Lesson 1: The Basics of a Sentence

Noun Roles (Round 1)

For this first round of looking at nouns, we will cover two noun roles having to do with the subject of a sentence.

Subject Noun (Sn)
In the previous step, we learned that every sentence has to have a subject. Since a subject is who or what the sentence is about, you will not be surprised to learn that subjects are always nouns or pronouns. When we parse, we will not only label our subject with the capital ‘S’ for subject, but will also include a lowercase ’n’ for noun, or ‘pr’ for pronoun. We will not cover pronouns until the next lesson, however for now just know that pronouns are words like “I”, “you”, “they”, and the like.

Note that when a noun is the subject of a sentence, it is in the nominative case. A ‘case’ is something that we don’t think about much in English, and we will only encounter it a few times during this course. However, if you ever take NT Greek, it will become very important. Case indicates the purpose of a noun in a sentence.

Let’s go back to our friend James, who was running with the boys earlier. James is the subject of the sentence and the word “James” is a noun, so we will label “James” the subject noun (Sn).

Vocative (Voc)
A vocative is a noun that is directly addressing the hearer. In English, this is often called the noun of direct address, and though we won’t use this term, it is helpful in understanding the concept. What is a direct address? It’s when someone says your name or “you” (or calls you a name) when speaking with you.
“Carl, be happy.”
“Hey you, stop walking in the road!”

This direct address is not the subject of the sentence. One way you can see this is to take the vocative out.
“Be happy.”
“Hey, stop walking in the road!”

These are still complete sentences. They are commands and the subject of each is the implied “you” that we talked about a couple of steps ago. The implied “you” does not change when a vocative is added—even when the vocative is also “you!” The subject is still an implied “you,” and the direct address is an add-on. We parse the vocative with Voc.




So in the command we saw a few steps back, “Run!” had an implied you. If we add the vocative, “You, run!” the implied subject “you” still remains, and the explicit “you” is the vocative, not the subject.
Though vocatives are most often seen in imperative (command) sentences, they can be in declarative (statement) sentences as well, and this gives us the ability to see even more clearly that the vocative is not the subject of the sentence.
“Carl, it snowed!”

Here, Carl is the vocative. However, the subject is not Carl at all, rather the subject of the sentence is “it.”
Vocatives are a very confusing bit of grammar! Here are the rules to sum it up.
1) In English, commands always have an implied “you” as the subject, whether there is also an explicit “you” present in the sentence or not.
2) If you are not sure if a word is a vocative or the subject of a sentence, you can tell by taking it out of the sentence. If the sentence no longer makes sense (because there is now no subject), the the word was the subject. If the sentence is still complete, then the word was a vocative.