Delahunty and Garvey
pound sentences. They may consist of coordinated clauses (bolded) that are
subordinate to another clause, e.g., Edgeworth believed that novels should
have redeeming social value and that her writing might help improve
social conditions; or one or more of the coordinate clauses may include
one or more subordinate clauses (bolded), e.g., Compound-complex sentences
consist of at least two coordinate clauses and at least one of those must contain a
clause which is subordinate to it.
To orient ourselves, let’s recall that in our chapter on Major Parts of
Speech we distinguished between intransitive verbs (i.e., those that are in-
compatible with a direct object, such as cought, laugh, lie), transitive verbs
(i.e., those that require a direct object, such as bite, consume, transmit), bi-
transitive verbs (i.e., those that require a direct and an indirect object, such
as give, offer, send,), linking verbs (i.e., those that “link” a subject with a sub-
ject complement, such as be, become, seem), and object complement verbs
(i.e., those that require both a direct object and a complement associated
with that object, such as consider, elect, name). We revisited this subcatego-
rization of verbs in our chapter on Phrases, where we dealt with the distinct
VPs associated with each type. In our chapter on Basic Clause Patterns we
added NP subjects to those VPs to create clauses built around each of these
verb types. We illustrated objects with NPs, and complements with NPs
and APs. In this chapter we substitute clauses for the NPs that functioned in
the chapter on Basic Clause Patterns as subjects, direct objects, indirect ob-
jects, and subject and object complements. We will begin with subordinate
finite clauses (clauses that are marked for either present or past tense) and
move on to non-finite clauses (those that are not marked for present or past
tense). Then we will continue the discussion we began in Phrases and Mi-
nor Parts of Speech on modifying clauses, including relative clauses (which
are modifiers in NPs), and adverbial clauses (which modify Vs, VPs, and
clauses). We wrap up this chapter with a brief discussion of a few sentence
types that are designed to allow for alternative ways of presenting informa-
tion in sentences.
We begin with a brief overview of how one clause is included within
another, technically known as recursion
recursion.
The possibility of creating multi-clause sentences depends on a characteristic
of language called recursion. Recursion is the possibility of allowing a gram-
matical category to recur inside another instance of the same category, for
example, an NP within an NP, or an S within an S, and so on.