In this video, I'd like to give a basic introduction to clauses in terms of how
they work in the English language, and as you can
see from the order here, we're moving up in terms of complexity,
from parts of speech, which tend to be fairly small units,
all the way up to sentences. Sometimes actually
a sentence can be a single clause, as we'll see in a moment.
Now, most clauses are going to have a subject and a verb. So [a] subject
plus a verb. As I said before, this is a fairly basic
introduction, so in a separate video at some point we'll talk about some
exceptions, because there are some verbless clauses and some some
clauses that look like they have verbs but are a little bit different.
But before we break the rules of course we need to know
what the basic rules are! And that's what this video is all about.
The other thing that we need to know about clauses is that
they are either independent or dependent, and another word for
dependent is "subordinate." Independent clauses are
clauses that can stand by themselves as sentences,
and dependent ones have to be tacked on to another clause
in order to function. Sometimes I like to compare this to
a tree. So if you think of a tree, for instance ...
let's just draw a tree with branches and so on ...
if you think of the branches as dependent clauses, so the dependent
clauses are the branches and the independent clause
is the trunk ... you always need some kind of trunk
rooted in the ground. Otherwise the branches are just going to fall to the
ground. So we really need this trunk here in every
sentence. Every sentence has to have at least
one independent clause, and then we can kind of build
on that. We can have additional independent clauses, we can
have additional subordinate or dependent clauses, but we
always need this one independent clause to kind of ground
things. So let's start then with a sentence that
is simply one clause. If we look at this first
one here, it goes, "Canada's prime minister
likes fancy socks." As mentioned, we always have
to have, or most of the time we're going to have, a subject and a verb.
So in this case, "likes" is the verb and if we ask the question "who or what
likes fancy socks," then the answer is
"Canada's Prime Minister." That's our subject and there's a
direct object here as well. Likes what? Fancy socks.
What we can see then is that this can easily stand by itself as a sentence,
and you can often hear it if you just read it aloud for yourself. You'll be
able to catch that this is a sentence. We can put a period
after it, and we're good to go. If we look at the second one here, this
is still only one clause, and we
start with "the 2017 Super Bowl" -- that's our subject,
and that's doing the action of the verb "remains."
And then again we have a direct object in "one."
What remains? One. The rest of this actually consists of
various prepositional phrases: "of the most
spectacular comebacks" and "in sports history." And those just add
extra information. In other words, it is quite common to
have phrases kind of tacked onto clauses. Sometimes these phrases
even are part of the main part of the clause. So if we think of "The 2017
Super Bowl": that's a noun phrase and that forms the
subject, which is then essential to the clause.
Alright, if we were wondering then,
well, what is the clause here, this whole thing together can be
construed as the clause. And at the core of it we have
the subject and the verb. Let's start to complicate
this a little bit more with our third example here.
Now we're going to introduce the dependent clause.
In this case we start with, "If you visit the Coromandel Peninsula
[which is in New Zealand] ..." This word "if" ... is what we call a
subordinating conjunction,
which we know as a part of speech. And what this little word is doing is
it's making this whole first clause dependent. So this is a
dependent clause, or a subordinate clause. If you were to
say this by itself, right, if you said "If you visit the
Coromandel Peninsula," and you stop right there
people would say, well, that's not complete. But it does have the main parts
of a clause. And if we look more closely we can see
that quite clearly. So, "visit" is the verb,
and if we say, "who is visiting?" we have "you."
Again we have this direct object: the Coromandel Peninsula.
By the way, not every sentence or every clause needs a direct object.
So we know then that this is a complete clause,
and this word "if" is connecting this dependent clause
to our independent clause over there. Okay, so our independent clause is the
second part, and again we can test: do we have a
subject and a verb? Which we do, so the subject here
is "you" and "visit" is the verb, or "should visit." Okay, so
there's our subject and our verb. In other words, a sentence can have
multiple subjects, because each clause typically has its
own subject and its own verb. Alright, now if we look at the
fourth example here, this is one that often confuses students.
There is a word right in the middle here -- the word "but" --
that seems to make the second clause dependent: "but i did not go to Hot Water
Beach." If you said that by itself you would say,
well, that doesn't seem entirely complete! It needs to be
attached to something. And yet, "but" is a different kind of
conjunction. If you remember correctly, "but" is one of
the coordinating conjunctions, and there are seven of
these, often known as the fanboys, and they are
"and," "but," "nor," "for," "or," and "so" and "yet." Now when you deal with a coordinating
conjunction, typically you do not include it in the sentence in terms of
trying to figure out where the clauses are.
So if we look at this what we actually have to do is we have to kind of ignore
the coordinating conjunction, and then we look at everything around it
(like that), and we say, okay, well those are
independent clauses: "I did not go to Hot Water Beach" and "I
visited the Coromandel Peninsula." And the coordinating conjunction ties
together two equal elements and is not included when we are trying
to figure out if these things are independent or not. That's always
something that really confuses people, so it's it's good to have that
clear. Now that we know the basics, I want to look at a more
complicated example to kind of put things together a little bit.
And we'll try to kind of diagram this a little bit, so
we'll start with an independent clause: "She laughed."
Okay, "She laughed" -- that is complete, although we probably want a bit more
information as we go on. And then we'll add a dependent clause:
"when I told her." ... You can see that "I" is the subject and
"told" is the verb. Then we're going to add another
subordinating conjunction here. Okay, we're going to actually split this up
a little bit, so we'll start with "that" over here: "that
i loved her."
And now we're going to add another coordinating conjunction, so
let's make it a different color because it's not
going to be included in our assessment of this. And we'll add one
more dependent clause: "that I
had forgotten."
There we go: "had forgotten our argument"
Alright, very forgetful. Now you can go through all of this and you can see
exactly that each of these clauses has a subject
and a verb. These dependent clauses have "I"
and "loved," "I had forgotten," and so on and so forth.
If we look at what the various subordinating conjunctions are, we can
see them: "when," "that," and "that."
So, a couple of things to notice here. First of all, notice that the
coordinating conjunctions can also tie together dependent clauses.
It's not as if they occur only between independent clauses.
And the other thing to notice is that we can have clauses within clauses
in a sense. There's a fancy word for this.
So this is called a "superordinate clause."
To demonstrate this, I've put these clauses above each other.
If you look at the first one, we'll call this a
A. As a superordinate clause, if we look at it
that way instead of just as an independent clause,
as a superordinate clause it includes everything below it.
So A starts over here and it ends all the way at the end.
A superordinate clause then is a clause that contains other clauses in a
sense. We're complicating this, but i think you
get the idea. It's the the top of the hierarchy. Now if you
look at the second clause here, "when I told her,"
this is included in "She laughed." "She laughed when I told her."
But it's also superordinate to what comes below,
because it contains those things within it.
Alright, we're probably making this over complicated, and this is kind of
bonus information, but this this word "superordinate" you may come
across it sometimes when you study clauses.
And what it refers to is really this idea that the
top clause that includes other clauses
below it in a sense can be considered as kind of the
inclusive clause. It's the clause that contains the other ones,
but if that's confusing, just stick with dependent and independent,
and that's no problem at all. Okay, let's move on here. We're almost done.
If we scroll down a little bit here, a lot of our
dependent clauses are going to be connected with subordinating
conjunctions or relative pronouns. This is the most
common way to do this. So these words are often found at the
beginning of a dependent clause, and they tie that clause to the main
part of the sentence. If that clause starts with one of these
relative pronouns then it's sometimes called a relative clause,
a relative clause, which is a specific type of dependent clause.
It's simply a dependent clause that starts with one of these words.
If you look at our example here you can see a good example.
So this says, "I love Kim, who appreciates my knitting."
This is our relative clause. Or again, we can call it a dependent
clause. It's the same thing. It's just a specific kind of dependent
clause, and it starts with "who" to tie back to Kim. "I love Kim, who
appreciates my knitting." Now, one of the cool things about
relative clauses is that "who" here both links back
(so it's kind of acting just like a subordinating conjunction, it's
linking back), but it also acts as the subject. If we
look at the verb here, the verb is "appreciates" and we say, well, who or what
appreciates? Then the answer is "who." A relative pronoun in this kind of
clause is pretty neat because it's doing
multiple things. It's linking and it's also acting as the subject of
this new clause. Okay, that's a basic introduction to
clauses, and I hope that really helps you understand the complexity of
many sentences.