Connectors and an introduction to complex meaning

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.

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.