• Subject - The bit of the sentence which tells us who is responsible for the action/state expressed in the verb,

  eg ‘devoured (a mouse)’.

• However subjects can have other roles. Consider the following:

  John was injured (John = patient)

  She sighed (She = experiencer)

  The key opened the door (The key = instrument)

  John won a prize (John = recipient)

• The term ‘subject’ therefore is rather abstract
• It is a term for a particular syntactic position
• Thus in functional grammar we tend to talk about the participant rather than the subject

In the same way the verb and the object don’t always tell us what the subject did:

• These predicates do not denote actions but states.
• So in functional grammar verbs can be processes which include:

• actions,
• sensing,
• saying,
• being/having (states)

Objects are not always participants as in ‘The cat devoured the mouse’. Objects can be goals, eg:

• We are going to Melbourne
• She went to the Circus

But verbs don’t always have objects.

• Verbs which have objects are called transitive verbs.
• Verbs that do not require objects are called intransitive verbs. ‘
• Devour’ is a transitive verb and ‘purr’ and ‘squeak’ are intransitive verbs. For example we cannot ‘squeak the door’ or ‘purr the cat’ but we have to ‘make the door squeak’ or ‘make the cat purr’.

Note that some verbs can be either transitive or intransitive:

Some verbs (ditransitive verbs) have two objects:

Where the indirect object (the recipient) does not have ‘to’ if it comes directly after the verb.

The English tense system includes more than just the expression of time. It describes:

• When something happened
• What kind of activity it was (temporary, habitual, ongoing, repetitive, state, etc), that is, they tell us whether the action has taken place over a period of time or at a point in time.

The way we divide up time and express it using our tenses can be illustrated in the following diagram:

The timeframe described by some of the more common tenses can be described thus:

Tense in subordinate clauses

Basically complex sentences contain another clause (ie another verb), the most common being the clause introduced with ‘that’, eg:

However we can leave out the ‘that’ (called a complementiser):

Embedded clauses can be quite independent in terms of tense if the matrix is in the present but less so if the matrix verb is in the past:

But some embedded sentences (making complex constructions) are tenseless (nonfinite), and contain an infinitive, eg:

Or a bare infinitive (ie, without the ‘to’)

Other complex constructions include:

The boys smelt the kangaroo meat cooking on the fire

All the children love making damper

We need our car fixed

The teacher thinks us clever

And there are other complementisers (like ‘that’) in English:

I wonder if Pop shot the kangaroo

I wonder if Pop will shoot the kangaroo

I wonder if Pop has shot the kangaroo

We don’t know whether the fish will bite

We don’t know whether the fish were biting

We don’t know whether the fish are biting

We don’t know when Auntie will come from Meekatharra

We don’t know when Auntie came from Meekatharra

We don’t know when Auntie was coming from Meekatharra

These complementisers are not optional:

*I wonder Pop shot the kangaroo

*We don’t know the fish will bite

*We don’t know Auntie will come from Meekatharra

These are introduced with the wh-words, eg ‘who, what, when, where’ and ‘how’, eg:

I don’t know who saw the snake

I forgot what Nanna said

The old woman didn’t know where the children were hiding

She showed her children when they should dig for roots

They all learned how to cook damper