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Dad caught fish and cooked them for supper.

This is a question from a test that my son missed; he is in the second grade.

The instructions for the test are as follows:

Put one line under the naming part of the sentence, and two lines under the telling part.

My B average from high school English tells me the following:

  1. Naming Part = Subject
  2. Telling Part = Predicate
  3. The subject of the second independent clause is omitted because it is understood to be Dad (What is the term for this?)

What part of the above sentence would you put a single line under? What about the double line? Specifically, I'm curious about the conjunction and. Is that naming, telling or neither?

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These grammar terms seem way too vague and confused to be of any use. I have no idea what the expected answer is supposed to be, but you could make a good argument that all of the nouns are "naming" and the verbs are "telling". – JSBձոգչ Sep 28 '11 at 15:05
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@JSBᾶngs - Agreed, I had to look them up, and found them to be very common in teaching grammar to young students. But the OP appears to be correct in that they correlate to subject/predicate. – Dusty Sep 28 '11 at 15:13

2 Answers

up vote 2 down vote accepted

This isn't actually a compound sentence, it's a simple sentence that contains a compound predicate. A compound sentence would look something like Dad caught fish, and he cooked them for supper.

So, the 'Naming Part' (subject) is simply the word Dad and the 'Telling Part' (predicate) would be caught fish and cooked them for supper.

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Thanks @Dusty. I've edited the question to reflect what type of sentence it really is. When my son and I go over tests, I explain to him why he missed it. I could not do that in this case and it really bugged me. Thanks for the explanation and answer. – ray023 Sep 28 '11 at 15:04
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I've never heard the term "compound predicate" before, and I think that the linked analysis is transparently wrong. The quoted sentence is a regular compound sentence with ellipsis of the repeated subject: "Dad caught fish and [he] cooked them for supper." – JSBձոգչ Sep 28 '11 at 15:09
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@JSBᾶngs - Interesting. We were taught compound subject and compound predicates all growing up in school, and google has a substantial number of hits, so I'm not just misremembering, but I'll concede that I can't prove that it's a real thing, and not just some grammatical construct they made up to make things easier on us. – Dusty Sep 28 '11 at 15:16
up vote 4 down vote

I'm not familiar with the terms Naming Part and Telling Part, but 'Dad' is the Subject and the rest is the Predicate, although it does rather depend on the terminology you use. One system of analysis would call 'Dad' a Noun Phrase and the rest a Verb Phrase.

That apart, it's rather an odd sentence. I would expect 'Dad caught a fish and cooked it for supper' or 'Dad caught some fish and cooked them for supper.' I'm not saying the sentence as it stands is ungrammatical, but it's unusual to see 'fish' without a determiner in this context.

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