Lesson 1: The Basics of a Sentence
Pattern #1: S-Vi
We have now arrived at our first sentence pattern!
With subjects and verbs under our belts, we are ready to tackle the simple sentence pattern S-Vi, and I'll bet you can already guess what those letters stand for: Subject-Verb (intransitive). That’s it! We’ve already looked at several sentences like this, but now we will not only label them, but in the next step, we will diagram them.
Let’s start with the sentence, “Carl woke up.” We would label it as follows:
First, note that “woke up” is considered a compound verb. That means we treat those two words as if they were one since they come together in a single verb. (They show up together as a single dictionary entry.)
No sweat, right? Take a look at two more:
For the last example, notice that we have a subject pronoun (Spr) instead of a subject noun (Sn).
That’s it! Are you ready to learn how to diagram?