Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
In the second example, the non-restrictive relative clause who have never known your family describes you in the independent clause, You see them standing around you. A noun clause is a dependent clause that functions like a noun. A noun clause may function as the subject of a clause, a predicate nominative, an object or an appositive.
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.
A clause typically contains a subject (a noun phrase) and a predicate (a verb phrase in the terminology used above; that is, a verb together with its objects and complements). A dependent clause also normally contains a subordinating conjunction (or in the case of relative clauses, a relative pronoun, or phrase containing one).
The stereotypical subject immediately precedes the finite verb in declarative sentences and represents an agent or a theme. The subject is often a multi-word constituent and should be distinguished from parts of speech, which, roughly, classify words within constituents. In the example sentences below, the subjects are indicated in boldface.
Although the subject is usually a noun phrase, other kinds of phrases (such as gerund phrases) work as well, and some languages allow subjects to be omitted. In the examples below, the subject of the outmost clause simplex is in italics and the subject of boiling is in square brackets. There is clause embedding in the second and third examples.
A noun such as Fred or a noun phrase such as the book cannot qualify as subject and direct object, respectively, unless they appear in an environment, e.g. a clause, where they are related to each other and/or to an action or state. In this regard, the main verb in a clause is responsible for assigning grammatical relations to the clause ...
For example, in the person who arrived, who functions as the subject of the relative clause. Different words have different functions depending on their lexical category and form. For example, while a plain [ d ] pronoun like who may typically function as a subject or object, its genitive form functions only as a determiner (e.g., the person ...
The phrase structure relation derives from an initial binary division, whereby the clause is split into a subject noun phrase (NP) and a predicate verb phrase (VP). This division is certainly present in the basic analysis of the clause that we find in the works of, for instance, Leonard Bloomfield and Noam Chomsky. Tesnière, however, argued ...