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For example: What he did was clearly impossible. Here "What he did" has the same sense as "the things that he did", or "the thing that he did". Thus the noun phrase the thing and the relative pronoun that are 'fused' into what; and the resulting relative construction "What he did" functions as the subject of the verb was.
Fused relatives are easily confused with open interrogatives, and even a careful analysis may conclude that, if taken out of context, a particular sentence can have either of two interpretations. An example in The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language illustrating this ambiguity is What she wrote is completely unclear.
A sentence consisting of at least one dependent clause and at least two independent clauses may be called a complex-compound sentence or compound-complex sentence. Sentence 1 is an example of a simple sentence. Sentence 2 is compound because "so" is considered a coordinating conjunction in English, and sentence 3 is complex.
For example, in the English sentence "The person whom I saw yesterday went home", the relative clause "whom I saw yesterday" modifies the head noun person, and the relative pronoun whom refers back to the referent of that noun. The sentence is equivalent to the following two sentences: "I saw a person yesterday. The person went home".
Comma splices are similar to run-on sentences, which join two independent clauses without any punctuation or a coordinating conjunction such as and, but, for, etc. Sometimes the two types of sentences are treated differently based on the presence or absence of a comma, but most writers consider the comma splice a special type of run-on sentence ...
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 verb . [ 4 ] But this too fails, as a clause need not have a subject, as with the imperative, [ 2 ] : 170 and, in many theories, an English clause may be verbless.
In these examples, the first sentence contains a longer noun phrase ('This pair of suede pants') in comparison to the second sentence, which contains a very short noun phrase ('The weight'). Thus, it is observed that the sentence containing the longer noun phrase also contains the relativizer 'that', whereas the sentence with the shorter noun ...
The following sentences illustrate some uses of gerund clauses, showing how such a clause serves as a noun within the larger sentence. In some cases, the clause consists of just the gerund (although in many such cases the word could equally be analyzed as a pure verbal noun). Swimming is fun. (gerund as subject of the sentence) I like swimming.