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When the "restrictive" relative clause is removed from either of the above sentences, the antecedent ("the father" and "the clergyman") is not placed in question. In the first example, for instance, there is no suggestion that the narrator has two fathers because the relative clause does not express a distinguishing property of the subject ...
The English relative words are words in English used to mark a clause, noun phrase or preposition phrase as relative. The central relative words in English include who, whom, whose, which, why, and while, as shown in the following examples, each of which has the relative clause in bold: We should celebrate the things which we hold dear.
A clause is often said to be the smallest grammatical unit that can express a complete proposition. [1] But this semantic idea of a clause leaves out much of English clause syntax. For example, clauses can be questions, [2]: 161 but questions are not propositions. [3] A syntactic description of an English clause is that it is a subject and a ...
For example, in the English sentence "I like what I see", the clause what I see is a free relative clause, because it has no antecedent, but itself serves as the object of the verb like in the main clause. Alternatively, one could argue that the free relative clause has a zero as its antecedent.
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.
For example, after is a preposition in "he left after the fight" but a conjunction in "he left after they fought". In general, a conjunction is an invariant (non-inflecting) grammatical particle that stands between conjuncts. A conjunction may be placed at the beginning of a sentence, [1] but some superstition about the practice persists. [2]
A major sentence is a regular sentence; it has a subject and a predicate, e.g. "I have a ball." In this sentence, one can change the persons, e.g. "We have a ball." However, a minor sentence is an irregular type of sentence that does not contain a main clause, e.g. "Mary!", "Precisely so.", "Next Tuesday evening after it gets dark."
A cleft sentence is a complex sentence (one having a main clause and a dependent clause) that has a meaning that could be expressed by a simple sentence. Clefts typically put a particular constituent into focus. In spoken language, this focusing is often accompanied by a special intonation. In English, a cleft sentence can be constructed as ...