Sentence, Clause, Phrase - Introduction

(a) A sentence is a group of words that makes complete sense. It does not depend upon anything else to make its meaning clear.

For example:

Raju hit the ball.

Here, the individual words ‘Raju’ ‘hit’ ‘the’ ‘ball’ combine to form a group that has a particular meaning—someone named Raju has hit the ball.

This brings us to the second important point about a sentence.

(b) A sentence consists of two parts—subject and predicate. The subject of a sentence is the person, place, thing or idea being talked about. The predicate consists of a word or words which show what is being talked about the person, place, thing or idea.

Let us take the previous example:

[Raju] [hit the ball.]

Here, ‘Raju’ is the subject. He is the topic of the sentence. The remaining part of the sentence forms the predicate as it contains all theinformation regarding the topic (i.e., Raju).