Analysis of a simple sentence

A simple sentence consists of just one clause.

To analyze a simple sentence, we must first of all learn how to divide the sentence into two main parts – the subject and the predicate.

Study the examples given below.

Birds chirp. (Subject – birds; predicate – chirp)

The boy sang a song. (Subject – the boy; predicate – sang a song)

She was ironing the clothes. (Subject – she; predicate – was ironing the clothes)

The subject is the person or thing that performs the action denoted by the verb. The subject is a noun or a pronoun. It can also be an –ing form or a to-infinitive.

The subject may be qualified by an article, an adjective or another word/phrase that acts as an adjective.

This word or phrase that modifies the subject is called the enlargement or attribute of the subject.

Study the example given below.

My little daughter loves to play with her dolls.

Here the subject daughter is modified by the possessive ‘my’ and the adjective ‘little’.

The predicate consists of the verb, the object and other parts of the sentence except the subject.

In the above example, the predicate is: loves to play with her dolls

The predicate may consist of one word or several words. When the predicate consists of just one word, it is the verb. When it consists of more than one word, it may contain one or more adverbs and/or one or more objects.

When the verb is a form of ‘be’, the sentence will require a word/phrase to make its meaning complete.

This word or phrase that completes the verb and makes the sentence meaningful is called the complement.

We see from the analysis of this sentence that to analyze a simple sentence is to name:

• Its subject.
• Its predicate.
• The principal word of the subject with its modifiers.
• The modifiers of any other words in the subject.
• Its predicate verb.
• The modifiers of its predicate verb.