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Pasco Hernando Community College
Tutorial Series
What is a Sentence?
A sentence is a group of words that has
 a subject (the doer of the action),
 a predicate (the action, the verb),
 and a complete thought (a finished action or
idea).
In other words, a sentence is a group of words that has
somebody or something doing something. There must
be a complete thought.
What is a Sentence?
 Bunnies hop.
The word bunnies is the subject (the doer of the action)
The word hop is the predicate (the action word, the verb)
This is a complete sentence since it has a subject,
predicate, and completes a thought.
What is a Sentence?
A sentence can include words that describe.
 Big, white bunnies hop quickly.
 The words big and white are words that describe the
noun bunnies.
Words that describe nouns are called adjectives.
 The word quickly describes the verb hop.
Words that describe verbs are called adverbs.
Phrases
 Blue giraffes fly at midnight.
 In addition to the subject (giraffes) and predicate (fly), this
sentence has an adjective, a word that describes a noun:
blue is an adjective.
 It also has another word group: at midnight.
 Word groups that do not have a subject and predicate are
called phrases. The words at midnight are a phrase.
 Phrases usually have nouns (a person, place, thing, or idea),
but the noun is not a subject since there is no verb to serve
as predicate.
Phrases
 Phrases are groups of words that do not have a subject or
predicate. They are used to further tell something.
Blue giraffes fly at midnight.
 The phrase at midnight tells when the blue giraffes fly.
 There are different types of phrases. This is a prepositional
phrase because it begins with a preposition.
Prepositions are words that tell position: over, under, around,
during (position in time), to, from, before after (positions in
place), and so on.
Phrases
Here are some examples of sentences with prepositional
phrases:
 With the mist, the single duck in the pond looked lonely.
 After the meal, they had chocolate cake and ice cream for
dessert.
 People with a heart condition should not mow the lawn
in the heat.
 Before the storm, the sky was strangely quiet.
Phrases
In addition to prepositional phrases, there are other phrases:
 -ing phrases – begin with an –ing word: dancing all night,
running in the park.
 Infinitive phrases – phrases that begin with an infinitive –
the to form of a verb such as to sing or to enjoy: to sing
loudly, to enjoy a good meal
 Appositive phrases – word groups that describe something
or someone: the flower in the garden, the stars in the sky,
the woman in the hall.
Phrases
While phrases may have nouns and verbs, a phrase
cannot be a sentence since they don’t convey a doer
(subject) doing something (predicate, verb) and
complete a thought.
Some aspect of a sentence in missing in all phrases,
generally the action and complete thought.
A phrase cannot be a sentence.
Phrases
Here are some examples of how phrases give more
information in a sentence:
 At school, the children played in the yard. (prepositional
phrases)
 Driving on the country road, she saw three deer. (-ing
phrase)
 She had a goal to become a nurse. (infinitive phrase)
 The cab driver, a man with a moustache, beeped the
horn. (appositive phrase)
To Review
 Sentences are word groups that begin with a capital and




end with proper end punctuation: period, question mark,
or exclamation points.
Sentences which are so closely related they seem to belong
in one sentence may be separated with a semicolon.
Sentences are word groups that have a subject (doer),
predicate (action, verb), and a complete thought.
A subject must be a noun (person, place, thing, or idea) or
a pronoun (a word that can replace a noun – he, she, it,
they.
A predicate must be a verb – an action word or a state of
being word.
To Review
 Sentences can have modifiers which tell more about
the subject, verb, or other parts of the sentence:
adjectives and adverbs.
 Phrases, word groups that do not have a subject and
predicate, may be used to tell more about something
in the sentence.
 Types of phrases include propositional (begins with a
word that shows position), -ing phrases (begins with a
phrase that ends in –ing), infinitive phrases (begins
with an infinitive [to + verb], and appositive phrases.