Shana's Guide to the Sentence (Intermediate Lesson)

This guide is a direct continuation from my basic introduction to the sentence. I will be touching on only a few things here such as clauses, conjunctions, and the complex sentence.

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To understand what a complex sentence is, we need to delve even deeper into the simple sentence. We've established that a sentence needs both a subject and a verb. However, it does need one other thing. We call this a clause.

Clause: A clause is an idea that must consist of a subject and a predicate verb. This must be coherent. The noun must be doing the verb actively.

Predicate Verb: A predicate consists of a verb or verb phrase and its complements, if any. (Definition taken from Scientific Psychic)

It is important to note that although a complete sentence must contain at least one clause in it, a clause does not make a complete sentence. (It can, but we'll address that later as well)

So let's look at some examples of clauses, shall we? First off, we will look at Dependent Clauses.

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Dependent Clauses: Dependent clauses are clauses that do not form a complete sentence. They rely on another clause to portray a complete idea, and hence, a complete sentence. Let's look at some examples. I will be highlighting the subject in red, and the predicate verb in orange.

Since the woman walked faster...

With his fists pumping methodically like pistons...

Because of the strike missing...

As you can see, none of these clauses could stand as a sentence on its own. The verb used is not finite. It's not the main idea we are trying to portray, so it just seemingly trails off. This falls into the next lesson on complex sentences. Remember when I said that clauses could make a complete sentence? We'll look at that next. Clauses that can stand on their own are called independent clauses.

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Independent Clauses: As rightly named, an independent clause is the opposite of a dependent clause. Just as before, it must contain a subject and a predicate verb. However, unlike the previous, the verb must be finite and actually hold the main idea as to form a complete sentence. Independent Clauses can also be called simple sentences. Using the same color code as before, let's look at some examples of independent clauses.

He simply wants to be safe.

They're goingon a picnic.

Shana aimed a powerful kick at the man's gut.

Now that we know the two major types of clauses, we can move on to the advanced guide and discuss two more types of sentences: the compound and complex sentence.

Intermediate guide finished.