Clause elements

English grammar questions, answered by Alan

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Tanii
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Clause elements

Post by Tanii »

What are the clause elements in this sentence:
'Eleonora' is a nice short story written by Edgar Allan Poe.
Eleonora (S) is (V) a nice short story written by Edgar Allan Poe (??)
Is the rest of the sentence Subject compliment/predicative or do we have to divide it into Subject compliment (a nice short story) and adverbial (written by Edgar Allan Poe) ??
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Alan
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Re: Clause elements

Post by Alan »

Essentially, the sentence predicate (is...Poe) consists of the main verb (is) followed by a complement* (a...Poe), which in turn consists of a noun phrase (a...story) adjectivally (not adverbially) postmodifed by the participial phrase 'written...Poe'.

There are further, finer analyses that could be made within each of these phrases, ultimately down to the level of the individual words, but a basic clause element analysis would consist of VERB+COMPLEMENT.

*note the spelling!
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