Teach english new edition r

adverbial 
(‘in here’ - called adverbial because it 
further exemplifies the verb). The elements have to go in the right order for the sentence 
to work. If we tried to say ‘*It here in warm is’, the sentence would not work. In the same 
way, we have to be careful about the types of words we can put in the slots (subject, verb, 
etc). We can’t, for example, put an adjective or an adverb in the subject slot (‘^stealthily is 
warm in here/inhospitable is warm in here’), or a verb in the adverbial position (‘*It’s warm 
go’).
However, there are some changes we are allowed to make to our sentence elements, 
and these will alter the meaning of the sentence. For example, a simple elem ent-order 
change (subject-verb 
-*■
verb-subject) will make our sentence into a question (‘Is it warm 
in here?’).
Unlike the example we have used so far, some sentences only have two elements, subject 
and verb (e.g. ‘He laughed’, ‘They disagreed’, ‘It rained!’). Verbs such as these which don’t 
take an object are called intransitive. Some verbs can be either transitive (i.e. they do take 
an object) or intransitive, e.g. ‘She 
opened
the door/The door 
opened.
The one sentence element we have not m entioned so far is the 
object, 
exemplified 
in sentences such as ‘He opened 
the door,
‘He entered 
the warm room.
Once again, the 
sequence of sentence elements is crucial, so we cannot say ‘*The room entered he’. But the 
situation is complicated by the fact that some sentences have two objects, a direct object 
and an indirect object. Direct objects refer to things or persons affected by the verb, e.g. ‘He 
sang a 
song,
‘Pizarro conquered 
Peru,
‘She loved 
him.
An indirect object refers to the person or thing that (in one gram m arian’s phrase) 
‘benefits’ from the action, e.g. ‘He sang 
me
a song’, ‘She painted 
him
a picture’, ‘I gave a ring 
to my girlfriend’,
‘Why should we pay taxes to 
the government7.’.
Not all sentences consist o f just one 
clause 
(e.g. subject-verb-adverbial or subject- 
verb-object) in this way. We can make things considerably more complex by joining and 
amalgamating a num ber of different clauses. For example, the following sentences:
‘The girl met the w om an.’
‘The woman was standing by the canal.’
‘They went to a cafe.’
‘They had a m eal.’
‘They enjoyed it very m uch.’
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D escribing language
can be amalgamated into a multi-clause sentence such as:
‘The girt met the woman who was standing by the canal and they went to a cafe and
had a meal, which they enjoyed very m uch.’
It is possible also to convert some elements of the separate sentences into phrases, e.g. 
‘The girl m et the woman 
standing by the can al
. .. ’, etc. But whether we are dealing with a 
single-clause or multi-clause sentence, our choice o f what we can say is governed by what is 
appropriate or permissible in the various slots that make up the sentence.
Vocabulary
The sentence ‘It is warm in here’ is made up of the words ‘it’, ‘is’, ‘warm ’, ‘in’ and ‘here’. The 
speaker has chosen these words on purpose to express a particular meaning. He or she 
could have chosen ‘ho t’ or ‘cold’ instead o f ‘warm ’ and, as a result, the sentence would mean 
something different.
W hat a word means is also defined by its relationship to other words. For example, we 
can say that the word ‘ho t’ is the