The Seven Basic Sentence Structures of English

Author: Indigo Curnick

Date: 2026-06-13

#grammar   #linguistics   #english  


Introduction

You may know English as a SVO language; subject, verb, object. While SVO certainly does characterise the language; the situation is much more complex than that. In fact, there are seven basic sentence structures, listed here:

  1. SV - Subject + Intransitive Verb
  2. SVA - Subject + Verb + Adverbial Complement
  3. SVC - Subject + Linking Verb + Subject Complement
  4. SVO - Subject + Transitive Verb + Direct Object
  5. SVOO - Subject + Transitive Verb + Indirect Object + Direct Object
  6. SVOA - Subject + Transitive Verb + Direct Object + Adverbial Complement
  7. SVOC - Subject + Transitive Verb + Direct Object + Object Complement

We also use the following acronyms within this blog

We will dig into the definitions of each of these as the blog goes on.

It's worth pausing here then to ask what is a sentence? In The Grammar of Dionysius Thrax, Dionysius defines the sentence as

A sentence is a combination of words, either in prose or in verse, making complete sense

This is a broadly notional definition of a sentence, which defines the sentence by the notion, or idea, it conveys. More modern notional definitions would replace "complete sense" with "complete thought". In either case, defining a "complete thought" or "sense" is tricky. Some very short "sentences" seem to contain complete thoughts, such as "Exit" or "Danger!".

A more formal definition is that a sentence begins with a capital letter and ends with a full stop (or question mark, exclamation point &c). The trouble with this definition is twofold. First, it only works for the written language where capital letters and fullstops are visible. Second, spoken language tends to be more free-flowing than this definition might allow.

For now, I suggest not worrying too much about the precise definition of a sentence. We'll use a vaguely putative "feel" of a sentence. As time goes on in your grammar studies you can refine some of the issues around defining the sentence.

SV

The SV sentence structure is the simplest sentence structure available in English (excluding pseudo-sentences without specific structures e.g. "Help!", "Stop!").

In this sentence, we need an intransitive verb. Intransitive verbs do not require an object to be complete (we will see this soon). We can analyse the following sentence:

Notice how, for example, you can not laugh something. Laugh is just something you do, not do to something else. No object is required to complete the laughing, other than yourself.

Some verbs can be both intransitive and transitive. Eat, for instance, can have an object or not. We'll see examples with an object soon.

Going Beyond the Basics

Already we can ask what happens if we want to go beyond this basic sentence structure. We can add in optional, additional information. These pieces of additional information are called adverbials. The term adverbial comes from the word adverb, and they do act like adverbs, but an adverbial is a phrase not a single word i.e. it is made up of one or more words.

Some examples:

SVA

In the SVA sentence we can introduce an adverbial complement. These are additional pieces of information which are required to make the main verb complete. The difference between an adverbial complement and an adverbial is in their necessity: adverbials are optional while adverbial complements are required to complete the sentence.

Let's contrast two sentences, one with SV and an optional adverbial and one with SVA to see how this works:

We can remove the adverbial from the first; "The protesters were demonstrating" is a valid sentence. However in the second we can not remove the adverbial complement, "The protesters were" isn't a real sentence. The protesters were, what, exactly?

The difference between an adverbial complement and a (direct) object (of which we shall see examples soon) is that objects receive or are affected by the verb. Whereas the adverbial complement completed the verb by specifying something like a location, direction, time, manner, state and so on. [O]utside Downing Street in the second sentence tells you the manner in which the protesters were; the protesters are not "were-ing" the outside of Downing Street, so to speak.

SVC

Linking verbs are an oft forgotten class of verbs which require a subject complement to be complete. A subject complement characterises or identifies the person or thing denoted in the subject. For instance

Subject complements are most commonly noun phrases, as in the first sentence above, but can also be adjective phrases as in the second.

The most common linking verb is to be, but other verbs can be used too, for example

SVO

Transitive verbs require a direct object to be completed. A direct object is the entity upon which the verb acts; or the entity which is affected by the verb.

There are some grammatical rules to keep in mind when using the direct object.

First, the direct object comes after the verb.

This is where the general description of English being an SVO language comes from. As we've seen, many sentences don't contain an object and so this obviously can't apply to them. Nevertheless, this is still a useful litmus test for a language.

Second, some pronouns have a different form when acting as a direct object e.g.

Here's a table for the pronouns

Pronoun Objective Form
I Me
You You
He Him
She Her
It It
We Us
They Them

Notably you and it do not change form.

Third, if the subject and direct object refer to the same entity, then a reflexive pronoun is used.

Here's a table for reflexive forms of pronouns

Pronoun Reflexive Form
I Myself
You (Singular) Yourself
He Himself
She Herself
It Itself
We Ourselves
You (Pural) Yourselves
They Themselves
They (Epicene) Themself

Fourth, when turning an active SVO sentence into a passive sentence, the direct object of the active sentence becomes the subject of the passive sentence:

The alt. form is often the reason why we use the passive sentence; being able to drop the subject from the active form. In this case, the fact that tests did the revealing is not what we want to emphasise; we want to emphasise that poison has been found.

SVOO

The SVOO sentence builds upon the SVO sentence by introducing an indirect object. An indirect object is the entity which receives the direct object. For example

We can also used to or for to introduce the indirect object after the direct object

There are some grammatical rules to observe for the indirect object.

First, the indirect object comes after the verb:

Second, some pronouns have a distinctive form when they function as an indirect object

See the table in the section above for all pronoun object forms.

Third, if the subject and indirect object refer to the same person, the indirect object is a reflexive pronoun

See the table in the section above for all pronoun reflexive forms.

Fourth, when turning an active sentence into a passive sentence, the indirect object of the active sentences can become the subject of the passive sentence

Alternatively, the direct object can become the subject and the indirect object can be introduced with to or for

SVOA

We can also form a sentence with a transitive verb, a direct object and an adverbial complement, giving rise to the SVOA sentence.

The SVOA form mirrors the SVA form:

SVOC

The final sentence form we shall look at is SVOC: subject, transitive verb, direct object and object complement.

Just as SVOA mirrors SVA, SVOC mirrors SVC:

Conclusion

We've looked at the seven basic sentence structures present in English. Of course, it goes without saying that there are many, many more sentence structures than this. I would assume that the total number of structures is virtually infinite. All of the sentences we looked at could easily take on additional adverbials to add further information.

Nevertheless, there is huge utility in studying basic sentence structures, even if we understand we can not enumerate all of them. This should be enough basics sentence structures covered that when you encounter a wild new sentence, you can analyse it in terms of the ones presented here. For instance:

This again raises issues of the definition of a sentence. Is this one compound sentence? Two separate sentences? Nevertheless, we could do the analysis like this

So in other words, two SVC "sentences" smooshed together with the conjunction because. I'm sure you can see why I didn't list the SVCcSVC sentence, or the SVCcSVO, SVOOcSV, and so on....

Using what has been presented in this blog, you should be able to identify the parts of English sentences in the wild.

References

Greenbaum, S., Nelson, G. (2002) An Introduction to English Grammar. Pearson Education Limited

Quirk, R., Greenbaum, S., Leech, G., Svartik, J. (1985) A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. Longman.

Murray, L. (1859) [1795] English Grammar Adapted to the Different Classes of Learners. With an Appendix, Containing Rules and Observations, for Assisting the More Advanced Students to Write with Perspicuity and Accuracy. John Murphy & Co.

Possibly(?) Thrax, D. (1874) [Ancient, original date unknown] The Grammar of Dionysius Thrax trans by Davidson, T. Journal of Speculative Philosophy.