A Student's Introduction to English Grammar

Clause structure, complements

and adjuncts

I Introduction 63

2 The subject^67

3 The object 70

4 Predicative complements 73

5 Five canonical clause structures 77

6 Adjuncts 78

In this chapter we investigate the structure of canonical clauses, the syntactically

most elementary type of clause. Various kinds of non-canonical clause will be intro­

duced from time to time, but solely for the purpose of illuminating the structure of

canonical clauses. Very often the best evidence for analysing one construction is

provided by a comparison between it and a different but related construction.

Canonical clauses have the potential to stand alone as sentences, and we therefore

follow the standard convention of citing examples with the punctuation of sen­

tences, i.e. with an initial capital letter and final full stop.

1 Introduction

Every canonical clause has a head element with the form of a verb
phrase (VP). Every VP in turn has as its head a verb (V). Thus a canonical clause
always contains a V which is the head of a VP which is the head of the clause. The
verb is the most important element in determining what the rest of the clause is like.
From now on we'll refer to the verb as the head word of the clause.

Predicates and predicators

The term 'head' was not introduced into grammatical theory until the latter half of

the twentieth century, and in talking about clause structure we will generally use the

traditional, long-established terminology where the two major elements in the

clause are called subject and predicate. In Cats l ike water, the NP cats is subject

and the VP like water is predicate. The idea is that in elementary examples like this

the predicate represents what is 'predicated of' - i.e. said about - the referent of the

subject. 'Predicate', therefore, is a more specific term than 'head' when the con­

struction concerned is a clause. Similarly, predicator is used for the head of the VP,

i.e. for the verb like in this example.

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