What are Complete Subject and Predicate?

Complete Subject and Predicate

• We can divide the sentence into two parts.
• They are the complete subject and the complete predicate.

What is a Complete Subject?

It consists of all the words that tell who/what the sentence is about.

The beautiful tall girl sat near the window.

Complete subject: The beautiful tall girl

What is a Complete Predicate?

• It includes the verb and all the words that tell what happened in the sentence.

The beautiful tall girl sat near the window.

Complete predicate: sat near the window.

What is a Simple Subject?

• It is the thing/animal/person that does the action.
• It is the noun/pronoun found within the complete subject.

The beautiful tall girl sat near the window.

Simple subject: girl

What is a Simple Predicate?

• It is the action done by the subject.
• It is the verb found within the complete predicate.

The beautiful tall girl sat near the window.

Simple predicate: sat

• So, all the words in a sentence either belong to the complete subject or complete predicate.

Examples

• Tina | wrote a mail to her colleague.
• Shonda’s dog | kept barking all night.

How to Avoid Confusion

• There could be words or phrases between the simple subject and the simple predicate.
• Thus, we must decide whether the phrase describes the subject or the predicate.
• Tiffany Gibbons, a college student | will be Shane’s new tutor. (a college student describes Tiffany)
• The lawyer | later explained how the accident occurred. (latertells when she explained)
• Look for inverted sentences or sentences with adverb prepositional phrases.

Note: An adverb modifies a verb, adverb, or adjective.

Example

• During the heavy rain, our electricity | went out. (The adverb prepositional phrase, During the heavy rain, is part of the predicate even though it is at the beginning of the sentence.)

Complete Subject: Our electricity

Complete Predicate: During the heavy rain………….Went out.