Foundations

Sentence Types & Voice

Every sentence has a type: it states, asks, commands or exclaims. It also has a voice: its subject either does the action or receives it. Type and voice tell you where to find the subject and what it does, and both are Practice Lab filters.

What you’ll learn

Tell declarative, interrogative, imperative and exclamatory sentences apart
Find the subject of a question, and the missing subject of a command
Recognise the passive from its verb phrase, and tell it from the progressive
Find the page that explains each Practice Lab filter

Four kinds of sentence

A sentence does one of four jobs: it states something, asks something, tells someone to do something, or exclaims. This job is its sentence type, and each type has a name:

Declarative: a statement. The ferry leaves at noon.
Interrogative: a question. Did the ferry leave on time?
Imperative: a command or request. Shut the window.
Exclamatory: an exclamation. What a long day this was!

The end mark usually shows the type, but not always. Three clues help you decide:

Look at the end mark
A question mark means a question. An exclamation mark means an exclamation, unless the sentence is a shouted command: Sit down! is still imperative.
Look at the word order
A question usually puts an auxiliary before the subject, often after a question word: Did the ferry leave?, Where does the ferry stop? A statement keeps the subject before the verb, even when a phrase comes first: On Sundays, the market opens at eight.
Look for a subject
A command usually has none on the page: Shut the window. means You shut the window, with the you understood. If the subject is missing and the verb is in its base form, the sentence is a command.

Declarative: a statement

The ordinary sentence. It has a subject, then a verb, and it ends in a full stop. The ferry leaves at noon. and Our neighbours keep bees. are both declarative, and so are most example sentences in this section.

A statement shows the basic pattern of a Reed-Kellogg diagram. The subject goes left of the vertical line and the verb goes right of it. Each modifier hangs below the word it describes: The below ferry, and at noon below leaves.

“The ferry leaves at noon.”

Reed-Kellogg — a statement: subject | verb, with the phrase below

det Determiner
nsubj Nominal subject
ROOT Root of the sentence
prep Prepositional modifier
pobj Object of preposition

Dependency — the verb is the root; everything hangs from it

Comparing the two views

Both views agree on the skeleton. Reed-Kellogg puts ferry and leaves on either side of the vertical and hangs at noon beneath the verb. The dependency tree makes leaves the root, with ferry as nsubj and at as a prep — the same attachment, drawn top-down instead of left-right.

Interrogative: a question

A question moves an auxiliary in front of the subject: Did the ferry leave on time?, Has the gate been locked? Or it opens with a question word: Where does the ferry stop? In most questions the subject is no longer first, and that makes questions harder to diagram than statements.

To find the subject, turn the question back into a statement in your head and look for the subject there. Then diagram the words the sentence really uses. You will use this method again in Subjects & Verbs.

Rewrite it as a statement
Did the ferry leave on time? → The ferry did leave on time.
Find the subject there
ferry. The auxiliary did belongs with leave, so the verb phrase is did leave.
Diagram with the original words
ferry left of the vertical, Did leave right of it, exactly as if the sentence were a statement.

“Did the ferry leave on time?”

Reed-Kellogg — the question, diagrammed as its statement

aux Auxiliary
det Determiner
nsubj Nominal subject
ROOT Root of the sentence
prep Prepositional modifier
pobj Object of preposition

Dependency — the auxiliary comes first but still hangs from the verb

Comparing the two views

Reed-Kellogg hides the inversion completely: the diagram of the question is the diagram of the statement. The dependency tree keeps every word where the sentence put it, so Did appears to the left of ferry. It is still an aux hanging from leave, so the tree has the same shape as the tree of the statement. Only the word order differs.

Imperative: a command

A command usually leaves its subject out. Shut the window., Wait here. and Please hand me the map. all mean you, the person spoken to, but none of them says so. This unspoken you is the understood subject.

Reed-Kellogg gives the missing word a placeholder: an x in the subject slot. The Practice Lab’s diagrams draw it that way. Some diagrams write (you) instead, in parentheses. The dependency tree does not add words that are not there. It has no subject: the verb is the root, and its objects hang from it.

“Shut the window.”

Reed-Kellogg — the understood subject as x

ROOT Root of the sentence
det Determiner
dobj Direct object

Dependency — a root with an object and no subject

Comparing the two views

Here the two views really differ. Reed-Kellogg needs a subject in every clause, so it writes x for the understood one. The dependency tree records only the words that are there: Shut is the root, window is its dobj, and there is no nsubj at all. A base-form verb with no subject is the usual sign of a command. The filters also find some commands that name their subject, such as Everyone sit down! (see the imperative mood).

Exclamatory: an exclamation

An exclamation expresses feeling and ends in an exclamation mark: What a long day this was!, How quickly the summer passed! Many begin with what or how. The what or how phrase (What a long day, How quickly) comes first, before the subject and the verb.

For diagramming, treat it as the statement it is built on. What a long day this was! is This was a long day, with the subjective complement a long day moved to the front. The exclamation mark changes nothing in either picture.

“What a long day this was!”

det Determiner
amod Adjectival modifier
attr Attribute
nsubj Nominal subject
ROOT Root of the sentence

Dependency — day is the complement (attr) of was, even though it comes first

Active and passive voice

Voice says whether the subject does the action or receives it. In The storm flooded the road. the storm does the flooding — that is the active voice. In The road was flooded by the storm. the road is the subject, but it is on the receiving end — the passive voice.

The passive always shows in the verb phrase: a form of be plus a past participle (was flooded, has been cleaned). The doer, if it is named at all, comes in a by phrase. For the passive in each tense, see the passive forms on the Tense & Aspect Chart.

“The storm flooded the road.”

det Determiner
nsubj Nominal subject
ROOT Root of the sentence
dobj Direct object

Dependency — active: the subject is nsubj, the road is dobj

“The road was flooded by the storm.”

Reed-Kellogg — passive: the same slots, a longer verb phrase

det Determiner
nsubjpass Passive nominal subject
auxpass Passive auxiliary
ROOT Root of the sentence
agent Agent (passive)
pobj Object of preposition

Dependency — passive: nsubjpass, auxpass and an agent phrase

Comparing the two views

Reed-Kellogg treats the passive subject like any other and shows the passive only in the verb phrase, with by the storm as a phrase under the verb. The dependency labels name it outright: road is nsubjpass, was is auxpass, and by is labelled agent rather than a plain prep.

What the Practice Lab filters mean

The Practice Lab, the assignment builder and the Workbench filter sentences on ten things, with the same names everywhere. Each is taught somewhere in this section; this table says where, and the ? beside each filter opens that page. In the Practice Lab the filters appear once you sign in. Signed out, you still see each sentence’s structure, type and voice as grey badges, such as Simple declarative sentence.

Practice Lab filters and the pages that explain them
Filter	Values	Explained on
Sentence type	declarative, interrogative, exclamatory, imperative	Four kinds of sentence (above)
Sentence structure	simple, compound, complex, compound-complex	Compound-Complex Sentences
Tense	past, present, future, no tense (modals, commands…)	Tense, Tense & Aspect Chart
Aspect	simple, perfect, progressive, perfect progressive	Aspect, Tense & Aspect Chart
Mood	indicative, subjunctive, imperative	Mood
Voice	active, passive	Active and passive voice (above)
Verb type	linking (be, seem…), monotransitive (one object), ditransitive (two objects), intransitive (no object)	The four verb types
Dependent clause	adjective (relative) clause, noun clause, adverb clause	Adjective Clauses, Noun Clauses, Adverb Clauses
Verbal	any verbal, infinitive, gerund, participle	Infinitives, Gerunds, Participles
Preposition	any preposition the sentence contains	Prepositional Phrases

Tense, Aspect and Mood describe one verb phrase, not the whole sentence. Choosing Past in Tense and Perfect in Aspect finds sentences with a past perfect verb phrase, such as had left. A sentence matches when one of its verb phrases does; tick Every verb phrase to ask it of all of them, so Past + Simple then finds a sentence told wholly in the simple past.

A pair that no verb phrase can have is greyed out with its reason: a command has no tense, so a Tense with Mood: Imperative cannot be chosen. Sentence type and Mood both offer Imperative. In Sentence type, it finds sentences whose main verb gives a command. In Mood, it finds every command, even one quoted inside a statement (see Sentence type is not mood).

Each option shows how many sentences it would find, such as Past · 4, with the other filters applied. When a list is empty, it says which filters you chose and lets you remove them one at a time. Signed in, Copy link to these filters gives a link to the same list, which a teacher can send to a class.

Quick check

Which sentence type does the Practice Lab give each sentence, and why? Could you spell your name? Hang your coat here. Our team won the final!
Answer
Could you spell your name? is interrogative: the question mark decides first, even when the sentence is a polite request. Hang your coat here. is imperative: Hang is a base form with no subject, so it gives a command. Our team won the final! is exclamatory. Its verb, won, is a past form with a subject, team, so it is not a command. The sentence ends in an exclamation mark.
What is the subject of each question? Where did Diego park his bike? Who brought the cake?
Answer
Diego, then Who. Turn the first into a statement: Diego did park his bike there. The verb phrase is did park, and Where is an adverb, not the subject. In the second, the question word asks about the subject, so it is the subject. That is why there is no did and no inversion.
In a Reed-Kellogg diagram of Fold the towels., what goes in the subject slot? What does the dependency tree show for the subject?
Answer
An x, for the understood subject you; some diagrams write (you) instead. The dependency tree shows no subject at all: Fold is the root, towels is its dobj, and there is no nsubj. A base-form verb with no subject is the usual sign of a command.
Which sentence has a passive verb phrase, and how can you tell? The workers were painting the bridge. The bridge was painted last spring.
Answer
The second. In was painted, a form of be comes before a past participle, so the verb phrase is passive. Its subject, bridge, receives the action, and the doer is not named. In were painting, be comes before an -ing form: the past progressive. It is active, because the workers do the painting.

Key terms

Declarative sentence: A sentence that states something, with the subject before the verb and a full stop at the end. The ferry leaves at noon. Our neighbours keep bees.
Interrogative sentence: A question. Usually an auxiliary comes before the subject, and the sentence ends in a question mark. Did the ferry leave on time? Where does the ferry stop?
See: Subjects & Verbs
Imperative sentence: A command or request. The verb is in its base form, and the subject you is usually left unsaid. Shut the window. Please hand me the map.
See: Imperatives & Conjunctions · Mood
Exclamatory sentence: A sentence that expresses strong feeling and ends in an exclamation mark, often starting with what or how. What a long day this was! How quickly the summer passed!
Understood subject: The you that a command means but does not say. A Reed-Kellogg diagram writes it as x in the subject slot; some diagrams write (you) instead. In Wait here. and Please hand me the map. the understood subject is you, drawn as x.
See: Mood
Voice: Whether the subject performs the action (active) or receives it (passive). Active: The storm flooded the road. Passive: The road was flooded by the storm.
See: Subjects & Verbs · Miscellaneous

Practice on a real sentence

Before you start, decide this sentence’s type and its voice. It does not begin with its subject, so find the subject and check that it comes before the verb. In Roles, box the Subject. In the evening tells when Joe went out, so it belongs to the predicate: the Predicate comes in two pieces, one on each side of the subject. In Dependencies, the arc from the verb to the subject shows the voice: nsubj for active, nsubjpass for passive.

Loading the practice sentence…