Understanding clauses

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.