A few grammatical terms and what they mean

Sentence:
Sentence is a group of words, which makes a complete sense. A sentence has two parts. Subject and
predicate.
Subject:
The person, thing or idea that performs the action in the verb (do-er of the verb) or shows the being ness in
the verb (be-er of the verb) is the grammatical subject of the sentence.
E.g. He plays cricket. (He is the do-er of the verb, hence He is the subject)
He is a great cricketer. (He is the be-er, hence the subject)
E.g. He was awarded the Man of the Match by the ICB.
(He in a way shows the being ness of the verb ‘was awarded’, hence He is the grammatical subject of the
sentence. This is the case in the passive voice; the grammatical subject may look like the beneficiary of the
action performed by another agency and not appear to be the do-er or the be-er. The do-er or the be-er will
then be the object of the preposition ‘by’ (the ICB). In the passive voice most sentences will make perfect
sense without the ‘by ...’ phrase.
Predicate:
What is said about the subject is predicate.
E.g. Lovebirds are parrots.
Lovebirds tend to sit close to their mates with their heads touching.
The italicized part is the predicate in each case.
Phrase:
A group of words which makes sense but not complete sense.
E.g. tend to sit close to their mates with their heads touching.
Clause:
A group of words that makes sense and contains a predicate in itself, but is different from a sentence in that
it still does not make complete sense.
E. g. that tend to sit close to their mates with their heads touching. (‘tend to sit close to their mates with
their heads touching’ functions as a predicate though there is no subject.)
Parts of Speech:
The words in English are classified into eight groups depending on their function in a sentence.
(The key here is function of a particular word in a sentence. The same word can be of different parts of
speech depending on its function in another sentence.)
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The parts of speech are: Nouns, Pronouns, Verbs, Adjectives, Adverbs, Conjunctions, Prepositions and
Interjections.
(Some authorities would not list ‘interjections’, but would list ‘determiners’, instead.). We will study
determiners (a, an, the, some, etc.) under adjectives