We do not speak English by merely stringing words together in random fashion. Instead we carefully arrange our words for the most unconciuosly into patterns. In English we use nice basic sentence patt and a multitude of subpatterns. It will now be our purpose to exam these basic sentence patterns of English. Any sentence you speak probably be based on on of them. Included in these nine basic sentence patterns are specific sentence position. Eac position in each pattern is the home-slot of particular grammatical meaning. One pattern you will soon meet is illustrated by this sentence:
“The girl bought a dress”
The noun “girl” in isolation woul mean simply “young female human being “ . but dy dint of occupying the first position in this pattern it acquire the additional meaning of the performer of the action, in this case “bought” in another pattern as shown by.
“The girl is happy”
“girl’ is not the performer of any action but in this position in this pattern has an added grammatical meaning of “that which is described “
Similarly the verb which occupies the second slot in each pattern. In the grammatical meaning of predication, assertion. It predicates or assert the occurrence of an action or the existence of a condition as in :
“dick broke a branch”
It is the grammatical motor of the sentence. When attention is focused on the grammatical meaning, the verb is called predicator. In general practice however the term verb is commonly used for both aspects of the verb, its form part of speech and its meaning as predicator.
Thus grammatical meaning is a meaning that is added to the sentence by virtue of a particular position in a particular pattern.
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