1 Sentence forms

Not all our language use is about making statements. Sometimes we need to seek out information. Sometimes we have to tell people what to do. You’ll begin this week by taking a closer look at the most common sentence structures in English.

• We can make statements (known as declaratives)
• We can ask questions (called interrogatives)
• We can give commands (the technical term being imperatives)
• And we can make exclamations (known, rather helpfully, as exclamatives)

Most of the sentences that you’ve come across so far have been declaratives, which take the standard subject, verb, object (SVO) or subject, verb, complement (SVC) structure. You’ll now consider what makes interrogatives, imperatives and exclamatives different from this well-established grammatical pattern.