Let's talk about how you can find the
subject of a sentence. Now a lot of
people ask the wrong question when they
want to find the subject. So they
say, "well, what is the sentence about?"
And it's much better to ask
a more specific question. You should ask
"who or what
(it's good to just memorize this question)
is doing the action of the
verb?" So we're just going to represent
this as who or what plus the verb, and
we're talking about the main verb here.
So in the first example, "fifteen mustachioed
gangsters walked into the bank," our main
verb is "walked," so there is our verb. And
then we apply our question--we say "well, who
did the walking?" And in this case we
would say, "well, the gangsters did the
walking." There is our subject. If you want to
be more specific you can also
distinguish between the simple subject,
which is "gangsters," and the complete
subject, which is the simple subject with
all of its modifiers, so that would
include "fifteen" and "mustachioed." There's one
other term that you want to know before
we move on, and that's the term predicate.
I actually don't like that word that much,
but some people find it useful.
So the predicate is everything that's
not the subject in the sentence--
everything that describes the subject.
And we would say, then, that "walked into
the bank" is the predicate. So if you find
that term helpful then by all means use
it. I find it more helpful just to talk
about subjects and main verbs and then
the other parts of speech, the other part
of the sentence, you can analyze at some
other point.
We going to look at a few more sentences here
just to see how things can get a little
bit tricky at times and what you can
watch out for.
So in this example -- "it's my mom on the
phone!" -- again, it's easy to look for
shortcuts. A lot of students
would look at this and say, "well, I don't
really see a verb.
I'm just going to see what the sentence
is about, and so maybe it's about my mom.
That looks like it could be the subject.
Or it's about the phone." But if we apply
our question rigorously, and that's
the key, we would say, "well, there is a verb
here--it's the verb 'is,'" which is part of a
contraction in this case. So if we ask
the question, "well, who or what is my mom?",
then technically we would say, "well, 'it' is
my mom." So "it" is the subject. I know that
seems really weird, but grammatically "it"
is the subject. And that's where you
have to be rigorous in applying this
question, and don't be fooled by these
little words. So don't just think "well, it
has to be the biggest word in the
sentence" or whatever seems significant.
Grammatically, it doesn't have to be.
That's the second thing we've noticed
here. Now let's look at our third
sentence. And this one shows that a subject
can be quite long. Our subject is
"the topic of our lecture today," and then
we have our verb here, another
linking verb here, "is," and then we get all
of the stuff afterwards. So you can see
here that "the topic of our lecture today"
is quite a lengthy subject. And subjects
often have bits added to them. So in this
case, we have "of our lecture," which is a
prepositional phrase--you can put in
brackets, you can ignore it if you like,
but it has all been added onto
the main subject. Two more sentences, so
the fourth one here reads, "the
electric battery was invented by
Allessandro Volta." And in this case what
we have is a passive verb. Instead of
saying, "well, somebody invented something,"
instead we have, "was invented by." And
this one can fool you because you might
say, "well it was invented. Who did the
inventing? Well, it was Allessandro Volta,
so that must be the subject." But if we're
going to be rigorous, then we would say,
"well, who or what was invented?" and we
would have to say "the electric battery
was invented."
So this is our subject even though the
action of the verb is kind of happening
to our subject. And that's the case with
passive verbs, so watch out for those. One
more to have a look at here: "When the
snake charmer opened his snake pot, we held
our breath."
So what this one shows is that a
sentence can actually have multiple
subjects and multiple verbs. And that's
because what really
has a subject and a verb is a
clause, and you can add multiple clauses
to a sentence. So in this case, we have
"opened" is the first verb. And then we say,
"well, who or what opened his snake pot?",
and we would answer that with "the snake
charmer," so there's our subject. And then
after the comma we have another clause,
so we have "held" is our verb, and "we" is
our subject. So who held our breath? We
did. And now we can see that we have
actually two clauses, so a couple of
clauses here, and then we have to figure
out "well, what kind of clauses are these?"
So, just to quickly summarize
here, not to spend too much time on this,
we can say, "well, we held our breath," that
can be a sentence by itself, so that's an
independent clause. And then, "when the
snake charmer opened his snake pot," that
cannot be a sentence by itself, so that
one is dependent. And it's dependent
because of this conjunction, "when," which
ties all of this first part to the last
clause.
So that's it for the introduction to
subjects. Look for the main verb, ask the
right question, and you'll be able to
find it.