ABSTRACT
Chapter 3 focuses on six common sentence patterns of English. Verbs are categorized into linking (“be” verbs, verbs of sense), and action (transitive, intransitive). Terminology associated with verbs are verb phrase and complements (subject complement, predicate nominative, predicate adjective, direct object, indirect object, object complement). Tests for the type of complement include the “be” substitution test and the indirect object movement test. A note on “be” verbs shows how, in addition to functioning as linking verbs, “be” verbs can be used as auxiliary verbs (also called helping verbs). Writing Matters discusses sentence ambiguity and Language Matters examines dialectal syntactic variation.
