Delahunty and Garvey
units. As we noted earlier, fragments are typically internally grammatical,
that is, they are well-formed phrases or clauses. Students must learn the
differences between clauses and their constituent units and between clauses
and sentences in order to learn to punctuate appropriately.
Third, a developed writing style requires control of a range of sentence
types, from sentences with just a single clause through sentences with an
indefinite number of clauses. A traditional technique for helping student
writers expand their repertoires is sentence combining, or more accurately,
clause combining. Teachers wishing to create clause combining exercises
for their students must know about clauses, especially if they want to tai-
lor the exercises to their students’ actual needs.
Fourth, an important aspect of standard English grammar is subject-
verb agreement. That is, the subject and verb of a clause must grammati-
cally agree with each other in person and number. In order to be able to
teach subject-verb agreement, teachers must know about subjects, verbs,
and clauses. And, while the general agreement principle is quite simple, it is
quite intricate in its details (which we deal with in our chapter on Usage in
Book II).
In this chapter we first examine the internal organization of clauses. Next
we discuss the subject function, illustrating the use of formal characteristics
to identify it. We then discuss the semantic roles subjects and other phrases
may play in clauses. The main part of the chapter provides details on seven
major clause patterns in the language.
elements of the clause
The basic functional analysis of a clause is very simple:
(1) A clause is a grammatical unit that contains a subject and a predi-
cate.That’s all. Only a subject and a predicate are needed. No less than a subject
and a predicate will do. (Recall our discussion of necessary and sufficient
conditions!) According to this definition all of the expressions in (2) are
clauses. (Subjects are italicized; predicates are bolded.)
(2) a. Birds twittered.
b. All the birds of the neighborhood congregated in the vener-
able elms in the park.
c. that no one approves of the decision
d. which I lost