Have you ever played this game with wooden blocks?
My children and I like playing it sometimes.
It’s all about achieving balance and thinking about placement.
If you fit the blocks together with care, they keep building upwards.
But if you rush and get careless, the tower is more likely to fall.
This reminds me a bit of grammar and how we fit words together into sentences.
Do it with care and you can build effective sentences.
If you rush and get sloppy, however, things can fall apart and communication isn’t so successful.
That’s why I think it will be helpful for us to review the kinds of clauses we have in English.
Understanding clauses will help you build sentences. If you can build a variety of sentences,
then you can accomplish even larger tasks, such as writing clear email or putting together a solid essay or report.
If you agree that grammar is a helpful tool to master, then be sure you're subscribed to my channel so that you get all my future grammar lessons.
Well, let’s begin!
There are two basic kinds of clauses: independent and dependent clauses.
Both kinds have a subject and a verb. But independent clauses can stand alone and make sense. Dependent clauses can’t.
Can you identify which clauses are independent?
These are independent clauses. They can stand alone and form simple sentences.
The other clauses are dependent clauses. They fall into the category of fragments.
Each dependent clause is only part of a sentence.
We have to put a dependent clause together with independent clauses to form a sentence.
Now these are complete ideas and they make sense.
Independent clauses can follow different patterns, but they all have a subject and a verb
If you’d like to study patterns like subject-verb, subject-verb-object, and subject-verb-complement,
then you can click to watch my lesson on sentence patterns.
There are three different types of dependent clauses: noun clauses, adjective clauses, adverb clauses.
All three types of dependent clauses must combine with a main clause or independent clause to form a complete sentence.
When we put a dependent clause together with an independent clause, we get a complex sentence.
We can put dependent and independent clauses together in various combinations to get:
compound sentences,
complex sentences,
and even complex-compound sentences.
It helps to be familiar with these combinations because then you can achieve variety in your writing.
If you’d like to review simple, compound, complex, and complex-compound sentences, check out the video description.
I'm going to include some useful links. There will be a link to my website, and there's a page with useful videos to improve your writing.
Let’s talk about noun clauses first.
One kind of noun clause is an embedded question or wh- clause.
These noun clauses start with a question word and, of course, they have a subject and verb.
As a whole unit, a noun clause functions like a noun.
That means that an embedded question can be a subject,
an object of a verb,
an object of a preposition,
and even a complement.
If you need to review embedded questions, then click on the link. I’ll also put links to related lessons in the video description.
Another type of noun clause is a "that" clause.
We commonly use "that" clauses as objects of verbs, and when we do, we often omit the word “that.”
Check out these examples.
We see that clauses after reporting verbs.
We also see "that" clauses subject and adjective complements.
Here are more examples.
Okay. Onward to adjective clauses.
Hopefully, you’ve seen my series on this topic, so you know how to form adjective clauses and where to place them.
Just like noun clauses function like nouns, well, adjective clauses basically function like adjectives.
They describe or modify nouns or pronouns.
The big difference is position.
Single-word adjectives can appear before a noun or after a linking verb.
But an adjective clause has to follow the head noun as closely as possible.
Recall that there are two types of adjective clauses. Identifying and non-identifying.
Identifying clauses, also known as restrictive clauses, are necessary.
We need them to identify the head noun. We use no commas with these identifying or restrictive clauses.
Non-identifying clauses (or non-restrictive clauses) give additional information that could be left out,
and we set them off with commas when we write them or we drop our pitch when we say them.
Note that adjective clauses are also called relative clauses. And we use use relative pronouns and relative adverbs to build them.
I know I’m using a lot of terminology right now, but I think you can follow along, especially with the help of all the examples, right?
Okay. Let’s move on to the final type of dependent clause.
Adverb clauses, or as some say, adverbial clauses, allow us to add information about things like time and reason.
Adverb clauses answer questions just like adverbs: How? How much? Why? When? Where?
Remember, all this additional information doesn’t make sense alone. An adverb clause is a fragment until it combines with a main clause.
Another term you may hear when people talk about a dependent clause is a subordinate clause.
It's the same thing.
The prefix “sub” means below or or under.
A subordinate clause must hook up with a main clause (an independent clause) to make sense.
Adverb clauses are examples of subordinate clauses.
They have subordinating conjunctions. Those are connecting words like after, before, because, if.
Here are different types of adverb clauses.
This is not meant to be a complete list of all subordinating conjunctions, but I'll show you a good variety.
Here are more subordinating conjunctions to form adverb clauses.
Remember this is not a complete list.
Adverb clauses have some flexibility within a sentence.
They can come before or after the main clause.
If the adverb clause is first, we use a comma to separate the two clauses.
If the adverb clause is second, we usually write the sentence without a comma between the two clauses.
Something adverb and adjective clauses have in common is that they both can be reduced to phrases.
If you’d like some practice reducing adverb clauses, click on the link to my other lesson. I’ll also put the link in the video description.
Okay. Let’s see how well you followed. Take a short quiz to review.
Note how there's a pause, and I drop my pitch slightly when I say that nonrestrictive clause.
So how did you do? I hope you found it helpful to study grammar with me.
Please like this video if you think it’s important to develop your grammar skills.
That’s all for now.
Thanks for watching and happy studies!