English sentence structure: constituents, communicative functions and typical patterns

A grammatically complete sentence expresses at least one complete whole event or situation with a subject and predicate. Some sentences consist of only one clause. A clause also expresses a whole event or situation with a subject and a predicate. According to the book (Verspoor and Sauter, 2000, p. 23), in English, there are five basic, prototypical sentence patterns. Most sentences you will come across, no matter how complex, will be somewhat similar to one of these. However, they are usually much more complex because often the constituents are very complex and long. Because the pattern that can be used is very much dependent on the meaning of the verb in the predicator, the patterns are named after very typical verbs for that pattern.