In a previous video we've talked about how you can find the subject of the
sentence by asking the question "who or what is doing the action of the main
verb?" In this video we want to talk about some more advanced subjects, so
cases where it's a little bit trickier to find the subject and we're going to
look for things to watch out for as you try to find the subject of the sentence.
Our first one reads, "He was the harassment officer at the time of my
complaint." One thing to watch out for as you look for the main verb is that very
often the main verb is going to be a linking verb or some kind of verb that
doesn't really grab your attention. And in this case if you're just looking for
actions, you might be distracted by a word like "harassment" or "complaint."
These words sound like they are actions, but it's really critical that as
we look at the sentence we know what these parts of speech are, what these
these words actually do. In this case "harassment" is acting
like an adjective to describe the officer. What kind of officer? And
"complaint" here is a noun. It's the object of the preposition here. The complaint. So
it's not a verb and that's why in this case the main verb is "was" ...
[a] linking verb. And then we can say, "who or what was ...?" and the answer is "he."
The take away then is: watch out for those little verbs, and don't be confused
by words that sound like actions but are actually different parts of speech.
The next one here reads, "Being willing to take action in a crisis is the mark of a
strong leader." The thing to watch out for here is verbals, so a verbal is a part of
speech. Well it's not its own part of speech, but it's basically a word that's
derived from a verb but is usually no longer acting like the main verb unless
it has a helping verb with it. An example would be a present participle. And in
this case we have two in a row here -- "being willing." These are both
present participles. They end in "-ing" and they don't have any helping verbs
with them, so they can't be the main verb of the sentence.
Another verbal here is "to take." This is the infinitive form. So this one also
does not have a helping verb with it. And you can see then that all of these
verbals are not the main verb. What is the main verb here is again this linking
verb "is." And so the whole subject together is "Being willing to take action
in a crisis." Now you could put this last bit in brackets as a prepositional
phrase, but this is the complete subject -- all of this together before we get to
the linking verb. So watch out for that. Sometimes your subject is going to be
quite long and a verbal is only the main verb if it has helping verbs with it.
Okay let's go to the next one then. This one reads, "There is a little gnome at the
front door." And this one starts with an expletive -- which is not a swear
word in this case. That's a different expletive. An expletive is a phrase like
"there is" or "it is" or "there was" that starts a sentence. Often that expletive
is not actually necessary. You could say, "A little gnome is at the front door."
But if you have an expletive then it might be tempting to say that "there" is
the subject if "is" is the main verb. Who or what is? There is. But you shouldn't do
that. You should actually look for the actual subject after the
verb in this case. So the gnome is the subject. Let's go to the next one. We have
just two left here. So this one reads, "Don't tell mom our secret!" And the verb
here is "don't tell." So if we say "who or what's don't tell" then the person doing
this action is actually outside of the sentence. That's because the verb
here is an imperative verb. So an imperative verb refers to a verb that
orders somebody to do something. If that's the case then the person you're
ordering is presumably outside of the sentence and so the implied subject
would be "you." So the subject of "don't tell" would be something like "you."
This only happens with imperatives. otherwise the subject will definitely be
inside the sentence. Last one: "Among the books is a volume of poetry written by
your aunt." Here the verb again is "is" and sometimes it happens that the subject
comes after the verb. It's fairly rare in English, but in this case if we say "who
or what is?" then we would actually have to say "a volume of poetry." A volume of
poetry is among the books, because this first bit is a prepositional phrase
and so it cannot contain the subject. Those are a few things to watch out for
when it comes to advanced subjects. Try the exercises on the website to
really get better at finding the subject in a sentence.