Today’s topic is going to be a bit technical. Although it centres on three common grammatical elements, it involves some technicalities, the type we usually want to as much as possible play down in ...

A sentence is a group of words that include a subject and verb, and usually expresses one complete thought. ‘Selena lives on the new space station’ is an example of a sentence. Sentences are made up ...

An independent clause is basically a complete sentence; it can stand on its own and make sense. An independent clause consists of a subject (e.g. “the dog”) and a verb (e.g. “barked”) creating a ...

The preceding chapter showed how sentences can be streamlined by reducing their adjective clauses to adjective phrases — a simple process that omits the relative pronouns “that,” “which,” “who,” “whom ...

1. Relative clauses are “embedded” grammatical structures, contained inside other grammatical structures. 2. Relative clauses play a central role in English discourse. 3. Relative clause knowledge is ...

Our brain links incoming speech sounds to knowledge of grammar, which is abstract in nature. But how does the brain encode abstract sentence structure? In a neuroimaging study published in PLOS ...

Last week, we started discussing the differences between a phrase, clause and a sentence. We defined a phrase as a group of words without a subject and a predicate, though standing together to form a ...

We are concluding our discussion on phrases, clauses and sentences today. In the last two classes, we compared the three, underlining how a sentence is usually a combination of clauses and phrases. We ...