Grammar for Everyone - Barbara Dykes 2007
14 Subject and predicate - Abbreviations
Introduction
Part II The parts of speech
Definition: The word ’subject’ is from Latin sub meaning ’under’ and ’ject’ from jacere to throw - hence thrown under. The subject is that which is under our attention, i.e. the person or thing that we are talking about. The word ’predicate’, also from Latin, means pre, ’before’, and dicate, ’spoken’. It is something told to someone about the subject.
The students are already familiar with the term subject, being the person or thing that the sentence is about. Now is the time to confirm this - subjects do something, be something or have something.
Every sentence has two parts: the subject and the remaining part which tells something about the subject, and is called the predicate. Students should now learn the terms, and label sentences accordingly, as well as indicating the parts of speech of the individual words. This can be treated like a puzzle.
Firstly, some sentences should be labelled on the board with student participation. Students can then be given time to practise on their own in their grammar exercise books. Some sentences should be given for homework to demonstrate independent learning and accuracy. It is, as always, important for the work to be corrected to detect misunderstandings and errors.
’Parse’ is from the Latin word pars meaning ’part’ and describes the task we are doing when we divide a sentence to show how it is made up.
For example:
More information can be added to the sentence and allocated to the correct part.
For example:
14.1 Activities: subject and predicate
1. Students diagram sentences such as these.
a. Peter bought me an ice-cream.
b. My uncle took us to the show.
c. Mum picked up her basket.
d. The fisherman gave us a flounder.
e. The number plate fell off his car.
More difficult ones:
f. In the morning the new tank will come.
g. The old lady always sits here.
h. Don’t forget your homework.
i. For lunch we had sausage rolls.
j. When did you paint that?
*Students can treat sausage rolls as one entity, that is one noun, or as a noun ’rolls’ plus a qualifying adjective ’sausage’.
Tomorrow you must wash the car.
Checklist: subject and predicate
The student should now be able to:
• explain the term subject
• explain the term predicate
• correctly divide sentences into subject and predicate
• parse single sentences unaided
• recognise omitted subjects, understood as in commands - (You) go to bed. Don’t (you) forget your lunch
Abbreviations
If the students are showing confidence in diagramming sentences and recognising the parts of speech, it is now appropriate for them to start using abbreviations, in order to save time and space. At this point too, articles may be included with their nouns unless otherwise requested.
The following abbreviations are commonly used in dictionaries, but need to be used accurately to avoid confusion. Lower case is used.
Word
noun
verb
pronoun
adjective
adverb
article
Abbreviated
n
vb
pron
adj
adv
art
Word
preposition
conjunction
interjection
exclamation
subject
predicate
Abbreviated
prep
conj
interj
excl
subj
pred