A grammatical clause expresses a single complete idea. A grammatical sentence can either be a single clause or multiple clauses connected together by some linking mechanism. This means that a sequence of ideas can be expressed either by forming multiple sentences or by joining multiple clauses into a single sentence. The difference is largely a matter of style rather than grammar. For that reason, in these notes, I will refer to both sentences and clauses as statements.
Statement Components
A statement in English must be composed of the following five components: subject, finite verb, object, complement and adverbial.
As the table suggest the only mandatory component in a statement is a finite verb. Some statements, such as commands, requests, exhortations and wishes may consist of a single verb – Go! for example.
Exclamations, such as Ha! may also be a single word but such exclamations have an effect rather than a meaning; that is, they have pragmatic purpose rather than semantic content and therefore an exclamation doesn’t form a statement.
It is possible to have single word sentences but these really only have meaning in context. They are fundamentally elisions. For example, yes and no can be single word statements of affirmation and negation, hello and good-bye can be greetings and farewells and please and thank-you are single term acknowledgements.
Every other kind of statement must have a grammatical subject. The subject governs the form of the finite verb. Because there can only be one finite verb there can also be only one grammatical subject. This doesn’t mean that the subject cannot refer to multiple entities described in a list or that the finite verb cannot contain multiple ideas described in a verb chain. However, in both cases, in the grammar of the sentence, these will be treated as a single grammatical subject and a single grammatical verb term.
Whether there are any objects or complements in a statement is dependent
Statement Types
Whether there are objects or complements in a statement is dependent on the type of finite verb. There are three types of finite verb and therefore three types of statement structure: copula, transitive and intransitive.
Statements where the finite verb is intransitive cannot contain either complements or objects.
The use of transitivity is closely linked to grammatical voice in English. Transitive verbs can be used in both the active and the passive voice. The active voice is used when the focus is on the agent responsible for the action whereas the passive voice is used when the focus is on the entities modified in the course of the action.
Statements constructed with transitive verbs contain a mandatory direct object and an optional indirect object in the active voice. The subject is the agent responsible for the event and the direct object is an entity that is modified in the course of the event. The indirect object is a second entity impacted in the course of the action.
When an active statement is turned into a passive statement, one of the original objects becomes the subject. If there were two original objects, the other may optionally be retained as an object. The original subject may optionally be referenced in an adverbial component using a prepositional phrase.
For this reason, despite the name, transitive verbs don’t necessarily have an object. The difference between an intransitive verb and a transitive verb in the passive may be minimal: the plants are growing is intransitive, the plants are grown is transitive in the passive voice.
Adverbials
Adverbials contain additional information which qualifies the state or event being described. Adverbial components are optional but any number can be added to any type of statement. The limit is a matter of style rather than syntax. This is the difference between an adverbial and a complement. There can be any number of adverbials because there can be any number of qualifications: time, place, direction, manner, ground and so on.
Component Types
Although there are five statement components, there are only four types of component structure and there isn’t a simple one-to-one mapping between statement components and component types. I have called these components noun-terms, verb-terms, adjective-terms and adverb-terms.
It’s important to distinguish these component types from the traditional parts-of-speech. The main complexity, and the principal reason for introducing these concepts, concerns noun-terms (sections 5 & 7). The other three are relatively straight-forward. Verb-terms must be either simple or compound finite verbs (see section 6), adjective-terms must be adjectives or adjective phrases (section 8.1) and adverb-terms can be either adverbs or adverb phrases (section 8.2) or prepositional phrases (section 9). This means that an adverb-term need not include any adverbs.
The abstraction into component types is necessary in order to see the set of constraints which determine which terms may be used in each statement component. There are a number of reasons for this. Firstly, because each component may be either a single word or a phrase, it allows both to be treated as syntactic units.
Secondly, each component type may contain words from multiple parts-of-speech. As the table below demonstrates there are few constraints regarding where traditional parts-of-speech may be used. Every statement component of a sentence may contain words from multiple parts-of-speech. With the exception of finite verbs, there is little or no mapping between the traditional parts-of-speech and statement components.
For example, each component of a sentence may contain words from
Thirdly, each component type may be constructed from many different classes of words. For example, a noun-term can be formed not just from nouns as such but also from infinitives, gerunds, verb chains, names, pairs & lists. On the other hand, noun-phrases can occur as part of a prepositional phrase and may therefore be part of an adverbial component.
Abstracting to a syntactic unit called a noun-term creates simplicity; we can say that subjects must be noun-terms rather than saying subjects may be one of infinitive, gerund, verb chain, pronoun, noun, name, pair or list and that each of these may be either a single word or a phrase.
The advantage of adding the extra layer of component types is therefore that the constraints governing statement construction can be expressed in fewer more general principles at a summary level rather than as complex rules at a more detailed level. Language is impossibly complex when analysed word by word but this complexity is simplified and structured by a pattern of larger syntactic units.
Consider the following statement: The steeply raked seating that had been hastily assembled overnight in the shabby old arena was almost completely occupied by a largely cheerful crowd. The statement can be parsed as follows.
The seating was occupied is the mandatory requirement to create a syntactically well-formed and semantically meaningful copula statement. All the other elements are optional.
There are no syntactical limits to the complexity that can be added in this way. In this example, only the subject is complicated and it would be possible to add many more relative clauses, prepositional phrase, adjectives, determiners and adverbs. The limitations are a matter of style as over a certain length and a certain degree of complexity the statement would start to become opaque and tiresome to read.
Word Order
Except for questions where word order is reversed, and for commands, requests, wishes and exhortations which don’t require a subject, the standard word order in English is subject then verb then complement or object. Adverbials, on the other hand, can float around in the word order to change the emphasis in a statement.
