The Make-up of Clauses

Abstract

Traditional grammar is a word-based grammar, and so in this book hitherto I have used words as the basic linguistic building-blocks and seen how they can be combined to form larger units in language. These larger units consist of either phrases or groups. Groups are usually characterised by the role they play in the clause, and so it may be appropriate now to leave the word-based methodology to focus on the clause and its constituent parts. To do this it is easier to work from the clause and then to analyse its make-up. In other words we shall in this chapter not work up from small units to larger ones, but we shall work down from a larger linguistic unit, the clause, to those parts of which it is composed. This approach has also been employed as a subsidiary methodology in traditional grammar, which has investigated such features as subject and predicate, but it is even more common in modern grammars which have tended to start from the sentence in their grammatical methodology. Unfortunately it is even more difficult to provide a satisfactory definition of a clause than it is to provide one for a word. For the moment it may suffice to say that as a rule each clause contains one finite verb.