Journal of Tikrit University for Humanities

This study aims at investigating the syntactic functions of the sentence in English. A sentence in English is described in terms of a taxonomy of the range of different types of syntactic structures. The central assumption underpinning syntactic analysis is that sentences are built up of a series of syntactic units, each of which belongs to a specific grammatical category and serves a specific grammatical function. Consequently, it is most important to remember that words are classified into parts of speech according to their function, that is according to their work that they do and not according to their form (Eckersley and Eckersley, 1960:5). In this respect, each sentence can be analyzed into certain constituents. These constituents are called syntactic functions. Accordingly, there are five syntactic functions in English which are: subject (S), verb (V), object (O), complement (C) and adverbial (A). It is to be noted that these functions play an important role in attributing items to their categories (cf. Leech et al, 1982:75). Palmer (1983:57) states that the definitions of word classes "are not independent of " their syntactic functions; "precisely what a noun is in English will depend on the functions of that class of word" (see also Radford, 2009:1). When analyzed, no English sentence can have more than these five functions.