From the Latin bimembris, bimembre is an adjective that refers to that which has two members or parts. For example: “The Conservative Party has a bimembre block in the Chamber of Deputies”, “The board of directors has a bimembre structure formed by the General Manager and the Executive Manager”, “The poem advances with a bimembre rhythm that surprises the reader”.
A clear example of bimembre occurs, at a political level, in Spain. And it is that its General Courts, the country’s famous constitutional body, are made up of two chambers. One of them is the Congress of Deputies, also called the Lower House, and the other is the Senate, known as the Upper House.
Both bodies are identified by the fact that they are a representation of the Spanish people, they are in charge of controlling the government’s action at all times, they are the ones that carry out the approval of the General State Budgets, they have the so-called legislative power and they also defend and represent what is national sovereignty.
Something similar is what happens, for example, in the Parliament of the United Kingdom or the British Parliament. In his case, said legislative institution is also made up of two chambers: the Upper, known as the House of Lords, and the Lower, which is also called the House of Commons.
The first one is made up of members of the nobility and clergy, while the second is made up of people who are democratically elected by the people.
The concept of bimembre is frequent in the field of grammar. A two-member sentence is one that has two syntactic constituents (that is, two members) and that, therefore, can be structurally analyzed according to its parts. Another way to define bimembre sentences is by indicating them as those that can be divided into subject and predicate.
It is important to add to all the above that one of the most important characteristics that a bimembre sentence has is that the nucleus of what the subject is, agrees perfectly, in terms of number and person, with the nucleus of what the predicate is. An example of this is the phrase: “The cleaner tidied up the interior of the office and then quietly left.”
Bimembre sentences, in turn, can be divided into verb bimembre sentences (presenting a conjugated verb according to the enunciative tense) and verb bimembre sentences (without conjugated verbs).
Some examples of bimembre sentences:
“The child plays ball” (“The child” is the subject, while “plays ball” constitutes the predicate)
“The Canadian singer gave a great concert” (“The Canadian singer” –subject– and “gave a great concert” –precated– are the two members of the sentence)
“The tree fell in the middle of the storm” (the subject is “the tree” and “it fell in the middle of the storm” assumes the predicate)
“Argentina, Uruguay and Brazil are the most winning countries of the Copa América de Fútbol” (in this case, the three countries form the subject of the bimembre sentence and the rest of the structure – “are the most winning countries of the Copa América Soccer ” – acts as a predicate).
