Page 82 - English - Teaching Academic Esl Writing

68 CHAPTER 4
Once the noun phrase is replaced with a pronoun, subject-verb agreement is relatively easy to check. An important step in locating the subject noun phrase is to find the verb and then go to the left to look for the subject noun.
Building on this core structure, it is possible to construct more compli- cated sentences that adhere largely to the same order of elements. It is im- portant to note that this approach to sentence structure analysis is highly flexible in its ability to account for practically any number of syntactic and contextual variations, even though the core sentence elements remain rigid in their order relative to one another.
The third principle of the unit organization in a sentence specifies that sentence elements are organized according to a hierarchy based on their importance for a sentence to be grammatical (i.e., each sentence must have the most important elements, such as the subject and the verb, and, in most cases, an object or a subject complement). Other elements, such as adverbs or prepositional phrases, are mobile and can occur in various predictable locations. For example, the next sentence includes several units (preposi- tional phrases) that are added to the core structure, twofollowing the sub-
ject noun phrase and one at the end of the sentence.
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Shaded slots in the tables are for optional elements in a sentence.
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