The Verb

A (simple) sentence consists of a verb with sentence elements arranged around it. The verb therefore forms the centre of the sentence. A verb has the ability to bind other words or sentence elements to itself. This is known as valency. Which and how many sentence elements a verb requires is determined by its valency:

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Impersonal verbs

Impersonal verbs need neither a subject nor an object. “It” is used as a so-called “dummy subject”, a syntactic placeholder, but it has no referent. Impersonal verbs are most often used for weather phenomena (to rain, to hail, etc): 

• Ex.: to rain: “It rains.”, as one does not normally say “The sky/the clouds rain”.

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Intransitive verbs

Intransitive verbs only require one subject and do not need to bind an object: 

• Ex. to sleep: “Laura sleeps.” 

• Ex. to grow: “The flower grows.” 

 

Transitive verbs

Transitive verbs bind two sentence elements: One subject and one object:

• Ex. to help: “Laura helps her brother.”

• Ex. to cut: “Laura cuts the bread.”

 

Ditransitive verbs

Ditransitive verbs bind three sentence elements: One subject and two objects: 

• Ex. to give: “Laura gives her brother a pen.”

• Ex. to get: “Laura gets her friend a ball.” 

 

Tritransitive verbs

Lastly there are tritransitive verbs, which can bind one subject and three objects. However this is a small group of rarer verbs. 

• Ex. to trade «Laura trades her brother a blanket for his bicycle.»

• Ex. to write: «Laura writes her father a long letter about her problems.»

 

The subject

English sentences can be very short. You only need one subject and one verb and you have a so-called minimal sentence (e.g. "Laura sleeps."). The subject is always the person or thing that does something and is therefore often referred to as the doer or agent (= the acting entity). The subject is always in the nominative case and can therefore be asked for with the question "who/what is doing?".

 

The object

The subject is the person or thing doing something. The object is the one or to  or with which something happens. This is additional information or a supplement to the verb (e.g.: "Laura helps her brother."). The object can be in the objective or possessive case. But more on this later.

 

The adverbial (also adverbial clause)

Adverbials are sentence elements that are not subjects, objects or verbs. Based on this definition, adverbials are the residual category of sentence elements. They are usually additional information that is not absolutely grammatically necessary for the sentence and are therefore also called free information. For the sentence "Laura sleeps on the sofa.", only the subject Laura and the verb sleeps are grammatically necessary. The adverbial on the sofa merely serves as a more precise description. This sentence element can also be broken down even more precisely, namely into temporal adverbials (time), local adverbials (place), modal adverbials (manner) and causal adverbials (reason). But more on this later.