ShmoopTube

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[Dino and Coop singing]

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Vest. Called. In. Alligator. A. An. Is. An. Investigator.

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Words without structure just sort of float about without meaning. The only way to have [Words floating]

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them make any sense is to arrange them into sentences.

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“An alligator in a vest is called an investigator.” [Alligator crawls out of a pond]

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Sentences don't have to be as goofy as that

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one though. They can be serious, too. They can be short, or they can be long. Complex,

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or simple.

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But two things that a sentence always needs: a subject and a verb. [Coop discussing sentence requirements]

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In other words, you need a thing, the subject, to do something, the verb.

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“She sleeps.” That's a complete sentence. Why? [Girl sleeping on a sofa]

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Because there's the subject, the thing – in this case, “she” - and the verb or something

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it does – in this case, sleeps.

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The subject, she, sleeps, the verb. Easy, peasy. The English language is not always quite so simple, however.

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Which is probably for the best, because speaking in two-word sentences all the time

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would make communication take forever. [Door opens and boy appears]

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The very simple sentence “Diane dances.” works, because Diane is the subject and dances

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is the verb, but we could make it a whole lot longer and more descriptive too: “Our friend Diane dances

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in a giant banana suit every morning.” [Diane dancing in a banana suit]

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Here, Diane is still the simple subject, but there's also what we call a complete subject,

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and that is “our friend Diane.”

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it just adds another layer of description to our simple subject...And as the case for going outside in Chicago in January...layers are important! [Man walking in the snow]

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As for the verb, well it's still “dances,” and we can also call this the simple predicate.

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The predicate is part of the sentence that tells us something about

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the subject.

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So while the word “dances” is the simple predicate because it tells us that Diane dances, [Diane dancing in banana costume]

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the complete predicate is actually “dances in a giant banana suit every morning” because

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that tells us even more.

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A complete sentence has to always have a subject – the thing that the sentence is about – and

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a predicate – the part of the sentence that tells us about the subject. [Coop discussing the predicate]

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This probably makes a whole lot of sense to you – because hey, forming sentences is something

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we do every day – right after we finish our morning bananas.

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