Cambridge Grammar of English Hardback with cd-rom a comprehensive Guide

THE SENTENCE AND THE CLAUSE

269

The sentence is normally considered to be the largest unit of grammar. Longer

stretches of text, such as paragraphs and segments of conversations, are usually

regarded as units of discourse. The sentence is principally a unit of written

grammar and is normally easily identified by an initial capital letter on the first

word and a full stop after the last word. For spoken language, the sentence as a

grammatical unit is more problematic (

Û

272a below

).

Sentences are composed of clauses. The clause is the core unit of grammar. A

sentence must include at least one main clause (

Û

270 below

). A clause consists

of two parts: a subject and a predicate. The subject is a noun phrase or its

equivalent (e.g. a nominal clause: writing novels is not easy) which indicates the

doer or agent of an action, state or event, and the predicate is a verb phrase and

any other accompanying elements (e.g. an object or complement):