Explaining clause and conjunction - E3-01W

 

Intermediate English explanation - simple sentences expanded with clause, phrase and conjunction.

Expanding the basic English sentence

Understanding the structure of written English will not make you into William Shakespeare. But it will give you a strong technical basis for producing written English work of a good standard, and also help in your reading: i.e. in understanding what other people have written. For this reason, this writing course begins by analysing the basic units from which English is built up. We often think of the sentence as this basic unit:

 

The cat caught a mouse.                Albert ate three ice-creams.

 

A simple sentence of this kind is certainly a very basic form. But a typical English sentence would be more complicated than this:

 

 Just before dark, the cat caught a mouse at the bottom of the garden.

 

In this case, the two groups of words in bold are phrases – the first of time, the second of place.  Our other sentence could also very likely be longer:

 

Albert ate three ice creams while he was walking home from school.

 

In this case, we are adding two new elements to the sentence: a clause and a conjunction. A clause is a group of words with a subject, verb and possibly object, but it is not the only such group in the sentence.

 

Albert ate three ice creams.                        He was walking home from school.

 

Both of these could be sentences, but in the example above, they are put together and joined by the word while, which is a conjunction, so in this sentence they are clauses.

 

Albert ate three ice-creams on the way home from school.

 

Here, the meaning is the same, but ‘on the way home from school’ has no verb, so it is a phrase, not a clause. Note that many conjunctions can come before, rather than between, the two clauses:

 

While he was walking home from school, Albert ate three ice-creams.

 

Now try the exercise P3-01W.