What is a clause?

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

I’d shot the other one just below the chest, and he was dead too.

Burning for Revenge(1993)

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

I’d shot the other one just below the chest, and he was dead too.

Burning for Revenge(1993)

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.

I’d shot the other one just below the chest, and he was dead too.

Burning for Revenge(1993)

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'.

I’d shot the other one just below the chest, and he was dead too.

Burning for Revenge(1993)

Yes, on the previous page we were talking about "connecting simple sentences together using connectors", and this snippet is a perfect example of that:

I'd shot the other one just below the chest.
He was dead too.

...are both simple sentences.

BUT we need to upgrade our language.

As we start studying more complex sentence structures, we need a way to distinguish between:

the whole sentence
the "simple sentence" parts of the whole sentence, and
other elements that aren't simple sentences but have the same complexity of meaning.

So, from now on we're only going to use the word 'sentence' to describe whole sentences, and we're going to refine our definition of 'simple sentence' to a sentence that only contains one 'clause'.

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

I’d shot the other one just below the chest, and he was dead too.

Burning for Revenge(1993)

I’d shot the other one just below the chest, and he was dead too.

Burning for Revenge(1993)

I’d shot the other one just below the chest, and he was dead too.

Burning for Revenge(1993)

I’d shot the other one just below the chest, and he was dead too.

Burning for Revenge(1993)

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.

Understanding clauses