verb subject complement Some sentences must have a subject complement Subject verb complement Okay Were going to talk about each of these in a moment I have the A here because quite often this complement is actually an adverb phrase or an adverbial Well talk about that in a second
So your basic sentence can be any one of these three Now the reason were looking at this All these structures is because once you understand what must be contained in a sentence then you can read any English sentence out there that is grammatically correct and be able to understand the main idea of that sentence Okay So lets start with SVO
Okay lets look at our SVO type of independent clause subject verb object Now first what is an object Well we have two types of objects to talk about We have the direct object we have the indirect object Now the thing to understand is that the object always answers a question about the verb it completes the meaning of the verb by asking the questions What or Who Now keep in mind that technically its Whom But if you say Who Ill let it go this time Okay Formal academic writing Whom Whom Whom IELTS TOEFL SAT all that - Whom not Who In the object position But the direct object answers What or Who about the verb Okay Well get back to that
