Clause Types

Hello! This lesson is about clause types. Clauses are the building blocks of sentences, so if I want to write good sentences, I have to understand what clauses are. We could get a little bit more complicated, but for now, we’re going to keep things simple and, at the highest level, there are two types of clauses. There are independent clauses, and there are dependent clauses. Now, these two types of clauses have something in common: they both have a subject and a related verb. So, a subject is what the sentence is about; who is – usually, it’s who is doing the action – and a verb is what tells us what action or what state is being done, or is true. Independent clauses… so, both clauses have a subject and a verb; an independent clause then obviously has that but, it has one more thing: it expresses a complete thought. So, when there’s an independent clause, we feel satisfied. We feel that we’re not waiting for more information. Let’s look at some very simple examples. So, “The dog eats his food”. “Dog” is the subject and “eats” is the verb. I have a subject, I have a verb. Do I have a complete thought? Yes, I do. The dog eats his food. It’s not a very interesting sentence, but I understand it. I’m not waiting for any more information. Look at another example: “Jeff and Bob talked”. Okay, so I’ve got a subject here and I’ve got a subject here and I’ve got just one verb, so now I’m confused… Well, actually it might look like I have two subjects, but in this sentence, “Jeff and Bob” work together to be the subject, and I call this a “Compound Subject.” Compound because it’s made of two things that I can put together, okay? And I could, if you’re a little bit unsure, I could change this to “they” talked, okay? So, Jeff and Bob aha you’re not gonna fool me again! I understand that that’s one subject here. Oh my goodness! “talked and laughed” Well now I’ve got two verbs here again, but they kind of feel like they go together… and they do. This is what we call a compound verb. So again, an independent clause has a subject and a related verb and it expresses a complete thought. The subject can be a compound subject like we see here, and the verb can be a compound verb like what we see here. Let’s look at some more examples. Susan opened the fridge. Susan… opened… good to go. We love that movie. We… love… no problem. You lived in a large house. You – now, we’ve changed this a little bit because we put it in the past but that doesn’t really affect anything when we’re thinking about causes – so, You lived in a large house. So, no problem here; we’ve got a subject and a verb and a complete thought. So, let’s take a look and see if we can make our lives a little bit more complicated here. She was hungry. So far, so good; I’ve got a subject I’ve got a verb and it’s a complete thought. But watch what happens when I do this: Because she was hungry… so, I have added this word to the beginning and we’ll talk more about that word later. Because she was hungry. Now, is this a complete thought? Because she was hungry … Because she was hungry what? Finish your thought! So, I took something that was a complete thought, I added a word, and now it’s not a complete thought. So this is now an incomplete thought. Well if this is an incomplete thought, this can’t be an independent clause anymore. And you’re right, it’s not. This is a dependent clause. So a dependent clause is partly the same as independent – it has a subject and a related verb – but it expresses an incomplete thought, okay? It can’t stand on its own. It leaves you wanting more. Even though it is long… I don’t know; we have to wait for the rest of the sentence. When you were young… Hmm. Now, I’m going to answer a question I get a lot: So wait a minute – when you were young; let’s just look at this one. If I ask the question, When did you go to school, or sorry, when did I go to school? When you were young. Well, when you were young seems like a complete thought, doesn’t it? So… is that an independent clause then? No it’s still dependent because we need the question. Without the question, When did I or you go to school? it’s not complete. If I just say, When you were young” without any support from anything else, it doesn’t make sense, so this is still a dependent clause. Now what we’re going to do is talk about what we have added here. We’ve added because, we’ve added even though, we’ve added when. Those are all examples of a subordinating conjunction. Now in other videos, I talk about other types of conjunctions, but here we are talking about… we’re only going to talk about subordinating conjunctions. And if you have seen this prefix before, sub, so we could talk about submarines or we can talk about subway. “Sub” means less or under, okay? So a subordinating conjunction, what it does is, as as we see in these three examples, it takes an independent clause and changes it to a dependent clause. Let’s look at some examples of subordinating conjunctions. There are a lot – this is only a very short list – and before you write these down and start using them just randomly, please listen carefully to what I’m going to say. Giving vocabulary lists always makes me nervous because a certain percentage of students will always say, “Well it’s on the list, so I can use it.” Well, yeah, you can use it, but you have to know when and how to use it. So, if all these words meant exactly the same thing and all fit in exactly the same place, we wouldn’t need so many. So before you start using these, listen for a while to hear how they are used, or look them up to make sure that you’re using them correctly, okay? I’m not going to go through this list you can read it. You’ve probably been reading it while I’ve been talking and not listening to me warning you about how to use the vocabulary list. It’s your own fault, buddy! I put this list of subordinating conjunctions here because I want you to learn them, and know them, and understand them, and use them, but please make sure you’re using them correctly. Okay, now let’s go back to our dependent clauses. Now if we were writing sentences and we hand this in – handed this in – our teacher would not be very happy, so let’s see what we can do to fix these. Because she was hungry, Susan opened the fridge. I have my dependent clause here but I have now added an independent clause, so now I’m okay. This is now – all together – it is a complete thought so now this is a proper sentence. Even though it is long, we love that movie. Same idea: I started with my dependent clause and then after that I added my independent clause. When you were young… alright so, dependent clause whew! dependent clause still here, and you lived in a large house: independent cause. So by… if I just had the dependent clause by itself that’s not good; that’s not a complete thought. An independent clause can either be by itself, or, if it, if it wants, it can also have a dependent clause join it, and we’ll talk more about how to join clauses in my next video but the point here is this: Dependent clauses are not bad clauses; they just need some help from an independent clause so if you write a dependent clause, that doesn’t mean that you’re a bad writer; it just means that you need to make sure that there is also an independent clause that goes with it. Independent clauses can stand on their own; they do not need help from any other clauses. Here’s an important point that I haven’t talked about, but I will because, again, a lot of students seem to get confused with this. The length of a clause does not tell you what type of clause it is. So, oh, this is a big long strong independent clause. No – being long does not make it strong. There is no – you can’t count – I’ve had students count words, actually. You can’t count. You have to understand what you’re reading. So, the length really is completely unhelpful when we are deciding if a clause is dependent or independent. Okay, so where do you go from here? Next, watch my joining clauses video and then after that, watch my sentence types videos – video – where we’re going to put it all together. Alright? That’s all for today. Thank you! Videolytics