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In the following example sentences, independent clauses are underlined, and conjunctions are in bold. Single independent clauses: I have enough money to buy an ice cream cone. My favourite flavour is chocolate. Let's go to the shop. Multiple independent clauses: I have enough money to buy an ice cream cone; my favourite flavour is chocolate.
In example 3, I enjoyed the apple pie is an independent clause, and that you bought for me is a dependent clause; the sentence is thus complex. In sentence 4, The dog lived in the garden and the cat lived inside the house are both independent clauses; who was smarter is a dependent clause.
The earliest use of the word clause in Middle English is non-technical and similar to the current everyday meaning of phrase: "A sentence or clause, a brief statement, a short passage, a short text or quotation; in a ~, briefly, in short; (b) a written message or letter; a story; a long passage in an author's source."
In the clause the dog bit the man, for example, the dog belongs to the syntactic category of noun phrase and performs the syntactic function of subject. The distinction between category and function is at the heart of a terminological issue surrounding the word determiner : various grammars have used the word to describe a category, a function ...
Some examples of noun phrases are underlined in the sentences below. The head noun appears in bold. This election-year's politics are annoying for many people. Almost every sentence contains at least one noun phrase. Those five beautiful shiny Arkansas Black apples is a noun phrase of which apples is the head.
A complex sentence is one that has a main clause which could stand alone and a dependent clause which cannot by itself be a sentence. Using a complex sentence is a way to refer to the content of the paragraph above (dependent clause) and then bring in the content of the new paragraph (the independent clause). Here is a typical example:
Subordinate clauses preceding the main clause are said to be in the first field (Vorfeld), clauses following the main clause in the final field (Nachfeld). The central field (Mittelfeld) contains most or all of a clause, and is bounded by left bracket (Linke Satzklammer) and right bracket (Rechte Satzklammer) positions.
The following examples of sentence pairs illustrate wh-movement in main clauses in English: each (a) example has the canonical word order of a declarative sentence in English, while each (b) sentence has undergone wh-movement, whereby the wh-word has been fronted in order to form a direct question.