The World of English Sentences

English sentences, that is, sentences in the English language, are supposed to be groups of words which make complete sense. The question immediately arises: What exactly do we mean by complete sense?

The following pages will guide you through the interesting world of english sentences. They will help you understand phrases, clauses and sentences, sentence-parts, structure and types.

English Phrases

Here you have a syntactic explanation of what a phrase is. A phrase is a grammar unit. How can we recognize a grammar unit? From its behaviour. Four features of its behaviour are listed and explained.

What is a Phrase?

A different approach to the question. The phrase is understood as a word-group which can do the work of a part of speech. A traditional approach to the question.

Helpful to parents and teachers who have learnt grammar in the old days but want to help their children, grandchildren or students to learn "today's grammar."

What is a Clause?

Explains what a clause is and what its various types and sub-types are.

What is a Sentence?

Shows us how we can recognize a sentence and describes the various types. Also explains the two possible types of relationship between clauses when they are joined together to construct sentences of greater complexity.

Sentence Structure

Lists five common sentence structures and gives examples which show how sentence-parts are inter-related in each of the given sentence patterns.

Parts of a Sentence

Lists and explains the various sentence parts, such as: subject and predicate, finite verbs, object, complement, adverbial adjunct.

The Subject of a Sentence

Here you'll find a detailed explanation of the different features of the subject, both syntactically and semantically.

What we can learn from the very word sentences

When I hear the word sentences, my mind is immediately forced to make a choice. This fact tells us something important about the English language.

In Traditional Grammar

Even in traditional grammar, which identifies phrases and clauses from their function—e.g. "a group of words that does the work of an adjective is an adjective phrase, etc."—there is a better way to identify sentences than by using the vague "complete sense" criterion.

For Further Reading...

From this page on English Sentences go to English Phrases

or go to What is a phrase

or to English Grammar Home Page