This week: What’s that hiding between words and sentences? It’s the clause!!! Also, footnotes and a quote that’s a little too on-point to get us out. Let’s get to it.
Word, phrase, what's next? How about a clause? If you're like me, you tend to think of clauses in one of two contexts: Ms. Smith's seventh-grade English composition class and Tim Allen's The Santa Clause. Or, to put that less egocentrically, grammar and legal. Google's built-in dictionary defines clause as:
1. a unit of grammatical organization next below the sentence in rank and in traditional grammar said to consist of a subject and predicate.
2. a particular and separate article, stipulation, or proviso in a treaty, bill, or contract.
My seventh-grade English class drove me nuts. Ms. Smith was a very nice lady who had a terrible job - make 12-year-olds write their native language properly. Which meant drilling all the bizarre and byzantine rules of grammar into our stubborn little heads. The optimum method for doing so, circa 1989, was by diagramming sentences over and over again. To this day, my image of Hell is sitting at a too-small desk diagramming banal, joyless sentences in an infinite loop of misery. However, loathe though I am to admit it, it made me a better writer. (1) And so, enter the dreaded clause.
Situated between a word and a sentence, the grammatical clause helps define the related parts of a sentence. Dependent clauses add detail and expression, while independent clauses add context and breadth to the ideas contained in a single sentence. This might sound more than a little like a phrase, as discussed in the last two issues. However, from a grammatical point of view, there are some key differences between phrases and clauses.
When discussing phrases over the last two issues, I made the point that a phrase is a group of words with a distinct meaning. What was less clear was that a phrase is not really a grammatical term. It’s too loose to be useful except as a descriptor for a collection of words; often a phrase doesn't have a clear subject-verb component because it's acting like a single word or idea. A clause, tautological though it may seem, is strictly defined because it is a term for defining grammar. As such, a dependent clause is different from a phrase in that it does not contain a complete thought. Instead, it is an addendum to an independent clause, a collection of words that contain the requisite grammatical materials to form a complete sentence. To put it another way, an independent clause is a sentence in and of itself, but it can be combined with dependent clauses to build more detailed and more expressive complex sentences.
But what does it really matter? We have words and sentences, do we really need something in between? One of the many frustrating joys of English is that the sentence really is the basic building block of any longer-form of communication, be that a conversation or an essay. However, the sentence, in English, can be as short as two words. Hell, in a conversation between two people who understand the context, a sentence can be just one word. But. The clause lets us build complex sentences that contain details and context that would otherwise be lost, ignored, or left to be filled in via other sentences.
For example, let's look at something called an appositive, which is basically just background information inserted into the middle of a thought. Instead of "My friend called me," you might say, "My friend Jenny called me." By inserting the name of your friend, you've provided background information that may or may not be needed later.
Now, from a strict grammatical perspective, it should be noted that an appositive and a dependent clause are not exactly the same thing, or at least, not always. An appositive is a noun or noun phrase (e.g. Jenny), while a dependent noun clause ought to have both a noun and a verb in it. But what's important here is that they can serve the same purpose: providing information and details to make the ideas contained in a single sentence more readily understood.
But, okay, this is not really a grammar blog, no matter how much I blather on about it. What this is is a linguistics blog (2). So, what does a clause, independent or dependent, matter to linguists? A simple answer is that we care because it is a pattern, and patterns, observed, identified, and classified, allow us to better understand how humans create language as well as how languages work across time, geography, and culture. So, to use our example from the preceding paragraphs, since we know that dependent noun clauses often give extra information within a sentence's structure (a single, coherent idea) we can then look for how other languages do the same thing. We can also examine whether the kinds of information that get added to sentences has changed over time.
And that’s where the legal context comes in. But that will have to wait until next week.
Footnotes
Prescriptivism vs. Descriptivism again: I think learning grammar is important for students, especially as a way of establishing the baseline from which you can learn how to communicate effectively in your writing and speaking. This is one of those cases where it really helps to know the rules before you go about breaking them. The trouble I had was that I was reading all these really interesting examples of the rules being broken and I wanted to try that without really understanding how and why these authors made it work. Even now, I know what they're doing, but I can't always tell you why it works.
For linguists, grammar can be a really tricky beast to define. It’s kind of like asking a mathematician what a number is - they know the subject so well that asking them to narrow all that knowledge down to a single, easily-digestible definition is maddeningly difficult. That said, this article from Nautilus is an excellent glimpse into the mind of a professional linguist tackling a grammatical subject.
Stay curious,
J