The logical subject is what the sentence is really about. The grammatical subject is the noun phrase that is grammatically in the subject position.
The boy kicked the ball.
The ball was kicked by the boy.
These sentences are paraphrases of each other; in other words, they mean the same thing. However, The boy kicked the ball is in the active voice and The ball was kicked by the boy is in the passive voice. (For more about active and passive voice constructions, see Tutorial 11.) In both sentences, the logical subject is the boy, the doer of the action kicked. In the fi rst sentence the logi- cal and grammatical subjects are the same, but in the second sentence the grammatical subject is now the ball, the receiver of the action, while the logi- cal subject is still the boy. (For subject- verb agreement, focus on grammatical subjects when you are identifying the subject noun phrase. See Tutorial 20.)
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Tutorial 2 Subjects and Verbs
DISCOVER
DISCOVER PRACTICE 1 PRACTICE 2 APPLY ✓
PRACTICE 1
Examine the following sentences. As you did for the Discover activity, high- light the subject noun phrases and underline the verbs. These sentences are all taken from another prize- winning student essay called “Are You Gonna Eat That? Diving in Dumpsters for 120 Pounds of Cheese” by Ronny Smith.
Example: They hate it.
1. Americans hate trash, so much so that some American lawmakers want to pay other countries to take our trash, just so we don’t have to deal with it.
2. Trash smells, it looks gross, and it’s everywhere.
3. Nonetheless, I found myself dangling my legs over the side of a dump- ster as I slowly tried to lower my feet inside.
4. Below me were smashed oranges and bloody bags of meat.
5. I tried to slide my hand about six inches to the left to get a better grip, but stopped when my fi ngers touched some kind of cold, pink frosting.
6. Shaking my head, I decided to just hold my nose and jump.
7. I fi rst became aware that there were people who chose to rummage through dumpsters for food when my good friend, a free- spirited design major, told me about “Freegans.”
8. Having taken an American Studies class at UC Davis called Food and Health in the United States, she wrote a report on a counter- culture group of people known as Freegans, who, among other things, often eat food from dumpsters as a form of protest. Freegans?
9. My vivid imagination caught fi re, conjuring images of pale- skinned people who emerged from the sewers to feed under the cloak of night- fall, wiggling their long, stringy fi ngers at wayward travelers and hiss- ing, “Freeegan!”
10. A laid back and pretty woman not long out of college, Christie fi rst informed me that many of the local dumpster divers do not consider themselves Freegans.
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Tutorial 2
DISCOVERDISCOVER PRACTICE 1 PRACTICE 2 APPLY ✓
Look at the subjects you highlighted and write a short response to the follow- ing questions: How do these various examples illustrate the fi ve characteris- tics of subject noun phrases presented in this tutorial (see pp. 27– 30)? Did you have trouble with any of the sentences? If so, can any of the principles discussed in this section provide any clues about how to fi nd the subject?
The book En glish Grammar for Dummies by Geraldine Woods says this about subjects: “[A]ll sentences contain verbs that express action or state of being. But you can’t have an action in a vacuum. You can’t have a naked, solitary state of being either. Someone or something must also be present in the sentence — the who or what you’re talking about in relation to the action or state of being expressed by the verb. The someone or something doing the action or being talked about is the subject.”
Now that we’ve looked more closely at subject noun phrase characteristics, what do you think of this defi nition? Is it adequate? Is it clear?
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Tutorial 2 Subjects and Verbs
FOCUS DISCOVER
DISCOVER PRACTICE 1 PRACTICE 2 APPLY ✓
Identifying verbs: Three principles
Let’s consider the basic defi nition of a verb: It describes the action of a sen- tence (action verb) or the subject’s state of being (linking or stative verb). This defi nition, taken by itself, makes it fairly easy to fi nd verbs within sentences.
Here are some of the sentences from Practice 1. The verbs are highlighted.
Sentences Action verbs
(sentence #)
Linking verbs (sentence #) 1. Americans hate trash, so much so that some
American lawmakers want to pay other countries to take our trash, just so we don’t have to deal with it.
2. Trash smells , it looks gross, and it’s everywhere.
3. Nonetheless, I found myself dangling my legs over the side of a dumpster as I slowly tried to lower my feet inside.
4. Below me were smashed oranges and bloody bags of meat.
5. I tried to slide my hand about six inches to the left to get a better grip, but stopped when my fi ngers touched some kind of cold, pink frosting.
hate (1) want (1) have (1) found (3) tried (3) tried (5) stopped (5) touched (5)
smells (2) looks (2)
’s [is] (2) were (4)
There are two types of verbs: action and linking verbs. (See Tutorial 1 for more help with identifying verbs.) You will need to recognize linking verbs so that you can analyze sentences properly. However, these sample sentences show us that verb identifi cation can be more complicated than simply knowing the action and linking defi nitions.
The rest of this section covers three principles regarding verbs that are im- portant for sentence construction and for avoiding errors.