Multi-Clause Sentences(1) a. She said something. (One clause)
b. She said [that I don’t know anything]. (Two clauses)
c. She said [that I don’t know [what I want]]. (Three clauses)
d. She said [that I don’t know [what I want [Bill to do]]. (Four
clauses)
e. She said [that I don’t know [what I want [Bill to do]]...
(Indefinite number of clauses)We can represent this schematically as:
(2) S1... S2...
... S3...
... S4...
Recursion is one of the most important characteristics of natural language
because it is the basis of language’s open-endedness, its creativity.
Because one clause can be included (embedded) in another, a given
sentence may have any number of clauses. The main clause is the one that
is not embedded in any other clause. In all the sentences of (1), She said X
is the main clause. All other clauses are subordinate. However, it should be
clear from (2) that not all subordinate clauses are directly subordinate to
the main clause—they may be subordinate to other subordinate clauses. In
(2), S1 is the main clause and all the others are subordinate to it. However,
only S2 is directly subordinate to S1; S3 is directly subordinate to S2, and
S4 is directly subordinate to S3.
complex sentences
In this section we will illustrate the range of functions of subordinate clauses
using only finite clauses, that is, clauses that are marked as either past or
present tense or that contain a modal.
Clauses that function in the nominal range
The subordinate clause in a complex sentence may function as its subject,
direct object, indirect object, object of a preposition, or as a complement.