A practical english grammar - Vyssaja skola 1978
Chapter 1 - The Sentence
Sound symbols
The basic unit in English is the sentence, a’ rather difficult entity to define in scientific terms but one that fluent speakers of English have no trouble identifying. As the term is used in this book, the sentence is defined as a self-contained grammatical unit consisting of one word or more and not depending on some larger context to achieve its grammatical completeness. It satisfies English speakers as a complete speech unit, even though its total meaning may not be clear without reference to other sentences.1
For example, let us take the two utterances John’s work and John works. Both of them refer to somebody named John and to some work that is (was, could be, etc.) done by him or which belongs to him. However, Johns work is a phrase consisting of two nouns (we will find out later how to identify nouns) and would not be accepted by an English speaker as a sentence unless it was in answer to some such question as “Whose work do you prefer?” A speaker hearing it out of context would probably ask, “Well, what about John’s work? Go ahead, finish your sentence.” In other words, “You have only given me a subject; now I must hear the predicate.”
1 Thus we will not consider here the utterances in such a conversation as this: “Which one?—That one.—This one?—No, the other one.—Right!” These will be discussed in Chapter 20.
The second example, John works, consists of a noun followed by a verb. (The transposition of one sound makes all the difference.) This, we find, is the basic English sentence pattern, and when our speaker hears it he is satisfied. He may ask, “Who is John?” or “What kind of work does he do?” but he won’t complain about the grammatical completeness of what he has heard.
When nouns and verbs follow each other in this sequence and with the proper agreement (as we shall see later), they become subjects and predicates, the two structures on which all English sentences are built. A small minority of sentences lack subjects (Come in, Don’t do that), but no sentence, as we are using the term in this book, ever lacks a verb. A great many other structures can actompany these two basic structures, of course, and usually do accompany them; but we must start with subjects and predicates before we can understand anything else about English sentences.