Verb patterns

English sentences follow a certain pattern. There are several sentence patterns in English. You don’t have to learn all of them, but you should be familiar with the most important ones. The best thing about sentence patterns is that you can create thousands of sentences using just a few patterns.

Subject + transitive verb + direct object

A transitive verb is one that takes an object. The normal order of words in an English sentence is subject + verb + object.

The object is a noun or a noun equivalent. It is the answer to the question ‘whom?’ or ‘what?’.

• He likes whom? – children
• The teacher punished whom? – the boy
• The protestors invaded what? – the platform
• The scoundrels were given what? – a good thrashing

Some verbs are not normally followed by objects. These are called intransitive verbs. Examples are: sit, sleep.

Although intransitive verbs cannot take objects, they can be modified by adverbs.

• Please sit down.
• The baby was sleeping on the bed.
• He sat under the tree.

Subject + verb + object + adverb particle

Some verbs are followed by adverb participles. Examples are: put on, take off, give away, bring up, call in etc. Sometimes the adverb particle is separated from the verb and put after the object.

The adverb particle goes after the object, when the object is a personal pronoun, or when it is comparatively short.