Syntactic structure of the claus (simple sentence). The model of the members of the sentence.
The process of analysing sentences into their parts, or constituents, is known as parsing.
The syntactic structure of the sentence can be analysed at 2 levels: pre-functional (constituents are words and word-groups) and functional (constituents are parts of the sentence).
Parts of the sentence are notional sentence constituents which are in certain syntactic relations to other constituents or to the sentence as a whole.
Parts of the sentence:
1) principal parts of the sentence - the predication (the basic structure of the sentence),
2) secondary parts of the sentence extend or expand the basic structure.
Parts of the sentence are notional constituents: they name elements of events or situations denoted by the sentence: actions, states, participants and circumstances. The formal properties of parts of the sentence are the type of syntactic relations and the morphological expression.
Principal parts of the sentence are interdependent. The subject is structural centre of the sentence. The predicate agrees with the subject in person and number. The predicate is the semantic and communicative centre of the sentence.
Secondary parts of the sentence are modifiers of principal and other secondary parts: attributes are noun-adjuncts, objects and adverbial modifiers are primarily verb adjuncts. Besides the three “traditional” secondary parts, two more are singled out: the apposition and the objective predicative.
Accordingly to the structure parts of the sentence:
1) simple expressed by words and phrases;
2) compound, consisting of the structural and notional part (compound verbal and nominal predicate, subject with the introductory it and there);
3) complex, expressed by secondary predications (typical of secondary parts of the sentence).
The model of parts of the sentence shows the basic relations of notional sentence constituents. It does not show the linear order of constituents.