Subjects, Verbs and Objects

Subjects, verbs and objects are the building blocks of any sentence. To be able to identify and use them correctly is one of the first steps to writing and speaking good English. A sentence is the conventional unit of connected speech and writing. It is a group of words that together makes sense as a statement, question, command or exclamation. Sentences: Begin with a capitalised letter, Conclude with a full stop, a question mark or an exclamation mark, And are, at the most basic level, comprised of a subject and a predicate, or

verb.
The subject is generally a noun, a noun phrase, or pronoun, about which something is said in the predicate, which usually follows it. Take the following sentence: The dog barked. Here, the subject is the dog, and the verb barked describes what it was doing. The place of the noun in the sentence, as the subject, can be taken by noun phrases, such as the five dogs, or by pronouns, such as I, you, he and she. Another role played by nouns in sentences is that of the object which, directly or indirectly, receives the action performed by the subject. For example: The dog barked at the postman. Here, the postman is obviously the object that the subjects action (the barking of the dog) is directed at. In this role too, pronouns such as they, it, us, them, me, etc. can replace nouns. To conclude, let us analyse another sentence and see if we can identify the subjectverb-object pattern: Rita was furious with me. Here, 1. was acts as the verb that links the subject, Rita, 2. with the adjective furious, 3. and together they establish the relationship between the subject and the object, me (used in place of the narrators name).