Kommentar | chrisi: here's how to start: 1. Find and identify the subject 2. Find and identify the main verb 3. Find the direct object (if the verb is transitive)
So, how to find the subject and predicate? One way is to start throwing words out that seem unnecessary, not really unnecessary of course, but not central to the sentence, and keep chopping words out, until you have nothing left but the essential.
So, in your example, I would throw out 'In his early days as a concern-party artist for Combined Services' because it's obviously only a modifier and not central. Then, I would throw out 'both male and female' also obviously not the subject and not the verb.
So what's left? We now have: 'he specialised in imitation of voices'.
We can still throw out the prepositional phrase 'in imitation of voices', leaving:
'he specialised'
This is the central part of the sentence, and we now have:
Subject = 'he' Verb = 'specialised'.
Since 'specialised' is intransitive, there is no direct object, and therefore this is a complete, grammatical, English sentence.
Now start with your basic sentence, 'He specialised' and start adding pieces of the sentence back in again, noticing their function in the sentence. For example:
'He specialised...' in what? '...in imitation of voices'. This is a prepositional phrase, led by the preposition 'in'. What is its function in the sentence? It tells you WHERE or HOW he specialised, so it MODIFIES specialises. Anything that modifies a verb is an adverb, therefore, '...in imitation of voices' is an adverbial prepositional phrase modifying the main verb. [1/2] |
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