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Definition: The basic parts of a sentence involve the parts of speech along with the components of the sentence which tell you how to arrange those parts of speech. Together, they make a dynamic duo for understanding how English sentences work.
Meet the team!
Understanding the basic parts of a sentence is crucial for every English as a Second Language (ESL) learner.
Just like a building needs a strong foundation, every English sentence needs essential components.
This post will introduce you to the two main teams that make up a sentence: the connected parts of speech (the words themselves) and the sentence components (the roles those words play). Knowing how these teams work together is the key to constructing clear and accurate sentences.
Team 1: The Sentence Components (The two distinct parts of a sentence):
Every native speaker, if their memory goes back far enough, will remember their first day of first grade English. The teacher writes on the board, “This is a sentence” followed by the sentence itself.
The teacher then divides that sentence into two parts – a subject and a predicate.
Finally, the teacher then diagrams the individual words of the sentence, explaining “These are the parts of speech” of the words in the sentence.
The teacher then goes on to introduce all 8 of the parts of speech. Actually there are 9, but most native speaker English resources don’t consider determiners to be a separate part of speech.
From that point on, the English language arts part of the days’ lessons center around doing part-of-speech exercises and sentence recognition activities. In America, where I learned English natively, English is taught systematically and mechanically. By learning the basic parts of a sentence, we learn how these sentences work, polishing our language skills, correcting speech mistakes, and refining our ability to write.
Now that you know what the basic components of a sentence are, let’s meet team 2 before going on to explain how they combine to make sentence structure work.
Team 2: The Connected 8 Parts of Speech (The Words that go into the Sentence):
These are the individual words that make up your sentences, and every word in English can be classified into one (or more) of these 8 categories. I call them “connected” because they work together to build meaning. Think of them as the bricks and mortar of your sentence. Here are the eight connected parts of speech:
- Nouns: These are words that name people, places, things, or ideas. Examples: teacher, school, book, happiness.
- Pronouns: These words replace nouns to avoid repetition. Examples: he, she, it, they, us, them.
- Determiners: These words introduce nouns. Examples: a, an, the, this, that, my, your.
- Adjectives: These words describe nouns. Examples: big, small, red, interesting, helpful.
- Verbs: These words describe actions or states of being. Examples: run, jump, eat, think, be, have.
- Adverbs: These words modify verbs, adjectives, or other adverbs. They often tell us how, where, when, or why. Examples: quickly, slowly, very, here, there, yesterday.
- Prepositions: These words show relationships between other words. Examples: on, in, at, to, from, with, by.
- Conjunctions: These words connect words, phrases, or clauses. Examples: and, but, or, so, because.
Each Part of Speech has Sub-categories, Relationships, and Roles within a Sentence
It’s not enough to simply learn the definitions for the parts of speech. Each part of speech has sub-categories that define where and how they are used in a sentence. The better you understand how these relationships work, the better your use of English will be.
As an example of this, let’s look at pronouns. If you’re referring to yourself in the first person as the subject of your sentence, you use “I.” Whereas, you can refer to yourself in the first person after the verb or after a preposition and the pronoun changes to “me.”
These two distinctions are subject and object pronouns.
Going one step further, let’s say you refer to yourself in the first person as the subject, followed by a verb, then referring to yourself as the object of the action as well. That defines a reflexive pronoun.
Ex: I cut myself while I was shaving.
Here, I have just demonstrated 3 sub-categories of pronouns, yet there are at least another 5 you need to learn.
It’s best that you spend some time learning these systematically, especially if you are an ESL learner. I say this because ESL coursebooks focus more on teaching verb tenses in a systematic way, leaving sentence structure components and the parts of speech to be taught in a random, scattershot approach.
How the Teams Work Together to Build Clear and Structurally Accurate Sentences
The parts of speech are the words, and the sentence components are the roles those words play.
- A noun or a pronoun can be a subject or an object.
- A verb represents the action at the center of the sentence between the subject and object. Let’s look at some examples:
Ex: The dog buried its bone. “Dog” (noun) is the subject. “Buried” (verb) is the verb. “Bone” (adverb) is its object.
Conversely, let’s say that I’ve already mentioned the dog and the bone, that’s where pronouns come in and fill the same roles of subject and object.
Ex: After my dog took the bone from my plate, it buried it in the backyard.
- In the revised and extended version, “It” is the subject pronoun before the verb referring to the dog as the subject or “doer.”
- The “it” after the verb “buried” refers to the bone that received the dog’s action.
Interestingly, the revised sentence also introduces a third component of the sentence, adverbials.
Adverbial Phrases and Clauses are Additional Sentence Components, Adding More Information Blocks to the Sentence.
Adverbs, as a direct modifier, add information about the how, where, or when of the action in a sentence. In order to express the why, an adverbial phrase is needed.
- The dog (how) neatly buried its bone (where) outside (when) after dinner (why) to save it for later.
In the example sentence, you see a combination of direct adverbs and indirect adverbial phrases.
The third component of English sentence structure are adverbial phrases. They come at the tail end of the sentence, adding extra blocks of information in a specific word order.
As you can observe from the example, the main phrase types are prepositional phrases (for how, where, and when) and infinitive phrases of purpose (expressing the why).
Think of English Sentence Structure Like the Body of an Animal
An animal’s body often has three sections: the head, the body, and the tail. You want to think of English sentence structure in this way.
The head represents the subject, the body represents the verb, and the tail represents the adverbials.
You can add one adverbial to the tail end of the sentence or many adverbials. Each adverbial you add all points back to the verb phrase and makes perfect sense as long as you follow the word order.
While this post isn’t intended to teach the depths of word order, you can read more about word order and English sentence structure with the related post to this series or by purchasing my book, English Grammar Explained.
Why This Matters for ESL Learners:
Understanding the parts of speech and sentence components is essential for building strong sentences. It helps you:
- Identify the different parts of a sentence.
- Understand how words fit together.
- Construct grammatically correct sentences.
- Improve your reading and writing skills.
If you’re an ESL learner or non-native English speaker, you’ve probably spent most of your time trying to understand English verb tenses. All the while, you have never truly mastered the underlying sentence structure that forms the basis for English verb tenses to work.
A lack of understanding of English sentence structure leads to common mistakes that sound a lot worse than verb tense mistakes.
Summary: Practice English Sentence Structure with this Roadmap
Hopefully, this article has provided you with a solid foundation for how English sentences work. And now, you need to get some practice to reinforce the lessons learned.
Most ESL grammar resources focus on verb tenses, conditionals, and verb patterns, but rarely practice pure sentence building activities. That’s why I take a different approach, recommending native-speaker style workbooks.
I’m talking about the kind of workbooks that American second and third graders are using every day at school. These books are packed with sentence recognition and parts of speech recognition activities.
By connecting the dots within English sentences, you reinforce how English sentences work.
- Focus on base clauses as a starting point (subject and predicate).
- Revise the parts of speech and how they fit into sentence structure.
- Add in adverbial phrases to the base clauses, adding extra information blocks.
- Practice asking and answering adverbial questions starting with how, where, when, and why.
This simple formula will bring your ability to speak and write with simple sentences to a higher level.
And the perfect resources to practice these basic parts of a sentence are the 100+ Grammar Workbooks for grades (3-4) for elementary to pre-intermediate level or grades (5-6) for intermediate level ESL learners.
If you reach out to me, I’d be happy to show you how these resources can help take your English sentence structure to the next level.
Conclusion: The Basic Parts of a Sentence is the Foundation and Starting Point for English Grammar
Mastering the basic parts of a sentence is the first step toward mastering English sentence structure. By understanding the roles that words play, you can build a solid foundation for your English language learning. In my next post, I’ll explore phrases and clauses, which are the next level of sentence structure.
English Grammar Explained
For ESL and non-native English learners, basic sentence structure is often overlooked by English courses, favoring teaching verb tenses instead. Yet, it is the sentence structure that provides the foundation from which you then learn the English verb tenses. It's time to do a grammar reset and fill in your gaps of English sentence building. English Grammar Explained will systematically build your understanding of how English sentences work. Pick up your copy today!
