Throughout this book the sentences to which particular attention has been given have been simple sentences; i.e. there has been just one configuration of subject, verb, complements and adjuncts. This is the kind of expression to which the term clause can usefully be applied. A simple sentence consists of just one clause. But clauses can be combined in very many ways to make complex sentences. The study of complex sentences would take us beyond the intended scope of this book, but it is desirable that we should conclude with a glance at some of the areas not covered. In general, there are two ways in which simple sentences (clauses) can be combined; they can be strung out one after the other, each one of them being treated as equal to its partners. This is the co-ordinate kind of connection. Opposed to this is the kind where one sentence is involved within the structure of another, so that it becomes subordinated to it. The nature of these two kinds of combination can perhaps best be put across by means of illustration. The first example below has clauses of an equal status, and therefore coordinated with each other. The second example has a clause which is subordinated to a higher clause, so that in a sense one clause has another clause nested inside it. It is like the difference between a string of beads on a thread and a nest of Russian dolls. 1 Then he touched a spring in the wall and slowly the panelling slid open, and behind it were the steel safes…. He twisted a key; unlocked one; then another. Each was lined with a pad of deep crimson velvet; in each lay jewels…. (Virginia Woolf, The Duchess and the Jeweller) 2 Personal pride and piety demand that ancestors should not be exposed to public scorn. In the first example, the connection between the beads on the string is in some cases made explicit by words such as then, and and. In other cases the connection is made by a mere juxta-position of one clause after another. Since this is a written text, we can tell where the writer intended one sentence to come to an end and the next to begin, because she has used full stops rather than semi-colons for the end of the sentences. If it had been a spoken text, it would not have been possible to place a boundary at the end of a sentence with any confidence. This shows that the grammatical construct called a sentence is indeterminate in its upper limits. There is no saying how many clauses is the maximum number possible nor how inexplicit the connection between one clause and another may be without causing the sentence to come to an end. A minor word-class that is of some importance in this connection is the co-ordinating conjunction. These are, principally, the words and, or, but, for, so, yet. They are words that always come at the beginning of the co-ordinate clause which they introduce. We should notice that the word then in the above passage does not count as a conjunction, since it does not have to be initial; we could have had He then touched…. A glance at the sentence in the second example reveals that part of it could be extracted and, with only a minor adjustment of form, serve as
an independent sentence. The structure is set out in Figure 22. The nested clause is that ancestors should not be exposed to public scorn. If we omit the word that, this part stands out as a simple subject + verb + complement construction. On the other hand, the remainder of the sentence Personal pride and piety demand…is also a subject+verb construction. The function of the subordinate clause is to act as the necessary complement to the verb. In order to illustrate further the great range of ways in which a clause may be subordinate, let us take the clause The man hired a taxi, which is obviously a legitimate sentence, and see how it can be worked into the fabric of other constructions. In some cases the form of the clause is adjusted to make it fit its new context, but it is still recognizable as being in essence the same clause. The man who hired a taxi is my brother The fact that the man hired a taxi astonished us The man having hired a taxi, he was short of money We told you that the man hired a taxi If the man hired a taxi, he must have done the journey quickly The journey was short enough for the man to hire a taxi It is supposed that the man hired a taxi It was foolish of the man to hire a taxi One thing we may note about these subordinate clauses is that they have no fully specified mood. Anybody who is presented with a subordinate clause can only wait until it gets connected with a clause that is not subordinate before he can assess how the speaker expects him to take it. Quite often a subordinate clause is integrated into the structure of its context in such a way that it is functioning like a subject, a complement, an adjunct or a post-modifier to a head. For example, in The man who hired a taxi, who hired a taxi has the function of modifying the head man (this is an instance of a relative clause, see p. 20); it is a post-modifier, rather like with a beard in The man with a beard. In the sentence That the man hired a taxi was not very surprising, the subordinate clause that the man hired a taxi is the subject of the whole sentence. Again, I suppose that the man hired a taxi has the clause that the man hired a taxi as the complement of the verb suppose. In The man having hired a taxi, he was short of money the subordinate clause functions like an adjunct to he was short of money, rather like for this reason in For this reason, he was short of money. In the structure of subordinate clauses there is very frequently, though not always, an introductory element which has the function of signalling, ‘This clause is subordinate.’ There is a minor class of words which fulfils this function, the subordinating conjunction. The examples given above include that, and if; other examples are when, unless, since, and although. So we have now noticed two kinds of conjunction. In general conjunctions have the job of signalling a connection between clauses within a sentence. Co-ordinating conjunctions signal a co-ordinate connection and subordinating conjunctions signal that one clause is subordinate to the other. The details of this area of English grammar are not covered in this book. The purpose of this section is merely to introduce the idea of clauses which are functionally co-ordinated with or subordinated to their context. The reader should turn to more comprehensive and
advanced works for a fuller treatment.