Typical English Sentence Patterns

According to the book of Marjolijn Verspoor and Kim Sauter, 2000, 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. The first three patterns are most common in everyday language; the last two occur much less frequently. This paper shows that the precise lexicon information on basic verbs and constructional constraints sensitive to the presence of the verb can play important roles in predicting various related properties.