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Basic Sentence Structures

This document outlines the seven basic sentence patterns in English: SV, SVO, SVC, SVOO, SVOC, SVA, and SVOA. It explains that most simple and complex clauses follow one of these patterns, with the subject, verb, object, complement, and adverbial denoted by S, V, O, C, and A respectively. Examples are provided for each pattern type to illustrate how clauses can vary in length while maintaining the same underlying pattern.

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249 views1 page

Basic Sentence Structures

This document outlines the seven basic sentence patterns in English: SV, SVO, SVC, SVOO, SVOC, SVA, and SVOA. It explains that most simple and complex clauses follow one of these patterns, with the subject, verb, object, complement, and adverbial denoted by S, V, O, C, and A respectively. Examples are provided for each pattern type to illustrate how clauses can vary in length while maintaining the same underlying pattern.

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fidaaryana
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd

7 Basic Sentence Patterns

The English language has seven basic sentence (or clause) patterns. Examples are:

1. John / laughed. (SV)*


2. John / kissed / Jane. (SVO)
3. John / is / tall. (SVC)
4. John / gave / Jane / a present. (SVOO)
5. John / made / Jane / angry. (SVOC)
6. John / sat / up. (SVA)
7. John / put / the bag / down. (SVOA)

Most simple and complex (but not compound) clauses are of one of these patterns no matter how
long the clauses are. For example, the following two sentences are essentially of the same pattern.

8. Jane / bought / fruit. (SVO)


9. My long lost sister Jane / has been buying / a variety of fruit. (SVO)
* There are five sentence class terms: S = subject, V = verb, O = object, C = complement, and A
= adverbial. The slash (/) denotes the boundary between syntactic terms.

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