Basic Clause Patternsject of that clause. We will follow the practice of linguists: when we speak
of the subject of a clause, we mean the entire subject. If we wish to refer to
the head of the subject, then we will speak of the head of subject. We will
not use the terms simple subject nor will we ever use the term subject to
refer just to head of the subject. Similar remarks apply to predicates, objects,
complements, and modifiers. So, please, when we ask you to identify the
subject, object, etc. in an expression, identify the entire phrase, not just its
head word.
Notice now that as we changed the subject of the clauses in (9), we also
changed the form of the verb. Thus, I goes with am; we/you/they with are;
he/she/it with is. When two (or more) parts of an expression are mutually
dependent in this way they are said to agree with each other; that is, when
one is altered the other must also be altered.
Notice too that in order to create grammatical sentences our subjects
must agree with their verbs. If they don’t, the resulting strings of words are
not well-formed standard English sentences:
(11) a. I is at home. (grammatical in some varieties)
b. We/you/they am at home.
c. *He/she/it are at home.
The verb be is the most morphologically complex verb in English. It has
more forms than other verbs (see the chart in our chapter on Phrases), and
so shows the agreement between subject and verb most clearly. But a reduced
version of this agreement pattern can be seen also in other verbs:
(12) a. I/you/we/they/Bill and Molly like rutabagas.
b. He/she/it/Fred likes rutabagas.
Most verbs have only two forms in the present tense, one that ends in
-s and another that has no ending. The -s form occurs with third person
singular subjects. The uninflected form occurs with all other subjects. So, in
general, English subjects must agree with their verbs, as well as occur before
them.
We can use these characteristics of subjects to determine just which of
several phrases in a clause is its subject. Suppose, for example, that we have a
sentence in the past tense with several NPs in it, and we wish to decide just
which of these is the subject. Now, the -s marker does not occur in the past
tense; there are no verbs of the form *likeds in English, and, except for be,
the English past tense shows no indication of agreement. So to observe the