Understanding clauses

In the lesson about Simple Sentences, we saw how you can combine real world entities—people, things, actions, qualities, places and times—to express basic meaning.

We also saw that at the heart of every simple sentence is a single action:

In Connectors and an Introduction to Complex Meaning, we saw that you can combine strings of simple sentences together to show relationships between events.

For example, this simple sentence:

Can be joined with this simple sentence:

To get this compound sentence:

Different connectors create different relationships. 'Because' creates a cause and effect relationship:

While 'but' creates a concession relationship:

Connectors are great and there is a lot we can do with them, but they can get a little unwieldy:

This sentence sounds 'clunky'.

There's a lot of repetition (he did this, he did that, he did this other thing...), and the rhythm is monotonous—if people actually talked like this, everyone might end up falling asleep!

We need some additional tools for creating complex meaning, to cut out some of the repetition and make our writing more readable.

But before we can introduce these new tools we need to explain an important stepping-stone concept, and that's 'clauses'.

Clauses are a grammatical unit of language (like 'word groups' or 'sentences') which are fundamental to building complex meaning.

In this lesson, we're going to learn about what clauses are and what they're made of, so that when we get to writing complex sentences, you will be better able to see what's going on.

Compared to the simple sentences and the connectors lessons, this one might feel a bit more abstract and grammatical, but bear with us! Understanding clause structure will help down the track, we promise!

The snippet below is one sentence: a bunch of words followed by a full stop/period.

We could highlight all the word groups to look more deeply at its structure:

We can see there are 10 word groups all up: 3 noun groups, 2 verb groups, 2 adverb groups, 1 adjective group, 1 prepositional phrase, and 1 connector. A representative of every type of word group!

Most of the word groups are only 1 word long, and none of them are longer than 3 words. So much detail!

But with so much detail, it's easy to miss something very important about this sentence.

It's made up of two 'events' linked together with a connector.

• In the first event, the narrator has shot someone and describes where they hit them.
• In the second event, the person is dead.
• The connector tells us that the two events are related and that they belong in the same sentence.

We're going to call these representations of events 'clauses'.

Here are all these grammatical layers (sentence, clauses, and word groups) put on top of each other:

So, we now know that a clause is a representation of an event, much like how a noun group represents a person or thing, or a verb group represents an action/process.

Next, we're going to look at what clauses are made of and start to build them ourselves.

Clauses can be made up of 4 types of elements, all of which we'll learn about in this lesson:

• Subject
• Verb group
• Modifiers
• Objects 

Subject and verb group are pretty easy to understand:

• A subject is typically the person (or thing) doing something in a sentence, what we call the actor of an event.
• A verb group is whatever is being done, what we call the action/process of an event.

Modifiers and objects are little harder to explain, but they will make sense once we look at some examples:

• Modifiers are usually a kind of descriptive detail— qualities, places, times, and so on—that add extra detail about an event, but they aren't required for an event to make sense.
• Objects are another kind of descriptive detail—things, qualities, places, and so on— but they are required by an event to make sense.

To give you a quick sense of what we mean, here are the clause elements highlighted in some 'simple sentences' (which are sentences that only have one clause).

As you look at them, try to work out:

• which elements always appear
• which only sometimes appear, and
• what happens if you remove specific elements from a sentence.

Ok, time to take a closer look at each of these elements in turn.

A clause is defined as consisting of a subject and a verb group. They can have other things, but at a minimum, they should have those two things.

Here is a simple sentence with the simplest possible clause structure—a subject and a verb group, nothing else:

Remember how we said earlier that one clause was 'one event'?

That means a clause can only have 1 verb group.

1 verb group = 1 event = 1 clause

So, a quick way to figure out how many clauses are in a sentence is to count the verb groups.

How many clauses in each of these sentences?

2 verb groups = 2 clauses.

Each of the sentences above has 2-5 verb groups.

That means they must, by definition, have 2-5 clauses (matching the number of verb groups).

You don't need to look at anything else in these sentences to establish that number of clauses—just find the verb groups!

Paste this snippet into the textbox below and highlight all the verb groups. How many clauses does it have?

Lyra crossed the bridge and continued on the muddy path between water meadows, and came to the canal, where a line of boats was moored, some with smoke coming out of their tin chimneys, one with a dog that barked furiously until she came closer, when it must have sensed something wrong.

Snippet source: The Secret Commonwealth by Phillip Pullman.

What about the other compulsory element: the subject.

Does the same rule apply to subjects?

We said earlier that, by definition, a clause contains a subject as well as a verb group.

Does that mean that if you wanted to count clauses in a sentence, you could count subjects in the same way we counted verb groups on the previous page? 🤔

Let's try it.

2 verb groups and 2 subjects! So far so good. Let's do another one.

3 and 3! Every verb group so far has a corresponding subject—it's like a magic rule!

Uh-oh... The second verb group in that last snippet doesn't seem to have a subject. 😭

Or does it? 🧐

It isn't explicitly written out, but it's clear from context that he who'd "been sent there" was also the one "being a nuisance in Assembly".

This is called an 'implied subject'. We know what the subject is from the previous clause, so we don't need it spelled out again. We're smarter than that!

What are the implied subjects in these sentences?

Try the same thing on this snippet, in which a submarine has tipped over after striking something beneath an iceberg:

The ability to carry through subjects from other clauses is a key way we can make our writing more efficient, so keep an eye out for implied subjects as you work through this lesson!

Next, we'll look at the elements that not all clauses have: modifiers and objects.

Modifiers are extra pieces of information you can give about an event.

In the snippet above, the adverb 'horribly' is a modifier. It tells us more about how Sajid scowled, but we don't need it in order to understand what is happening.

For example, this is how the sentence looks if we delete the modifier:

We could also add more modifiers to the clause to give even more information about Sajid scowling:

Or even more:

Paste this text into the textbox below and keep adding modifiers. How many can you add before the sentence becomes hard to follow?

Every morning, Sajid scowled horribly at his friend.

We've now looked at verbs, subjects, and modifiers.

That leaves us with only one more clause element to unpack: objects.

Objects are a little harder to understand than the others, but we'll take it slow and look at lots of examples.

This next snippet has three prepositional phrases.

Two of these we have highlighted as modifiers, and one we've highlighted as an object. What do you think the difference is?

(Tip: try removing each prepositional phrase from the sentence one at a time.)

You probably found that you could take out the modifiers no problem. But what happened when you tried taking out the object, "to knitted woollen hose"?

It sounds incomplete. Revert... how?

Some verbs require extra elements in order to make sense. In this snippet, the verb "revert" requires a thing to revert to.

This is the main difference between objects and modifiers:

• Objects are essential to the meaning of an event.
• Modifiers are add-ons, giving more information and context, but not needed for an event to feel complete.

So how do we know if an element is "essential"?

We can start by looking at the verb.

For example, we now know that if something is "reverting", it has to be reverting "to something". So the verb 'to revert' requires a prepositional phrase starting with 'to' as a complement.

Here is a snippet with some more verbs that require complements:

We have 3 verbs in this snippet, and all 3 of them have an object, and all 3 objects are noun groups:

• The verb 'to unwrap' has the thing being unwrapped.
• The verb 'to find' has the thing being found.
• The verb 'to cover' has the thing being covered.

Remove any of those objects and the sentence stops making sense. (On the flip side, you can remove the modifier, "in the morning", with no issue.)

Here is another example that is a bit sneaky.

In this snippet, there are 2 objects. Can you tell what they are?

The verb 'to put' has 2 objects:

• the 'thing' being put ("my hand"), and
• the 'place' it is being put ("out").

Remove either of them and the sentence doesn't work.

So we've established that verbs determine whether an object is required. BUT some verbs have different requirements depending on context.

Consider the objects and modifiers in the 'to eat' clauses in the next two snippets:

If we remove the object "them" (the thing being eaten) from the first snippet, the sentence doesn't make sense.

But the second snippet doesn't need the object to make sense. What they are eating isn't important—the snippet is using the verb 'to eat' in a more general sense.

We could add something in that is being eaten:

Does that mean we should highlight "breakfast" as a modifier in this instance? Well... no.

This is where identifying objects can get tricky.

Without getting bogged down in really technical stuff, here's a few guidelines for quickly deciding whether something is an object or a modifier:

• Noun groups and adjective groups are never modifiers in standard English, even if they are not necessary for the sentence to be grammatically correct:
  • "We ate breakfast beside a small fire."
• Objects tend to come directly after the verb that they belong to:
  • "We ate breakfast beside a small fire."
    NOT
  • "We ate beside a small fire breakfast."
• Modifiers tend to be more flexible about where you put them:
  • "We ate breakfast beside a small fire."
    OR
  • "Beside a small fire, we ate breakfast."
    OR
  • "We, beside a small fire, ate breakfast."

These guidelines aren't perfect, so don't be surprised if you come across examples that don't strictly follow these rules.

And unless you're really interested in language structure, you don't need to be able to identify every single dubious object.

The important takeaway here is that objects are more restrictive than modifiers.

Whether you must, can, or can't have an object is determined by the verb and a dash of context, but modifiers can always be added or taken away.

That's all you really need to remember! 😊 

You have a try.

Write a couple of sentences and see if you can deliberately exclude or include objects, to make sure you understand the difference.

That's everything you need to know about clause objects, so let's write a checkpoint piece.

For this checkpoint, you need to write a few sentences that fulfil specific grammatical requirements:

1. A clause with no objects or modifiers.
2. A clause with no objects, but at least 1 modifier.
3. A clause with at least 1 object, and at least 1 modifier.
4. A clause with at least 3 modifiers (with or without objects).

Here is an inspiration image you can use to think of things to write about if you would like.

"Woodcut illustration of Circe and Odysseus with men transformed into animals" by Provenance Online Project is marked with CC0 1.0

This lesson has been a lot more abstract and technical than a normal Writelike lesson, so here's a peek at where we're heading in the next lesson—complex sentences.

We began this lesson with the idea that if we only used simple sentences and connectors in our writing, it would sound clunky and repetitive:

We then said we needed to understand clauses in order to fix this problem. So... what do subjects, verb groups, modifiers, and objects have to do with fixing clunky writing?

Well, let's see for ourselves. Here's a short snippet that only uses simple sentences:

That pronoun, 'her', at the end of the second sentence is redundant information—it doesn't tell us anything we don't already know. Wouldn't it be nice if we could just remove it?

It's easy enough to make sense of, but to a lot of people, this version of the snippet would sound incomplete, because we've removed an object. The verb 'to hear' needs 'a thing that is heard'.

So how could we make this sentence more efficient without sounding weird? How about this:

This is a simple-sounding sentence, but when you think about it we've done something clever: we've embedded Scarlett's clause into the object 'slot' of Bod's clause.

Now the verb 'to hear' has the object it needs, there's no repeated information, and as an added bonus our clauses feel more related because they are no longer two separate sentences. So efficient!

Here's a couple of things to notice about our new Scarlett clause:

• It still has all the same clause components as it did when it was a simple sentence:
  "Scarlett choked back a scream."
  "Scarlett choking back a scream"
• It's no longer in the past tense—in fact, technically the verb has no tense at all now!
• It no longer makes sense on its own—"Scarlett choking back a scream" doesn't work as a sentence (because it has no tense).

The exact mechanics of how this all works is the topic of the next lesson about Complex Sentences. But hopefully this little taster has shown you why understanding clauses is going to be useful!

This lesson may not have been immediately practical, but hopefully it's given you an interesting perspective on how language 'fits together'.

And we hope to see you soon in Part 2 – Complex Sentences.

You'll understand all of these by the end of the next lesson!