Ignore LBR's post (well, the second part of it anyway) — each of the words he highlighted is not the subject, but simply the object of a preposition modifying the predicate. The subject is the one doing the action being talked about: in the first sentence it's most people; in the second it's few of the people in [your] hometown. The second subject is not just a word, but a word modified by a couple prepositional phrases, but that's fine. The first subject is a noun ("people" and the adjective that modifies it ("few") — again fine.

Basically, to find the subject do this:

• Find the main verb — the point of the sentence.
• Whoever or whatever is doing that verb: that's the subject. Include all descriptive words and phrases.

Edit: Note that some would say that the subject is just a single noun or noun phrase, and that the adjectives and prepositional phrases that modify the subject are not part of it. I'm using what may be an old-style definition in which each clause (basically sentence or something that looks like a sentence) is divided into a subject and a predicate, each of which can be pretty long.

oops

What happened in POG?

I'm not going into it. I may discuss it there at some point, but for now I think that little good would come of it and I don't feel a burning need.

One result is that I may be posting here more often — or I may drift away from 2p2. Remains to be seen which.

oh yeah, post here more.

ty; I will take that sentiment into account.


[not sarcastic]

Economics

And to LBR and atakdog. To be clear, the question is to highlight the subject the verb is about. The answers according to my fundamentals of english book are:

Most people commute to jobs in a nearby city.
Few of the people in my home town actually work in the town.


---------
And I'm still not sure why. These are confusing answers.

I guessed "people, and people" or "few and most", but not people and few.

These sentences seem parallel in that they have some describing factor of people, "most & few" but only one of them is the subject. Perhaps "Few" is much more specific and deserves to be the subject, while "most" is broad so the true subject is "people"

Stick with economics. You are really missing the mark on this one.

Why waste your time with that comment?

Add to the forum and explain the right answer??!?!

It's both simpler and more complex. Don't think of content at all (which is how you are trying to solve the problem) but in terms of structure and (therefore) of relationships and functions.

In the first sentence, "Most people commute to jobs in a nearby city," "most" is an adjective. Its function is to modify the word "people"--to tell you something about these particular people.

If the second sentence had begun "Few people ..." then the structures of the two would indeed be parallel: "Few" (adjective) modifying "people" (subject).

But the structure "Few of the people" has a different set of relationships: "of the people" is serving as an adjective in the second sentence, telling us something about "few". (If terminology helps you, then--because "of " is a preposition--"of the people" is called a prepositional phrase; and because it's serving as an adjective, it is here a modifying phrase).

Thus "few" is now the subject and "of the people" is the modifier, a group of words serving as an adjective and telling you something more about "few".

To add to this point, it's useful to notice you're being asked to identify what (at least in my day) was called the "simple subject"--i.e. the most essential element of the subject. If you were asked to identify the "complex subject" then it would, indeed, be longer, including the simple subject and all the words modifying or qualifying it--here "Most people" and "Few of the people in my home town".

Thanks RT, awesome explanation

Ah, that was the terminology for which I was grasping.

Seems to me, bassmaster, that if you're going to go this route (book learning grammar — and I'm not implying it's a bad thing, just noting in passing that it's unusual), the first thing for you to do is learn and get very comfortable with the parts of speech:

• noun
• verb
• adjective
• adverb
• preposition
• conjunction
• interjection
• one more that I'm forgetting — I thought I remembered there being eight [Edit: pronoun.]

If you were solid on that you'd have recognized the prepositions in your example sentences, and immediately realized that the prepositional phrases were modifying the (simple) subject and (simple) predicate, because that's what they do. "Of the people", "in my home town", and other phrases like that are never going to be the subject. A solid understading of the parts of speech would also have helped you see that "few" is, as Russell explained, an adjective while "people" is a noun.

I'm not sure exactly how much good this will do in the long run, but it's certainly not a bad thing to know, and pretty much necessary if you are to wind up thinking logically about grammar.

Not funny, and not appropriate to mock someone who admitted right up front that he didn't know. He came here for help.

How about article (a/an/the)? Or are they just considered a specialty adjective and not listed as a separate POS anymore?

That's my understanding, though I admit it's not the most helpful way of thinking about it.

I'm not sure what they teach these days. Hell, I'm not even sure they do teach it. And even though I'm old (contrasted with most of y'all), I got this not from school but from my parents and Schoolhouse Rock.

One could add the particle to your list. From Wikipedia:

"In grammar, a particle is a function word that does not belong to any of the inflected grammatical word classes (such as nouns, pronouns, verbs, or articles). It is a catch-all term for a heterogeneous set of words and terms that lack a precise lexical definition. It is mostly used for words that help to encode grammatical categories (such as negation, mood or case), or fillers or discourse markers that facilitate discourse such as well, ah, anyway, etc."

Atakdog's and my training in grammar are from an era of simple rules. Contemporary grammar sometimes has more complicated ways of answering these questions. Again from Wikipedia:

"Among the classical parts of speech, articles are considered a special category of adjectives. Some modern linguists prefer to classify them within a separate part of speech, determiners."

That reminds me of a funny anecdote about the changes in naming of the parts of speech. When my daughter was in high school she was looking at a sentence that read: "Wow, that's an amazing story" and she asked me, "What part of speech is 'Wow'?" I, remembering what I'd been taught in high school, replied, "An ejaculation."

After a very long pause, she gently replied, "Uh, Dad, I don't think that's what you meant to say."

"Particle" is so much safer.

Was anyone else taught in grade school (80s, USA for me) that these were "noun markers?" It seems to be obsolete - there isn't even a wikipedia entry for "noun marker" - but I do see other references to it on the web.

This vaguely fits this thread:

Thank you Louis!!!

Let's get this thread back on track, highlighting the ridiculous usages we see out there.

Originally Posted by Cpt.Obvious at Bookit.com
So let me get this straight... The Venetian has rooms that are twice the size of normal, typical Las Vegas hotels? or normal, typical Las Vegas hotels' rooms?

I'm confused... O_O

Damn, that's actually quite a deal. Bring your friends... and a couple thousand of their friends.

very slightly off topic, but some of the grammar mavens herein may enjoy this quiz. I found it surprisingly difficult.

i got the 40 or so i know from the preposition song, then quit