Complex sentences contain multiple events

What’s the difference between a house and a housing complex?

A house has 1 building. It might be a shack, or it might be a mansion, but however big or small, there’s just 1.

A house has 1 building.

A complex has multiple buildings grouped together.

There might be 2 buildings, or 100 buildings.
Some of those buildings might be large, and some small.

The important thing is that they’re considered to be parts of some larger whole.

Manuelle Gautrand Futuristic Housing Block for Amsterdam

A complex has multiple buildings grouped together.

Complex sentences work the same way.

However, instead of multiple buildings, we’re interested in multiple events.

Let's take a look at the three sentence types—simple, compound, and complex—in terms of events.

A simple sentence has just 1 event. Like this:

Snookle was delivered one morning with the milk.

Unbelievable!(1995)

Write a simple sentence of your own—with just one event—to remind yourself what it feels like.

two yellow blocks labelled main separated by a red connector block. The red connector block is then replaced by a dot creating two separate main blocks

A compound sentence has multiple distinct events linked by connectors.

For instance, this snippet has two related but distinct events:

Brian turned the wheel slightly and the plane immediately banked to the right.

Hatchet(2000)

Do you notice how easily we could separate those 2 events? We could just replace the connector with a full stop and we'd have 2 simple sentences:

Brian turned the wheel.
The plane banked to the right.

Each event is distinct, meaning it can be isolated from other events (even when they're related).

So a simple sentence will have only 1 distinct event and a compound sentence will have 2 or more distinct events connected within the same sentence.

Write a compound sentence of your own by combining two simple sentences with a connector.

yellow main block and green supporting block lock together like puzzle pieces

However, in a complex sentence, multiple events are layered together to create a more detailed "combined" event.

For instance, this snippet has 2 events, but unlike the plane snippet above, it has no connector—and do you think you could separate the events as easily as you could separate Brian turning the wheel and the plane banking above?

Bod heard Scarlett choking back a scream.

The Graveyard Book(2010)

Try to rewrite this snippet as two distinct events, using two simple sentences. What do you come up with?

There are a few different ways you could have rewritten this sentence. Here's a couple of examples:

Bod heard a noise. Scarlett was choking back a scream.

Scarlett choked back a scream. Bod heard her.

But notice how no matter how you rewite it, you have to wrangle with Bod's event to make it sound complete, and you have to mess around with the verb group in Scarlett's event to make it sound okay in a sentence on its own. Not as simple as splitting up the compound sentence!

It's not clear how to separate these events, is it?

'Scarlett choking back a scream' is a distinct event, but 'Bod hearing' is not a distinct event because he needs something to hear.

This means the events can't be disentangled without completely rewriting Bod's action. 🤯

So the snippet above is a simple example of a complex sentence.

Try to write your own complex sentence with two or more events. (How might you check if your sentence is actually 'complex' and not 'compound'? 🤔 )

Can you identify which of the 6 sentences in this snippet are simple sentences, which are compound, and which are complex based on events?

(Hint: start by counting verb groups, which will form the heart of each event. Then look for connectors to separate compound sentences from complex ones.)

Someday she would wear armour too, but she wouldn’t be confined to temple grounds!

“I’m come with Master Alan of Trebond to begin his service at Court.”

Outside the wall on the other side lay the royal forest.

Here the Market Way changed its name, becoming the Palace Way.

Coram led the way to the courtyard beside the stables.

Alanna gritted her teeth and thrust her chin forward stubbornly.

Alanna: The first adventure(1983)

Simple sentences:

Outside the wall on the other side lay the royal forest.

Coram led the way to the courtyard beside the stables.

Notice how these sentences only have 1 verb group, which means they only describe 1 event.

Compound sentences

Someday she would wear armour too, but she wouldn’t be confined to temple grounds!

Alanna gritted her teeth and thrust her chin forward stubbornly.

If you split these sentences at the connector (but, and), you end up with two distinct events in each.

Complex sentences

Here the Market Way changed its name, becoming the Palace Way.

“I’m come with Master Alan of Trebond to begin his service at Court.”

These ones are a bit trickier—the events aren't as clearly entangled as the Bod and Scarlett example—but if you think about it, each sentence has one event that is expanded on in more detail.

The Market Way changed its name (and here's what it changed its name to).
I've come with Master Alan (and this is why).

Can you see how this is subtly different from the distinct events in the compound sentence examples?

To recap:

Simple sentence = 1 event.
Compound sentence = more than 1 event joined together by connectors.
Complex sentence = more than 1 event but they’re sort of tangled up.

simple sentence with 1 main block, compound sentence with 2 main blocks with a connector block in the middle, complex sentence with interlocking main and supporting blocks

In grammar, 'events' are represented by clauses (much like 'things' are represented by noun groups, or ‘actions’ are represented by verb groups).

At the heart of every clause is a single verb group.

So if you want to know whether or not you are looking at a simple sentence, simply count the verb groups:

Snookle was delivered one morning with the milk. (1 verb group = 1 event = a simple sentence)
Brian turned the wheel slightly and the plane immediately banked. (2 verb groups = 2 events = not a simple sentence).
Bod heard Scarlett choking back a scream. (2 verb groups = 2 events = not a simple sentence)

Notice that just counting verb groups won’t help you distinguish between compound and complex sentences.

However, once you know what clauses you have, you can look for connectors and other grammatical features to figure out which type of sentence you're reading. (You'll learn more of the giveaway signs in this lesson.)

But just because the events in a complex sentence can be a bit tangled, it doesn't mean there's no order to them.

For example, events in a complex sentence have a hierarchy.