Clause
A clause is a key grammatical structure. Thought of at its simplest, a clause can be considered as a short ‘sentence’ – one that occurs either on its own as an independent clause or simple sentence (e.g. ‘I ate the jelly’) or together with an independent or main clause to be a part of a longer sentence (e.g. ‘because I was hungry’).
- A clause is a group of words that is either a whole sentence or is a part of a sentence.
- Clauses are built up from phrases, which are either individual grammatical words or small clusters of words called phrases.
- Typically a clause is built around a main verb which tells, often, of an action, thought or state, e.g. ‘I ate the jelly because I was hungry’.
An independent clause is a simple sentence, as in the example, ‘I ate the jelly’. If and independent clause forms a part of complex or compound sentence, it is referred to as a main clause.
Some clauses function to help out the meaning of a main clause. These clauses are dependent on a main clause for their meaning. An example would be the subordinate or dependent clause, ‘because I was hungry’. You’ll see here that there is an extra word at the start of the clause: ‘because’. It is this extra word that prevents the clause from being independent; thus it cannot be a main clause: the subordinating conjunction ‘because’ forces the clause to be dependent upon a main clause, e.g. ‘I ate the jelly because I was hungry’. Subordinators create dependent clauses – more often, these days, called subordinate clauses (sometimes reduced to ‘sub-clauses’).
There are many subordinators. Look at this example: ‘He hit him even though he was a friend’:
An important kind of clause acts as if it were an adjective by adding extra information about a noun or noun phrase. These clauses are called relative or adjectival clauses. They can seem confusing because they can be inserted in between their main clause, e.g. ‘The girl who wore a red dress left early.’ This sentence contains one main clause ‘The girl left early’ and one dependent or relative clause, ‘who wore a red dress’.
- The subordinator in this example, the word ‘who’, is acting as a pronoun (i.e. it is a word that takes the place of, and stands in for, a noun). Here it is called, therefore, a relative pronoun because it introduces a relative clause.
- Other relative pronouns are ‘that’ and ‘whom’.
- Sometimes the relative pronoun can be missed out to create an elliptical relative clause, e.g. ‘The joke [that] he told was funny’; here the relative clause is ‘he told’.
The structure of clauses is fairly fixed in English syntax (S = subject V = verb O = object C = complement A = adverbial). In certain dialects and in poetry the syntax can be varied and the sense still kept, e.g. ‘A ballad Alison sang’.
- S+V: Sam / sang.
- S+V+O: Sam / sang / a song.
- S+V+C: Sam / is / a good singer.
- S+V+A: Sam / sings / in the choir.
- S+V+O+O: Sam/ sang / her mum / a ballad.
- S+V+O+A: Sam/ sang / the song / from the song-book.
