Word Order in English Sentences

Word order in English grammar

Declarative sentences make a statement or state a fact. They can be positive or negative. In English grammar, the usual word order in declarative sentences is subject – predicate – object.

Learn about the order of nouns, verbs and other sentence components in declarative sentences with Lingolia’a simple grammar rules. In the exercises, you can practise word order in English sentences.

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The dog is catching the ball.

There are some languages where word order doesn’t matter: either the subject (the dog) or the object (the ball) can come first in the sentence.

In English, however, we can’t change the word order, because then it would mean that the ball is the one doing the catching.

The ball is catching the dog.

Word order in declarative sentences

Affirmative and negative sentences

The usual word order for declarative sentences is subject – predicate – object – place – time.

Subject Predicate Object Place Time
Affirmative Sentence
 Many people walk their dogs in the park on Sundays.
Negative Sentence
 Many people do not walk* their dogs in the park on Sundays.

* See negation for more information about negating in different English tenses.

Verbs with two objects

When a sentence has more than one object, the indirect object usually goes before the direct object.

Examples:
My dog has brought me the ball.
Jack gave his dog a present.

However, when the indirect object with has a preposition, it goes after the direct object.

Examples:
My dog has brought the ball to me.
Jack gave a present to his dog.

Dependent clauses

A dependent clause forms a complex sentence together with a main clause. The word order in dependent clauses is the same, except that the clause begins with a conjunction.

Example:
Many people walk their dogs in the park on Sundays because they don’t have the time during the week.

In theory, every English sentence should begin with a subject, but then lengthy texts would sound very boring. In order to make texts more varied and interesting, we can place a time marker or a dependent clause at the beginning of the sentence instead.

Examples:
On Sundays, many people walk their dogs in the park.
Because they do not have to go to work at the weekend, many people walk their dogs in the park on Sundays.

Word order after linking verbs

Linking verbs (also called copulative verbs) are verbs like appear, be, become, feel, look, seem, smell, taste, etc. Be is the most common linking verb in English.

Word order is still the same, but the predicate (i.e. the linking verb) is not followed by an object. Instead, we have the following two options:

  • subject + linking verb + adjective (known as a predicative adjective)
Example:
My dog is small.
subject: my dog; linking verb: is; predicative adjective: small
  • subject + linking verb + noun or noun phrase
Example:
My dog is my best friend.
subject: my dog; linking verb: is; noun phrase: my best friend