"Alice pushes Bob."

"Cat drinks milk."

"Comment hurts feelings."

These are all different sentences that describe wildly different things. People are very different from cats, and cats are very different from comments. Bob, milk, and feelings don't have much to do with each other. Pushing, drinking, and (emotionally) hurting are also really different things.

But I bet these sentences all feel really similar to you.

They should feel similar. They all have the same structure. Specifically, that structure is

N o u n v e r b n o u n .

Because these sentences all share the same fundamental underlying structure, they all feel quite similar even though they are very different on the surface. (The mathematical term for "fundamentally the same but different on the surface" is isomorphic.)

When you studied sentence structure back in grammar school (it wasn't just me, right?) you learned to break down sentences into their parts of speech. You learn that nouns are persons, places, or things, and verbs are the activities that nouns do. Adjectives describe nouns, and adverbs describe pretty much anything. Prepositions tell you where nouns go. Etc.

Parts of speech are really abstract and really general. When you look at the surface, the sentence

the ant crawls on the ground

and the sentence

the spaceship flies through space

could not possibly be more different. But when you look at the sentence structure, they're nearly identical.

The concept of "parts of speech" emerge when we notice certain general patterns arising in the way we speak. We notice that whether we're talking about ants or spaceships, we're always talking about things. And whether we're talking about crawling or flying, we're always talking about actions.

And so on for adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions, etc., which always seem to relate back to nouns and verbs—adjectives modify nouns, for example.

Next we simply give things and actions, descriptors and relational terms some confusing names to make sure the peons can't catch on—nouns and verbs, adjectives and prepositions—and we have a way of breaking down any English sentence into its fundamental parts.

That is to say, if you know the abstract rules governing sentence structure—the types of pieces and their connections—you can come up with structures that any English sentence is but a particular example of.

Like how "Alice pushes Bob" is but a particular example of "Noun verb noun."

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