Constituent Orders

This page has information about common and less common orders of constituents in clauses.

What are constituents?

A general definition of a constituent in grammar is that it is "a linguistic unit (usually in sentence analysis) which is part of a larger construction" (Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching & Applied Linguistics).

The quizzes on constituents on this website test the learner's ability to identify the five primary constituents of the finite clause or sentence. These are the subject, verb (also called predicator), object, complement and adjunct (also called adverbial).

In an article elsewhere on this site, there is a detailed analysis of these five constituents and the canonical positions they occupy in sentences, as well as links to videos and more quizzes on the topic.

The article is Understanding sentence structures. The relevant part of the article is duplicated below. The rest of the Understanding sentence structures article deals with exceptions to the seven canonical structures show here in duplicate.

The seven canonical sentence structures

According to A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language (page 721) there are seven basic (also known as default or canonical) sentence structures formed from a combination of two or more of the five constituents. These are:

  1. Subject-Verb (SV):
    • She laughed.
    • My goldfish has died.
  2. Subject-Verb-Object (SVO):
    • He collects stamps.
    • I bought a new phone.
  3. Subject-Verb-Complement (SVC):
    • She is a politician.
    • The cake smells delicious.
  4. Subject-Verb-Object-Object (SVOO):
    • She gave me a gift.
    • He taught the students mathematics.

      Note: me and the students are indirect objects; a gift and mathematics are direct objects.

  5. Subject-Verb-Adjunct (SVA):
    • My office is on the top floor.
    • The basketball court was behind the car park.
  6. Subject-Verb-Object-Adjunct (SVOA):
    • She put her phone on the bedside table.
    • I keep my precious bike in the hallway.
  7. Subject-Verb-Object-Complement (SVOC):
    • I found the movie boring.
    • They elected her captain of the chess team.

As you see, each of the seven constituent structures starts subject-verb (SV).

Note 1: Some grammarians prefer the term predicator to verb, since predicator is a function term in the same way as the other four constituent terms are functions, whereas verb is a word class, not a function.
Note 2: There are other very common structures, most of them with adjuncts in various positions in the sentence. In most cases, these adjuncts are optional elements - the sentence is still grammatical and makes sense if the adjunct is removed.

Conversely, in the SVOA structures exemplified by the Comprehensive Grammar the adjunct is a necessary element. For example, it is ungrammatical and nonsensical to say She put her phone. This is due to the nature of the verb to put.

Similarly, the verb to be in certain contexts needs an adjunct. For example, the adjunct in the garden in the SVA sentence I was in the garden.

Most other verbs do not function in the same way and can be followed by an optional adjunct. For example, the optional adjunct with my sister in I played chess with my sister.

Classification disagreements

Grammarians do not always agree on the classification of the various elements in a sentence. In particular, there are widely different understandings of what should be called a complement. One result of this are the disagreements in many contexts on whether a particular element should be classified as a complement or as an adjunct.

If you believe, in the various quizzes on constituents, that I have wrongly marked a complement as an adjunct, or vice versa, please let me know via the Contact link at the foot of the page.

Quiz pages

Elsewhere on the site are several quizzes on constituents and constituent orders. Among them are:

Note: You can easily go to other quizzes on the same topic by clicking the Next Quiz link at the bottom of each of the above pages.