The word 'subject' needs care as it has a particular - and very important - meaning that is quite distinct to grammar

and which is different from its everyday, non-grammar meaning. In grammar, the subject (S) is a syntactical position or element within a clause. The subject can be either a word or a phrase, usually a noun phrase. In the sentence, 'I gave him a present', 'I' is the grammatical subject and 'gave' is its associated verb in the sentence (in the past tense). In the simple sentence, 'The quick brown fox jumped over the lazy dog', the subject is 'The quick brown fox'. This is a noun phrase that has as its associated finite verb, 'jumped'. Most English sentences need a subject but sometimes this can be one of the small words (called pronouns) 'it' or 'there'. This type of subject can be tricky to recognise as proper subjects. Some typical word orders of simple declarative sentences are: SV (subject-verb), SVO (subject-verb-object), SVC (subject-verb-complement) or SVA (subject-verb-adverbial). Some types of verb transfer their action from their subject onto something else (the thing receiving the action of the verb is called its object). These are called transitive verbs. In the above sentence, the verb 'gave' is transitive as action transfers to the object, the noun 'a present'. Verbs are called intransitive if they do not transfer action, but, instead, act to tell what their subject is doing, e.g. 'He is working.', 'It died.' Some verbs can be either transitive or intransitive according to their usage in the sentence, e.g. 'He is singing.' (intransitive) and 'He is singing a song.' (transitive). A few special verbs (stative verbs) have no sense of direct action but, instead, act to make a statement about their subject's state of being. These verbs are called copular or linking verbs, e.g. He seems ill, She is clever, he was a criminal, it appears dark, etc.. The word that follows a stative verb has no action passing on to it so it cannot be called an object; instead, it is termed a complement. Confusingly, Some verbs can take two objects: 'I gave Sally a present.' (i.e. 'I gave a present to Sally') In this type of sentence, the object is 'a present' (= the thing given; this is called the DIRECT OBJECT); but there is a second 'object' - the 'receiver' of the direct object. This is termed the INDIRECT OBJECT. Notice that all sentences of this type can be rewritten as shown using the word 'to'. The predicate is all that is written or said in a sentence or clause about its grammatical subject, e.g. The young choir boy [subject] sang every song in the book [predicate]. A phrase is a key grammatical unit. In terms of its meaning, a phrase expresses one complete element of a proposition. It will be made up of one or more words and occupy a particular syntactic slot within its clause or sentence, e.g. as subject, predicate or object. A useful rough and ready 'test' for a phrase is that it can be 'replaced' in its clause or sentence by a single word that is roughly its equivalent. Thus in the sentence, 'That old guy over there has been patiently waiting for three and a half hours already', the noun phrase, 'The tall man over there' could be replaced by 'he'; the verb phrase 'has been patiently waiting' could be replaced by 'waited', the prepositional phrase 'for three and a half hours' could be replaced by 'ages'! A phrase acts as a unit with individual meaning, but without sufficiently completeness to be a clause or sentence by itself.

Noun phrase

A noun phrase always has a noun as its head word, e.g. "a cat"; "the naughty cat"; "that furry black mangy old cat". A verb phrase always has a verb as its head word, drink"; "has drunk"; "has been drinking"; "seems"; "will be"; "might have been"; "explained"; "has been explaining". An adjective phrase always has an adjective as its head word, e.g. "gory", "absolutely foul". A phrase with an adverb as its head word, e.g. soundly; too evidently; as quickly as possible A phrase which has been constructed from a preposition with a noun phrase linked to it to form a single unit of meaning, e.g. "up the road"; "across the street"; "round the bend".

Verb phrase (sometimes called a verb chain) Adjective phrase (or adjectival phrase) Adverb phrase (or adverbial phrase) Prepositional phrase (a special kind of adverbial phrase)

Phrases - with words - are the basic building blocks of clauses and sentences. A phrase can always be split into two parts: its head word which is linked to some kind of modification of the head word. The head word is the central part of the phrase and the remaining words act to modify this head word in some way, e.g. "The peculiarly strong creature" - can you see that the head word of this noun phrase is the noun, "creature"? As suggested above, a phrase does, in fact, act just like an individual word. The next example sentence contains three phrases and a single main clause. Can you recognise which are the phrases and which is the clause? In a frenzy, without thinking, he grabbed him by the neck. You might like to think that, between each word of the three phrases above, there exists a kind of 'word glue' that gives the phrase its coherent quality. The phrases "In a frenzy", "without thinking" and "by the neck" all can be seen to exist as individual units of meaning, i.e. as individual phrases. Notice that the clause in the above sentence cannot be called a phrase because it is built around a verb (i.e. a verb phrase), "he grabbed him" A clause is a key grammatical structure and this means that clauses are things that you need to have, at the very least, a basic grasp of. Thought of at its simplest, a clause can be considered as a short 'sentence' - one that occurs either on its own (e.g. "I ate the jelly") or together with other clauses to make a longer sentence (e.g. "because I was hungry"). A clause, then, is a group of words that is either a whole sentence or is a part of a sentence. Clauses are built up from individual words or from small clusters of words called phrases. Most clauses are built around a main verb which tells, often, of an action, thought or state, e.g. "I ate the jelly because I was hungry". A clause can be what is called independent. This mean it is acting as a simple sentence, as in the example, "I ate the jelly". Independent clauses can also exist as a part of a larger sentence when they are called not an "independent clause" but a main clause.

Another common type of clause exists just to help out the meaning of a main clause. This second kind of clause is, therefore, dependent on its main clause for its meaning. An example would be the dependent clause, "because I was hungry"; you'll see here that there is an extra word at the start of the clause: "because". It is this extra word that stops the clause being able to be independent or to be a main clause; the word "because" forces the clause to be dependent on some other main clause, e.g. "I ate the jelly because I was hungry". This words acts to subordinate its clause and so is called a subordinator. Subordinators create dependent clauses - more often, these days, called subordinate clauses (sometimes reduced to "sub-clauses"). There are many subordinators. Look at this example: "He hit him even though he was a friend": He hit him MAIN CLAUSE
even though he was his friend.

DEPENDENT (subordinate) CLAUSE

An important kind of clause acts as if it were an adjective - it adds extra information about a noun or noun phrase. These clauses are called relative or adjectival clauses. They can seem confusing because they can be inserted in between their main clause, e.g. "The girl who wore a red dress left early." This sentence contains one main clause "The girl left early" and one dependent or relative clause, "who wore a red dress". The subordinator in this example, the word "who", is acting as a pronoun (i.e. it is a word that takes the place of, and stands in for, a noun). Here it is called, therefore, a relative pronoun because it introduces a relative clause. Other relative pronouns are "that" and "whom". Sometimes the relative pronoun can be missed out to create an elliptical relative clause, e.g. "The joke [that] he told was funny"; here the relative clause is "he told".
The structure of clauses is fairly fixed in English syntax (S = subject V = verb O = object C = complement A = adverbial). In certain dialects and in poetry the syntax can be varied and the sense still kept, e.g. "A ballad Alison sang".

S+V: Alison / sang. S+V+O: Alison / sang / a song. S+V+C: Alison / is / a good singer. S+V+A: Alison / sings / in the choir. S+V+O+O: Alison / sang / her mum / a ballad. S+V+O+A: Alison / sang / the song / from the song-book. Complement A word, phrase or clause that follows a verb and which simply adds further information concerning, usually, the verb's subject. Complements usually follow stative verbs such as 'to be' to create a statement (i.e. a declarative sentence), e.g. 'He is happy'. Here the adjective 'happy' is the subject complement. However, in the sentence, 'He made me happy', the adjective happy is called an object complement as it gives more information about the verb's object, me Source : http://www.englishbiz.co.uk/grammar/main_files/definitionsa-m.htm#Clause