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Structure of a Sentence: Subjects and Verbs

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All sentences are made up of a subject and a verb. Of course, there may be many other components (e.g., pronouns, prepositions), but a sentence cannot exist without at least one subject and one verb. So what are subjects and verbs? A verb is the action word of the sentence (walks, paid, runs, ate, etc.). The subject is the person or thing that is doing the action. If a group of words doesn't have these two components (subject + verb), it is called a phrase (e.g., the baskets at Target). See the example below of a very simple complete sentence.

Jim ran.
(Jim is the subject; ran is the verb)
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