Sentence Patterns from a Functional Perspective

In order to summarise what we have learned, we will now look at some typical sentence patterns from a functional perspective. We will then conclude this section by looking at some untypical patterns, on the next page.

As we've seen, the Subject is usually (but not always) the first element in a sentence, and it is followed by the verb:

Pattern 1

Subject	Verb
David The dog Susan	sings barked yawned

In this pattern, the verb is not followed by any Object, and we refer to this as an intransitive verb. If the verb is monotransitive, it takes a Direct Object, which follows the verb:

Pattern 2

Subject	Verb	Direct Object
David The professor The jury	sings wants found	ballads to retire the defendant guilty

In the ditransitive pattern, the verb is followed by an Indirect Object and a Direct Object, in that order:

Pattern 3

Subject	Verb	Indirect Object	Direct Object
The old man My uncle The detectives	gave sent asked	the children me Amy	some money a present lots of questions

Adjuncts are syntactically peripheral to the rest of the sentence. They may occur at the beginning and at the end of a sentence, and they may occur in all three of the patterns above:

Pattern 4

	(Adjunct)	Subject	Verb	Indirect Object	Direct Object	(Adjunct)
[1]	Usually	David	sings			in the bath
[2]	Unfortunately	the professor	wants		to retire	this year
[3]	At the start of the trial	the judge	showed	the jury	the photographs	in a private chamber

Pattern 4 is essentially a conflation of the other three, with Adjuncts added. We have bracketed the Adjuncts to show that they are optional. Strictly speaking, Objects are also optional, since they are only required by monotransitive and ditransitive verbs, as in the examples [2] and [3] above.

Search Post

Label :