Parts of a Sentence : Subject and Predicate

What are the Parts of a Sentence?

A simple sentence can be divided into two parts. The two parts are as follows:

1. a subject
2. a predicate

What is a Subject?

• A subject can be referred to as the person, place, or thing that is mentioned in the sentence.
• The subject refers to who or what the sentence is all about.

Examples:

Explaining the subject

‘John’ is the subject of this sentence. The sentence speaks about John cooking food.

The rest of the part in the sentence is a predicate.

What is a Predicate?

• The predicate is a part of a complete sentence that gives information about the subject but doesn’t include the subject.
• This part of the sentence always contains more than one word.

Examples:

Explaining the predicate

The predicate is the sentence is ‘ate the bone’, which explains the action of the dog.

How to Find Out the Subject and Predicate in a Sentence?

Identifying the subject and predicate in a sentence is very easy. Remember, the subject of the sentence refers to what the sentence is all about or whom the sentence is referring to. Whenever you want to find out the subject, just find out which part of the sentence has the name of the doer of the action.Ask the question - ‘who is doing the action?’. The answer to the question points out the subject in the sentence.

Examples:

The dog is sleeping on the floor.

In the above sentence, ‘the dog’ is the subject, and it answers the question ‘who is sleeping?’ the answer is ‘dog’. Hence the word ‘the dog’ is considered as the subject of the sentence.

On the other hand, a predicate is that part of the sentence that gives us information about what the subject is doing.

Common Mistakes

Not considering words like ‘the’ and ‘a’ as part of the subject.

Example:

The boy climbed the tree to eat Mango.