Nominal Relative Clauses

NOMINAL RELATIVE CLAUSES (or independent relatives) function in some respects like noun phrases:

[What I like best] is football
(cf. the sport I like best...)

The prize will go to [whoever submits the best design]
(cf. the person who submits...)

My son is teaching me [how to use email]
(cf. the way to use email)

This is [where Shakespeare was born]
(cf. the place where...)

The similarity with NPs can be further seen in the fact that certain nominal relatives exhibit number contrast:

Singular: [What we need] is a plan
Plural: [What we need] are new ideas

Notice the agreement here with is (singular) and are (plural).

Small Clauses

Finally, we will mention briefly an unusual type of clause, the verbless or SMALL CLAUSE. While clauses usually contain a verb, which is finite or nonfinite, small clauses lack an overt verb:

Susan found [the job very difficult]

We analyse this as a unit because clearly its parts cannot be separated. What Susan found was not the job, but the job very difficult. And we analyse this unit specifically as a clause because we can posit an implicit verb, namely, a form of the verb be:

Susan found [the job (to be) very difficult]

Here are some more examples of small clauses:

Susan considers [David an idiot]
The jury found [the defendant guilty]
[Lunch over], the guests departed quickly

All of the clause types discussed here are distinguished by formal characteristics. On the next page, we will distinguish some more types, this time on the basis of their meaning.

11.4 Subordinate Clauses: Semantic Types

Here we will look at subordinate clauses from the point of view of their meaning. The main semantic types are exemplified in the following table:

The table does not cover all the possible types, but it does illustrate many of the various meanings which can be expressed by subordinate clauses.

Notice that the same word can introduce different semantic types. For instance, the word while can introduce a temporal clause:

I read the newspaper [while I was waiting]

or a concessive clause:

[While I don't agree with her], I can understand her viewpoint.

Similarly, the word since can express time:

I've known him [since he was a child]

as well as reason:

I borrowed your lawn mower, [since you weren't using it]

In the following exercise, be aware of words like these, which can introduce more than one type of subordinate clause.

Sentences

Most people recognise a sentence as a unit which begins with a capital letter and ends with a full stop (period), a question mark, or an exclamation mark. Of course, this applies only to written sentences. Sentences have also been defined notionally as units which express a "complete thought", though it is not at all clear what a "complete thought" is.

It is more useful to define a sentence syntactically, as a unit which consists of one or more clauses. According to this definition, the following examples are all sentences:

[1] Paul likes football

[2] You can borrow my pen if you need one

[3] Paul likes football and David likes chess

Sentence [1] is a SIMPLE SENTENCE -- it contains only one clause.

Sentence [2] consists of a matrix clause You can borrow my pen if you need one, and a subordinate clause if you need one. This is called a COMPLEX SENTENCE. A complex sentence is defined as a sentence which contains at least one subordinate clause.

Finally, sentence [3] consists of two clauses which are coordinated with each other. This is a COMPOUND sentence.

By using subordination and coordination, sentences can potentially be infinitely long, but in all cases we can analyse them as one or more clauses.

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 1066