Connectors and an introduction to complex meaning

Carrying the actor through

Some connectors let us carry over information from the first part of the compound sentence into later parts.

James turned and ran.

James and the Giant Peach(1961)

The verb 'ran' is by itself. Who ran?

We know from the first half of the sentence that James ran.

There's a level in between word groups and sentences called a 'clause'. The definition of a simple sentence is a sentence that only has one clause in it.

There are different kinds of clauses that do different kinds of things, and we're going to discuss them in more detail in other lessons.

For this lesson, we're mainly interested in two kinds of clauses: the kind that we could write on its own as a simple sentence (otherwise known as an 'independent clause'), and the kind we're introducing on this page, where some of the information is carried over from a previous clause.

To keep things simple and stay focused on connectors, we're going to continue highlighting both these clause types as 'simple sentences' in this lesson and tackle clauses more truthfully later.

If it was a different person (not James) who ran, we'd get something like the compound sentences we saw on the previous page:

James turned and Jacinta ran.

So our original snippet is actually very similar in structure to those sentences from the previous page. The difference is that the second 'sentence' is sharing the same actor (James) as the first one: "James turned and (James) ran."

Let's look at a few more. Notice how the actor "carries through" the whole compound sentence.

The enormous creature merely looked at Violet with its blank white eyes and shook its head, then dismissed her with a silent gesture.

The Bad Beginning

A bale of hay has come loose and spilt itself all over.

That Eye, the Sky(1986)

But people weren’t rushing to their next class, or playing around, or spinning the locks on their lockers.

Gone(2008)

You might have noticed in the last two snippets that the actor wasn't the only thing that carried through. Let's look at that last snippet again:

"But people weren't rushing to their next class, or playing around, or spinning the locks on their lockers."

All the verbs, 'rushing', 'playing' and 'spinning', are in what's known as the 'continuous tense', which you usually make using the verb 'to be' + the main verb in its '-ing' form ("were rushing", "were playing", "were spinning"). But in this snippet, the tense helper, 'were', and the negative, 'n't', only appear in the first clause. It's carried over in the following parts, just like the actor ('people').

This is also true for other types of verb helpers, like modal verbs ('can', 'could', 'will', 'would', and so on):

"People could rush to their next class, or play around, or spin the locks on their lockers."

There is more about verb helpers (like tense helpers and modal verbs in the Verb groups lesson from the word groups course.

Write your own variation with two or more simple sentences that share the same actor. Join them together with connectors and only include the actor (and any verb helpers if you're using them) in the first simple sentence.

Now that we've seen how to make compound sentences, it's time to look at some of the different kinds of meanings and relationships connectors can create.

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