If you’re learning to write English for college, you’ll need to understand how to talk about grammar. You probably already know that there are specific terms for each part of a sentence, but do you know your morphemes from your clauses?
If not, read on to find out what these are and check if you’ve used them right!
Sentence
Sure, you know what a sentence is, but did you know that a grammatically correct sentence must have certain ingredients? These are: a capital letter at the beginning, a period, question mark, or exclamation mark at the end, a subject, an object, a verb, and an independent ‘core’ idea, which can stand alone.
The boy sat in the tree.
In the above sentence the ‘boy’ is the subject (the ‘doer’), ‘sat’ is the verb, and the ‘tree’ is the object (the thing that is affected by the ‘doer’s’ actions). The sentence above is a simple sentence and so expresses one ‘core’ idea- that there was a boy who sat in a tree.
Clause
A clause is a part of a sentence that expresses an idea. A simple sentence can be made up of a single clause, as in the example above. A complex sentence may have two or more clauses:
The boy sat in the tree as he whistled a tune to himself.
The second clause ‘as he whistled a tune to himself’ adds information to the first clause but could work as a standalone sentence. The word ‘as’ joins the two clauses.
Phrase
A phrase can be made up of two or more words that go together, such as ‘the boy’ or ‘whistled a tune’.
Word
Surely you know what a word is! These are the building blocks that make up phrases.
Morpheme
Morphemes are the sounds that make up words. These can work as add-ons to words or be words themselves. So ‘dog’ and ‘house’ are both morphemes as well as independent words. ‘Doghouse’ is a compound word made up of two morphemes.
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