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Sentence Fragments 5937 Views

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Transcript

00:04
Sentence Fragments, a la Shmoop. Mary is a waitress, and she has to put up
00:08
with a lot at her job: aching feet...
00:11
...the smell of fried food...
00:13
...and the butt-ugly line cook who has a crush on her.
00:16
But there's nothing that drives Mary quite so crazy as when her customers speak to her

00:22
in sentence fragments. When Mary asks Bill the bus driver what he
00:26
wants for lunch and he says, "Reuben sandwich"...
00:28
...his response is a sentence fragment.
00:31
When Mrs. Crabtree the retiree shakes her glass at Mary from across the room and yells,
00:35
"Tea!"...
00:36
...the old bat is speaking in sentence fragments.
00:39
Really, with all the sentence fragments Mary hears every day, it's a miracle she hasn't
00:44
gone at anyone with a steak knife. Grammatically correct sentences, as a rule,
00:48
have at least one subject and one verb.
00:50
For example, in the two-word sentence, "Mary cleaned"...
00:53
...we have the subject of the sentence, Mary...
00:55
...performing the action verb "cleaned".
01:02
Sentence fragments, however, tend to lack verbs, which is why they aren't real sentences.
01:06
Now, sometimes we encounter one-word sentences that look like sentence fragments, but are
01:10
actually full-on, pure-blooded sentences.
01:13
For example, there's the imperative sentence form, which consists of a one-word command.
01:22
When a customer spills his drink on the floor and Mary's boss says, "Mop!"...
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...the word "mop" is the command...
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...and Mary is the implied subject.
01:32
When a customer tries to sneak out of the restaurant without paying her bill, and Mary
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shrieks, "Pay!"...
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...the word "pay" is the command...
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...and the thieving customer is the implied subject.
01:42
It's also possible to make one-word sentences out of exclamations.
01:47
When Mary drops a plate on the floor and screams "CENSORED!"...
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...the exclamation "CENSORED!" is a sentence.
01:57
When Mary gets lemon juice in a paper cut on her finger and yells "Ouch!"...
02:00
...the exclamation "Ouch!" is a sentence. But...still not as much fun to yell as "CENSORED!"
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Now, here comes the tricky part. It just so happens that, sometimes, we can have both
02:11
a subject and a verb...
02:13
...but no sentence. This type of sentence fragment occurs when the subject and the verb
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are part of a dependent clause.
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Dependent clauses have two characteristics: they start with a subordinating conjunction
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like "because", "although", or "if"...
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...and they depend on the existence of a main clause.
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Say we have the sentence, "Although Mr. Johnson had a forty-dollar ticket, he only
02:39
tipped Mary two bucks."
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If the dependent clause "Although Mr. Johnson had a forty-dollar ticket" stood on its
02:46
own, it wouldn't make any sense. It's a sentence fragment, and we need the rest
02:50
of the sentence...
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...the main clause, "He only tipped Mary two bucks"...
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...to explain what the dependent clause means...
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...and what the dependent clause means is that Mr. Johnson... is a jerk.
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Let's try another. Say we have the sentence, "Because the parents were too lazy to go
03:12
into the bathroom, they changed their baby's diaper at their table in the middle of the
03:17
restaurant."
03:18
If the dependent clause "Because the parents were too lazy to go into the bathroom" stood
03:22
on its own, we'd be lost. And quite intrigued.
03:25
This sentence fragment needs its main clause, "They changed their baby's diaper at their
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table in the middle of the restaurant"...
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...to provide context...
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...and the context provided is that some people... are nasty.
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There are some easy ways to check whether or not a sentence is actually a sentence fragment.
03:46
If there's a verb, then it's probably a sentence.
03:48
If there's only one word...
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...and that word is an exclamation or a command...
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...then it's a sentence.
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If it's a dependent clause with no main clause to tag along with, it's a sentence
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fragment. And now we must excuse Mary. She's going
04:01
to pay Mr. Johnson back for his lousy tip by slipping some hand soap into his salad.
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