The English Language english language

10 Basic Clause Patterns

key concepts

Clause elements: subjects, predicates

Subjects

Semantic roles

Auxiliary verbs

Tense and aspect

Basic clause patterns

Appendix: time and tense

introduction

Until now, we have examined the grammar of English in bits and piec-
es—phonemes, morphemes, words, and phrases. In this chapter, we put
these pieces together into the basic grammatical structure of language—the
clause. Clauses are basic for several reasons. First, you need only one of
them to make a sentence, though, of course, sentences may consist of an
indefinite number of clauses. Second, in actual communication, shorter ut-
terances are usually reconstructed and understood by reference to clauses.
For instance, over here might be understood as I’m over here or Shine the light
over here. The grammatical importance of clauses probably reflects the fact
that the clause most directly represents the most fundamental structure of
meaning—the proposition (a description of a state of affairs whose truth
may be asserted, questioned, or otherwise manipulated). It doesn’t make
much sense to say that a clause represents a complete thought, as school
grammars often do, unless we know what a complete thought is. A proposi-
tion is the best model of a complete thought (whatever it is) that we have.
For the present, we will proceed on the assumption that the sense of clause-
hood is intuitive, based on our competence as native speakers and perhaps
on our status as human makers of meaning, although students may need
practice in identifying clauses.
Of the many reasons why we should know about clauses, we’ll briefly
discuss just four. First, clauses are an important punctuation unit. When a
clause constitutes a whole sentence, in written English it must begin with a
capital letter and end in a period or its equivalent. When multiple clauses
combine to constitute a sentence, the individual clauses may require spe-
cial punctuation, such as separation by commas. Certainly, the single-clause
sentence is the best unit to begin teaching punctuation with.
Second, and relatedly, writing teachers are concerned about sentence
fragments, that is, non-sentential units improperly punctuated as sentential