Copenhagen Academic Writing Academy

Sentence Constituents

As mentioned above, when we want to analyse a sentence, as the very first step we divide the sentence into its (immediate) constituents. Now, what is sentence constituent? Every sentence has an internal structure. It means that every sentence consists of grammatical units smaller than the sentence itself named constituents. Constituents are sequences of words that belong together to form a grammatical unit.

Look at this sentence:

The trees have turned very colourful these days.

If you were asked how many pieces of information the sentence gives us, what would those pieces be?

It is as if the sentence gives us four pieces of information:

The trees, have turned, very colourful and these days.

Therefore, we say that this sentence is made up of four constituents.

You may say that each of these constituents is itself made up of other constituents. For example, the trees is made up of the and trees, have turned is made up of have and turned, very colourful is made up of very and colourful and these days is made up of these and days. This is actually correct, but at this level we only deal with what we call the IMMIDIATE CONSTITUENTS of sentences. When we want to analyse a sentence, as the very first step we divide the sentence into its immediate constituents. Then, as we go further into analysing the sentence, we analyse the sentence down to word level.