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The subject (glossing abbreviations: SUB or SU) is, according to a tradition that can be traced back to Aristotle (and that is associated with phrase structure grammars), one of the two main constituents of a clause, the other constituent being the predicate, whereby the predicate says something about the subject.
A major sentence is a regular sentence; it has a subject and a predicate, e.g. "I have a ball." In this sentence, one can change the persons, e.g. "We have a ball." However, a minor sentence is an irregular type of sentence that does not contain a main clause, e.g. "Mary!", "Precisely so.", "Next Tuesday evening after it gets dark."
English is an SVO language, that is, in simple declarative sentences the order of the main components is SUBJECT + HEAD-VP where the basic VP consists of HEAD-VERB + OBJECT. A clause may also have fronted constituents, such as question words or auxiliary verbs appearing before the subject.
The clause structure with an inverted subject and verb, used to form questions as described above, is also used in certain types of declarative sentences. This occurs mainly when the sentence begins with adverbial or other phrases that are essentially negative or contain words such as only, hardly, etc.:
A sentence consisting of at least one dependent clause and at least two independent clauses may be called a complex-compound sentence or compound-complex sentence. Sentence 1 is an example of a simple sentence. Sentence 2 is compound because "so" is considered a coordinating conjunction in English, and sentence 3 is complex.
The subject, verb, and object can come in any order in a Latin sentence, although most often (especially in subordinate clauses) the verb comes last. [26] Pragmatic factors, such as topic and focus, play a large part in determining the order. Thus the following sentences each answer a different question: [27] "Romulus Romam condidit."
The relation between a subject and its predicate is sometimes called a nexus. A predicative nominal is a noun phrase: in the sentence George III is the king of England, the phrase the king of England is the predicative nominal. In English, the subject and predicative nominal must be connected by a linking verb, also called a copula.
grammar, a right-branching sentence is a sentence in which the main subject of the sentence is described first, and is followed by a sequence of modifiers that provide additional information about the subject. The inverse would be a Left-branching sentence. The name "right-branching" comes from the English syntax of putting such modifiers to ...