If you have become comfortable with recognizing S/V/C patterns, you should have few, if any problems with clauses; if you have not . . . . Clauses are the core, or we might even say the engine, of English sentence structure. We most often communicate with each other by naming something (a grammatical "subject") and predicating something about that subject with a finite verb. This gives us a sentence, and sentence after sentence, we communicate. When we were very young, we used this pattern of main S/V/C after main S/V/C almost exclusively: We went to the park, and we played on the swings, and we had ice cream, and we saw a man. The man had a dog, and we played with the dog.As we grew older, we learned how to embed one S/V/C pattern into another, thereby creating "[subordinate" clauses], in order to add focus to our communications: [When we went to the park], we played on the swings and we had ice cream. We saw a man [who had aThere are, therefore, two primary types of clauses -- subordinate and main. Subordinate clauses "always" function as nouns, adjectives or adverbs in relation to another word in a main clause. Main clauses have no such functions. Instead, main clauses provide the core S/V/C patterns that give us sentences. [See the psycholinguistic model of how the brain processes language.] The "Definitions/Guides"
may be all that you need to master clauses. However, you may want to look
at an example of how to analyze clauses, and/or
at a more detailed explanation and some simple
examples. Remember that your brain has already unconsciously mastered
clauses -- all you are trying to do is to make that unconscious knowledge
conscious. Expect to make some mistakes in your first few exercises, keep
calm, and learn from your mistakes.
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