Clause analysis

THE STAR'S MIND OUR ENGLISH of Thursday September 7, 2006
There’s cause for knowing clauses
By RALPH BERRY

MOST education is wasted. What stays is what matters. In maths, my brief knowledge of logarithms, equations, and trigonometry has passed away – I do not spend my life measuring the height of trees from their hypotenuse – but the multiplication tables have seen me through life. I can never be fooled by clever supermarket prices.
In English, the only valuable thing I learned was analysis into clauses. The rest was all but useless.
Words change their meaning, all the time. New ones come in. Grammar changes. Punctuation is now quite different from what it used to be. But clauses are the rock foundation of writing.
A knowledge of clauses would save writers from a problem that often baffles them, the who/whom issue. Here is a staff writer on The Times giving us the plot of Jane Austen’s Persuasion: “Captain Wentworth is particularly attracted to Louisa, whom he believes has the strong personality he’s looking for.”
The writer thinks that whom is the object of he believes, because the three words are run together. But in that case, what is the subject of has the strong personality? It cannot be whom. Back to the problem area: all is clear if you bracket off (he believes), as a separate clause.
The entire sentence contains four clauses:
1) Captain Wentworth is particularly attracted to Louisa (main clause)
2) who has the strong personality (subordinate adjectival clause)
3) he believes (parenthesis: grammatically separate, but qualifying the subordinate clause)
4) [that] he’s looking for (subordinate adjectival clause)
Dull stuff, I know, and I apologise. But all analysis is artificial. And without it, there’s no way of knowing that whom here is wrong.
Incidentally, the point, for me, is not that the journalist blundered – that is an old story – but that the sub-editor let it go. Who guards the guardians?
No one, and more proof comes from the Times, admittedly in the Sports section, which I always regard as Dunce’s Corner. “England are stuck with a head coach whom few now believe is capable of turning the national team into world champions.” Cut out is, and all is well – “? whom few now believe capable ?” Whom then becomes genuinely the object of believe.
Is, if left in, is looking around helplessly for a subject like an orphan for a parent.
Again, this is from a Sunday Times report on David Blunkett’s interesting sex life: “Along came this woman who, intellectually, he had a lot in common with ?” Note that if you stop the sentence after “who”, it is not wrong at that point, and might go on to remain correct, with, for example, “who appeared to be fond of him”.
So the writer is lulled into a false sense of security. And goes wrong. He should have corrected the sentence to “Along came this woman with whom, intellectually, he had a lot in common.”
Back to basics. A clause is a distinct group of words that contains a subject and a predicate (that is, what is said about the subject).
An independent clause stands on its own, e.g. “Medicine is expensive.” If the clause is extended to read “Medicine is expensive, a fact we soon learned”, then it’s a main clause followed by a subordinate clause (adjectival, in this instance).
The subordinate clause is dependent on the main clause for its meaning. It cannot exist in its own right. There are three types of subordinate clause: noun, adjectival, and adverbial.
[A noun clause functions like a noun: “You still haven’t told me what I want to know.” Here, the noun clause is the object of the main clause. An adjectival clause functions as an adjective: “He brought a vegetable marrow, which was the biggest at the show.” [An adverbial clause functions as an adverb, and there are eight or nine varieties: time (begins when), place (where), condition (if), reason (because), concession (although), manner (how), purpose, and result.]
When these types are locked into the mind, you can see them highlighted on the page. You can place mental brackets around them. This is especially important when a clause is not merely a block of words that follows, or goes before, another clause. A clause may be ‘inserted’ into another clause. For example:
John had found when he was living in Jamaica several old silver coins.
The clause-break here could easily be marked off with a comma after found, and another after Jamaica. The words could also be rearranged:
John had found several old silver coins when he was living in Jamaica.
But the writer is up against today’s doctrine: DOWN WITH THE COMMA. That’s all very well, but a sentence with two or more clauses may leave the reader or writer looking around for help. The comma would then function as a satellite navigation system, telling you where a clause ends and another one begins.
My advice: BRING BACK THE COMMA.

It pays to read carefully the above article (which, as indicated above, appeared in THE STAR'S MIND OUR ENGLISH on September 7, 2006) followed by my comments to the editor and the writer's reply relayed by the editor. For a simple guide to the correct usage of "who/whom", kindly revisit my earlier post.

My comments to the editor (who forwarded them to the writer)
I refer to the article entitled “There’s cause for knowing clauses” in Mind Our English of STARTWO of September 7 which is essentially dealing with clause analysis.
I wish to present a different opinion in the treatment of the sentence, “Medicine is expensive, a fact we soon learned”, in clause analysis.
The comma (,) in the sentence can function in two ways – first in taking the place of a coordinating conjunction “and” and joining the two sentences. The second part is more discernible as a complete sentence if rewritten as “We soon learned a fact”; and clause analysis cannot be performed on the whole sentence which is a compound sentence as clause analysis can only be done to a complex sentence which has a main clause and one or more subordinate clauses.
Such comma can also function in the second way as to make the sentence (in which it appears) elliptical for “Medicine is expensive and it is a fact (which) we soon learned”. Then, “we soon learned” becomes an adjectival clause qualifying the noun, “fact”. As for the first part of the sentence, “Medicine is expensive”, it is a simple sentence by itself which has no clause/s to be analyzed.
Kengt, Penang

The writer's reply to the editor who relayed it to me
Here's Ralph Berry's reply:

The sentence cited (not mine) is neither compound nor complex. It is an elliptical complex sentence with a fact in apposition to the first clause and the omitted 'which' makes the second verb part of an adjectival clause.

Moral, look out for the unstated but dominant words 'which' (or 'that') which make the analysis clear. Otherwise, commas always help to clear the air. They are markers, they help to distinguish the borders between one group of words and another.

You have some serious people out there. Grapple them unto thy soul with hoops of steel. I was about to add, 'as Hamlet says,' but actually it's Polonius.

Best, Ralph