Subjects And Verbs

Last Updated on April 9, 2024.

A subject, along with the verb, completes a sentence. Every sentence must have a subject and a verb.

So, always be looking for the subject in a sentence, because it has to be there somewhere.

1. Which word is the subject of this sentence?

Bob made his mother a writing desk in woodshop class.

A.Bob

B.mother

C.desk

D.class

Question 1 of 2

2. Which word is the subject of this sentence?

According to engineers, computers can give us an amazing amount of information about a car.

A.engineers

B.computers

C.information

D.car

Question 2 of 2

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This lesson is provided by Onsego GED Prep.

Video Transcription

In this section, we’ make clear how you best can identify the subject and the main verb of sentences. If you want to write an effective and clear sentence, you need to include three (3) elements: 1/ Subject, 2/ Main verb, and 3/ A complete thought.

These three elements are the essential parts of our speech and form the building blocks of clear and effective sentences. If you miss one of these elements, you don’t have a sentence, also not when you capitalized the first word and placed a period after the last word.

Subjects

In sentences, the “who” or “what” of the sentences are the subjects. Subjects are always either nouns or pronouns. Nouns are persons, places, things, or ideas, such as desert, book, Jonny, or freedom. Pronouns refer to and/or restate nouns, such as she, he, they, or it. Let’s look at these examples:

Jonny saw his dad at the library.

In this sentence, “Jonny” is the subject since he is the one that does the action and the sentence’s focus.

The verb in the sentence is “saw”. It is what Jonny was doing: Jonny saw his dad at the library.

Verbs

We have three (3) major verb types: action verbs, linking verbs, and helping verbs.

Action Verbs
An action verb tells readers what the sentence’s subject does. Let’s check again this sentence:

Jonny saw his dad at the library.

What is Jonny doing here? Jonny “saw” his dad. So “saw” is an action verb.

Linking Verbs
A linking verb is a word that shows something existing or being, but it doesn’t show that an action is taking place. Most linking verbs are also referred to as the so-called “state of being” verbs that are including these words: is, am, was, are, were, feels, seems, becomes, and looks.

A linking verb is not expressing action. Rather than letting us know what the subject of a sentence is (or was) doing, linking verbs tell us what the subject is.

To understand linking verbs better, just think of a math equation like 2+2=4. A linking verb acts like the equal sign but instead of making use of the equal sign, we are substituting the word are or is (linking verbs) and say this: two and two are four.

Look at the following example of a “state of being” verb in this sentence:

Martin is a truly amazing speaker.

The subject in this sentence is Marty and the “state of being” verb is “is”.

Special Linking Verbs
We know also several verbs that may be classified as either linking or action verbs. These are including: look, sound, smell, feel, and taste. If you want to determine if they are action verbs or linking verbs, you first need to find the subject of the sentence.

Then determine whether this subject is actually “doing” what your verb expresses. If not, the verb is a linking verb.

Example:

My aunt smelled the roses that her husband gave her for their fifteenth anniversary.

In this example, “aunt” is the sentence’s subject and she actually uses her nose to smell the given roses. So “smelled” is in this example an action verb.

These roses smelled so nice.

In this example, “roses” is the sentence’s subject. Roses don’t have noses to smell, they cannot smell, so “smelled” is a linking verb in this sentence. If you need confirmation of your choice, check if you will be able to substitute “smelled” with is, am, was, are, or were. Yes, you can: “The roses were so nice.”

Helping Verbs
A helping verb works with an action verb to indicate what’s going on and to indicate the tense for the situation (past, present, or future).

This table is outlining our language’s 24 helping verbs:

Let’s look at a few sentence examples that use helping verbs:

Jonny will sign up for classes early.

This sentence’s subject is Jonny, the helping verb here is will, and the sentence’s verb is: sign up. Our helping verb is indicating that Jonny’s action will happen in the future.

Our professor had graded our papers already yesterday.

The subject in this example is the “professor,” the sentence’s helping verb is “had,” and the sentence’s verb is “graded.” In this example, our helping verb indicates that the action (grading our papers) happened in the past.