Clause

A sentence in English language can be divided into various parts. Each part of a sentence serves its relative purpose and has some specific characteristics. While all of this seems simple, there is still a lot of confusion that arise between different parts of a sentence. One such part of a sentence is a clause.

In today’s article, we will discuss about a part of a sentence or generally a grammatical term known as clause. We will highlight the meaning of the word clause and what it represents in English language and how you can identify a clause in a text.

Clause

A clause is a group of words in a sentence which contains a subject and a verb.

Example:

The boy is playing.

In the above simple sentence, boy is the subject and playing is the verb so the part boy is playing is a clause because it has both subject and verb.

A clause might also contain an object along with the subject which makes it stand alone as a complete sentence. One of the easiest way to distinguish between a clause and a phrase is that a clause is a set of words that makes complete sense and does not require any additional helping words to complete it.

Sara smiled.

Consider the above example; you will notice that this two word simple sentence make complete sense and is understandable. It consists of a subject and a verb thus it is a clause.

A single sentence might have one clause like in the above examples, but there can exist a sentence which contains more than one clause in it.

Example:

I looked everywhere but the cat was gone.

The above sentence contains two clauses I looked everywhere and cat was gone. In the same manner, longer and more complicated sentences might also contain more than two clauses.