In English, the shortest “full sentence” we can make is made up of 1) a subject and 2) a verb that shows past or non-past time (or a modal auxiliary verb, such as “can,” “will,” “should,” or “might”). Every sentence that is technically called a “sentence” consists of, at least, these two things.
| SUBJECT | VERB |
| She | paints. |
| We | won. |
A subject in a sentence can consist of just one word, or it can consist of many words. The crucial factor is that it functions as a noun. It may be a simple noun (like “milk”), a subject pronoun (such as “I,” “we,” “he,” “she,” or “you”), a gerund (like “sleeping” or “thinking”) a phrase, or anything else that can function as a noun. That is, it is a person or a thing (or many persons or many things). Of equal importance is that the subject of a sentence is generally the person or thing that does the action of the verb or is described by the action, thing, quality, or condition expressed by the verb part of the sentence.
| SUBJECT | VERB | |
| Lions | hunt. | |
| He | forgets | a lot. |
| The audience | laughed. | |
| The people across the street | moved. | |
| What | happened? | |
| My father | is | a mechanic. |
| They | are | happy. |
| The cat that was up in the tree | came | down finally |
Another thing that defines a subject is that it “governs” its verb. That is, the verb takes a particular form depending on what “person” the subject is. For example, the verb “work” in a sentence in the present tense will be “work” if the subject is “we,” “I,” “you,” or “they” (or an equivalent of one of these), but it will be “works” if the subject is “he,” “she,” or “it.” In the case of the verb “be,” the form of the verb varies to a greater extent. “Be” has three forms in the present tense–the word “am” for the subject “I,” the word “is” for the subjects “she,” “he,” or “it,” and the word “are” for the subjects “we,” “they,” and “you.” “Be” also has two different forms in the past tense, “was” and “were,” which vary according to their subject.