A Subordinate Clause (aka Dependent Clause) is a clause that doesn’t make sense fully on its own and always needs an independent clause‏‎ to express a complete thought and make a complete sentence‏‎. These, for example, are subordinate clauses: * whenever I see her * rather than take the bus […]

Subject-Verb Agreement means that a singular subject takes a singular verb‏‎ and a plural subject takes a plural verb. For example: My brother is in town. My brothers are in town. In the first example the subject is singular: my brother. This makes the verb singular: is. In the second […]

Here’s a simple statement: Mary Anderson invented the windshield wiper in 1903. It follows the usual pattern of English statements of SVO‏‎: subject + verb + object Mary Anderson + invented + the windshield wiper. Often we ask questions‏‎ about the object of the statement. In this case we’d ask: […]

A statement is a simple sentence‎ which tells us some information (as oppose to asking a question, for example). It is a record of a situation or state, in other words. The most basic statement is made up of a subject (what the sentence is about) and a predicate (what […]

SOV stands for: {subject} + {object} + {verb} * I + dinner + made. * We + car + buy. * an asterisk at the beginning of a sentence shows it’s ungrammatical In this sentence structure the subject comes first, the object second, and the verb third. English is not […]