Conclusion to Word Groups

So far we’ve only looked at the top-level word groups in each snippet; we haven’t dug into embedded word groups.

Here’s another snippet from Tomorrow, When the War Began.

Look at it—it couldn’t be simpler, right?

But actually this snippet is—from a grammatical perspective—quite slippery, and a great way to explore some of the more niche concepts we discussed in several of the word groups lessons.

So we’re going to look at this snippet from a few different perspectives, and rewrite it in a few different ways.

Starting simply

Let’s start by looking at this as simply as possible, with the idea that a noun group represents a thing (and noun groups can include all sorts of modifiers, including adjective groups embedded in the middle and prepositional phrases hanging off the end).

From that perspective, our snippet has two noun groups joined by a verb group:

The Noun-Verb-Noun pattern

This Noun-Verb-Noun pattern is possibly the second simplest sentence pattern after Noun-Verb, which we saw on the previous page.

On the previous page we had this Noun-Verb combo: They were all contributing.

If we wanted to change that to a Noun-Verb-Noun we might write something like: They were all contributing reasons.

People often call this Noun-Verb-Noun pattern Subject-Verb-Object because it's usually Someone (called the Subject)—Does something (the Verb)—To someone or something else (called the Object of the sentence).

Note: We’re talking about noun and verb groups here. We say Noun-Verb-Noun because it’s easier to say, write, and read than Noun group-Verb group-Noun group.

Some examples

If we’re talking about noun groups as main noun + any additional modifying word groups, then we we can write all sorts of variations that match the pattern, because we've defined it so loosely.

We could write something that sounds similar to the original:

But we have to be careful not to use an adjective instead of noun without thinking about it:

To match a noun-verb-noun pattern, the example above would need to be something like:

We could write a simple declarative statement:

We could switch the verb from passive voice (which makes it almost impossible to accidentally use an adjective instead of a noun group at the end):

We could also make all the word groups super elaborate, with embedded adjective groups, modal verbs and tense helpers, and qualifying prepositional phrases hanging off the end of each noun group:

All of these (except the one with the adjective instead of a noun group) match the basic Noun-Verb-Noun pattern.