A SENTENCE

A sentence is made with a group of words.

Look at these words -

a the the boy girl sees

b lion deer killed the the

Do these two groups of words make sentences?
Surely the answer is no.

The word order (WO) is wrong, thus preventing the words from making sense.

Move the words into the correct word order and you can get...

a 1 The boy sees the girl

a.2 The girl sees the boy

b 1 The lion killed the deer

b.2 The deer killed the lion

In a, both sentences 1 and 2 are possible.
We cannot tell which is the correct answer because both possibilities exist.

In b, 1 is correct.

But b, 2 is unlikely, if not impossible.
In the b sentences we can select the correct sentence because of the meaning.

Now we can make a rule about how English works

Rule - English needs the correct word order to make a sentence.

Ex 1
Put these words in the correct English word order.

1 boy ice the is cream the eating

2 the finds bone dog the

3 corn the grows farmer

4 people fish like chips and

5 play games often children

Now that you know that English needs the correct W O to make a sentence, we should ask:

WHAT IS THE WORD ORDER OF AN ENGLISH SENTENCE?

To find the answer, let’s look again at sentence a1

The boy sees the girl

This is a simple sentence which can be divided into 3 parts called the SUBJECT (S), the VERB (V) and the OBJECT (O). See below.

S                      V                       O

(The boy)         (sees)             (the girl)

Now let’s take a closer look at these terms SUBJECT, VERB, OBJECT.

SUBJECT: The SUBJECT of the SENTENCE is the person or thing that the information is about. It is particularly easy to find in English because, as we have seen above, it comes BEFORE the VERB.

VERB:The VERB tells:    1 What is happening

                                     2 When it is happening (see verb file)

OBJECT: In a1 the OBJECT is the person that the boy sees. The OBJECT is easy to find in English because it must come AFTER the VERB.

Now look at what happens in English if we change the W O:

        S                  V                      O

a 1 (The boy)       (sees)               (the girl)

a 2 (The girl)        (sees)               (the boy)

So we find that "the boy" is the SUBJECT provided it goes BEFORE the VERB.
If we move it after the VERB it changes its function and becomes the OBJECT.

Similarly when we move "the girl" from after to before the VERB,
it changes from OBJECT to SUBJECT.

From this information we can make a rule.

RULE

1 English uses the WORD ORDER:
SUBJECT VERB OBJECT

2 In English the SUBJECT comes BEFORE the VERB
the OBJECT comes AFTER the VERB.