The Sentence as a Structure

Everybody has heard the grade-school definition of a sentence as "a complete thought." Yet even a six-year-old can see through this oversimplification. Is "He is under it" a complete thought? Without some context to clarify what "he" and "it" refer to, these words express an incomplete thought, yet they are still a sentence. No wonder English teachers are feared rather than trusted! So why is "He is under it" a sentence just as much as "Rudy is under the table" and "The whale is under the water"? The answer is that all of these strings of words have the STRUCTURE of a sentence: They all have a subject and a predicate. Perceiving the sentence as an object containing parts, rather than as an idea or a mere string of words, can simplify the study of how sentences work, for anything is simpler to understand when divided into parts, whether it's a sentence or an engine. DIRECTIONS: This opening exercise shows you strings of words that express no "complete thoughts," but some of them are shaped like sentences while others are not. Distinguish between them. Once you can recognize structure separately from meaning, you are on your way to comprehending grammar.