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"basti ka hasti bro, not the structure of the clause itself. I think that misleading statement should be removed, but as I see there have been some wars over this article already I'd sooner leave that to a more experienced editor. Digitig ( talk) 14:17, 9 February 2011 (UTC)
I believe this is the dependent clause in that sentence: "is basti ka hasti bro "
I vaguely remember a teacher in high school using a word for dependent clauses used alone for emphasis. "It's so cold out!" "I'm so hungry." The only examples I can think of involve "so," but I'm not sure if it is the only case or if these are even correct examples. I can't seem to find any information on this concept. Am I imagining things? I am so confused. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Unprompted ( talk • contribs) 0:21, 13 February 2007 (UTC)
what is noun clause ?????? **** —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.28.230.230 ( talk) 19:15, 5 February 2010 (UTC)
"He saw Mary when he was in New York" and "They studied hard because they had a test" are both examples of adverb clauses.
This could cause some confusion. Wouldn't it be better to say they are both examples CONTAINING adverb clauses?
89.102.4.222 17:13, 18 October 2007 (UTC)
Because it is offensive. No need to say something like: "Avoid creating a sentence fragment." Nothing wrong with sentence fragments in informal contexts. Questionable prescriptionist advice in an encyclopedia? Better not.
Well, I guess one should not overdo it. In any case I made a half-hearted attempt to deal with this. I did not delete the section, because it contains valuable advice for the victims of the predictionist extremism often practised in schools. -- Hans Adler ( talk) 12:12, 17 November 2007 (UTC)
By the way, what's the name of the "owner" of a dependent clause, i.e. the part of the sentence that it depends on? (This is what led me here.) -- Hans Adler ( talk) 13:08, 17 November 2007 (UTC)
Second and third question first. In my opinion, the second fragment in what I wrote above clearly expresses as complete a thought as most complete sentences. So does the third. And, arguably, the fourth. And how about this self-referencing rhetorical question? And the fragments preceding it? Lots of fragments that express complete thoughts. OK, admittedly none of my fragments so far was an adjective clause.
Now look at the example "Whose big, brown eyes pleaded for another cookie." What happens if we replace the relative pronoun by a personal pronoun? The fragment becomes a sentence, but the only added information (if it is not clear from context) is whether "who" is a "he", "she", or "it". So is this example an incomplete thought, while "Her big, brown eyes pleaded for another cookie" is a complete thought? Certainly not. Three possibilities remain:
There is a very fine line between relative pronouns and personal pronouns, and in Latin, for example, it seems to be even finer. Sometimes a sentence (or "fragment") refers to the previous one in such a way that the two are best understood as a single unit. Which makes things complicated. (This was an example for that.) But this does not mean that they should be joined, because the trick here is that you first read the first sentence, think about it, and once you have understood it you get an additional relative clause disguised as the next sentence. This is often very good style, and that's why the best authors do it. (When they were young, they probably did it in school as well, even though some teachers gave them bad marks for this.)
The next example, "Why Fred cannot stand sitting across from his sister Melanie" could be used as a perfectly good title. You will easily find an analogous example that could be used, as a title, even in extremely formal contexts. I think that, again, it contains about as complete a thought as the average complete sentence.
As to the first question: WP:NOT#GUIDE – Wikipedia is not a repository for instruction manuals. As a consequence: WP:NOT#DICT — "Descriptive articles about languages, dialects or types of slang (such as Klingon language, Cockney or Leet) are desirable. Prescriptive guides for prospective speakers of such languages are not." For further information you can follow the link to Linguistic prescription that I provided above, and perhaps have a look at its Talk page.
As I see it there are two challenges here. One is to get the advice right. And the other is to formulate it so it's appropriate for an encyclopedia. I must admit that my version wasn't ideal, either, but I will revert to it now, restoring the POV tag, and go to bed. (It's 3:30 am for me.) -- Hans Adler ( talk) 03:54, 18 November 2007 (UTC)
By the way, Dependent clause#Fragments looks as if copied directly from a handout used by a teacher. So there might be a copyright problem as well (if it was copied without the author's consent). We might consider replacing the examples. The rest must be rephrased anyway to make it fit into Wikipedia. -- Hans Adler ( talk) 04:01/ 04:02, 18 November 2007 (UTC)
As the discussion between Torc2 and me ( Hans Adler) took a lot of space (my fault, I admit) without getting us closer to a resolution, it's probably best to start again in a new section, with a new format.
Two editors disagree whether the following statement is reasonable: "Since an adjective clause does not express a complete thought, it cannot stand alone as a sentence." Should it be flagged as POV? If the editors cannot agree whether it should be flagged, who bears the burden of proof: The editor who claims that it is a POV conflict, or the editor who claims that it isn't? Discuss.
You are using faulty logic on so many levels that it is hard to catch them all. Sorry for the language, but this is really getting on my nerves, and I feel that I cannot leave your repeated untrue assertions without comment.
-- Hans Adler ( talk) 10:38, 19 November 2007 (UTC)
I just realised that you have rephrased the issue in a distorting way, to make it easier to prove. When I responded to "stands alone as a complete thought" I automatically interpreted it as meaning "expresses a complete thought". The difference is important:
-- Hans Adler ( talk) 10:58, 19 November 2007 (UTC)
Outsider responding to RfC: If I read right, the conflict is over the word "thought." There is no disagreement over whether an adjective clause can stand as a sentence alone; it can't. I don't see a POV issue here, since the article is inherently prescriptivist, and POV objectors would include those who dislike formal grammatical rules entirely - who wouldn't read or use this article. Perhaps change the word "thought" to something less ambiguous and open to interpretation, or some word that is complete in itself; "idea," maybe. Pishogue ( talk) 05:51, 26 November 2007 (UTC)
Seems to me the solution is obvious; just cite "Since an adjective clause does not express a complete thought,..." to some grammar that gives this justification. It seems the justification is what is in question. Ben Standeven ( talk) 15:48, 28 November 2007 (UTC)
The punctuation section refers to "essential" and "non-essential" dependent clauses. Other readers are likely to recognize the distinction as "restrictive" and "non-restrictive" when describing the rule for using "that" or ", which" to set off a clause. Fowler also uses "defining" and "non-defining".
The different choices might be regionalisms or nationalisms, and we are not specifying a particular English as the target of this article's discussion, so we can afford to be inclusive and accommodating.
Would it, therefore, make sense to add a parenthetical mention of "restrictive/defining versus non-restrictive/non-defining", so that all the commonly used pairings are available in the the one place where they are needed (this article)?
Kevinmcl ( talk) 17:51, 4 June 2008 (UTC)
Under the heading "Noun clause", in the first sentence "....in the same way as a noun, adjective, verb, or pronoun", should the word "verb" be "adverb" instead?
202.130.125.102 ( talk) 01:58, 6 June 2008 (UTC)
If we could recruit enough wikipedians from other countries (especially people who speak a non-Indoeuropean language), we might expand this article to cover other languages. If you have contact to e.g. Finnish, Turkish, Japanese, etc. wikipedians or are yourself one, have a look at this article and see if other languages have comparable structures. Trigaranus ( talk) 18:24, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
There are no examples in the section of a noun clause as an ADJ or V. I can't think of any.
Wikinetman ( talk) 16:18, 12 March 2009 (UTC)
In addition to some small edits, I have removed this sentence:
Please give one example of where it is not. In fact, the statement before this sentence contradicts this statement unless there exists a third class of clauses:
I believe that in such cases, it would be grammatically incorrect. Furthermore, I have integrated the sentence, minus the misleading usually, into the surrounding sentences to be more concise. -- 124.150.94.103 ( talk) 18:45, 22 October 2010 (UTC)
Here’s one.
I suggest you leave the building.
In fact, the classification of clauses into dependent and independent, that given in the first lines of this article and most everywhere else, does not account for their use as subjects:
What Billy did shocked his friends.
or as the complements of transitive and linking verbs:
Billy’s friends didn’t know that he couldn’t swim.
Billy’s mistake was that he refused to take lessons.
The last three examples are taken from the DeAnza College website http://faculty.deanza.edu/flemingjohn/stories/storyReader$23 where too the clause relations are unaccounted for. The Internet Grammar of English website http://www.ucl.ac.uk/internet-grammar/clauses/xclau1.htm does better with a different classification. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.83.88.21 ( talk) 23:45, 20 March 2011 (UTC)
In the introductory section of this article, it states "Some grammarians use the term subordinate clause to refer only to adverbial dependent clauses." I haven't seen any proof of that. Could someone (perhaps the person that contributed that sentence) explain the rationale behind it - or better yet: provide some references, preferably from such grammarians that consider subordinate and dependent different terms? Thanks. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Arryc ( talk • contribs) 20:57, 20 November 2018 (UTC)
I can't pinpoint when linguists coined " dependent clause" as a term that has largely supplanted " subordinate clause," but both terms stand in contrast to the notion of an " independent clause (formerly called a " main clause"). All of those terms rely on naïve assumptions about how we actually use language. Furthermore, traditional linguistic models that employ those terms either (1) routinely present simplistic examples that comport with a preferred outcome, or (2) generate anomalies and exceptions that eviscerate the terms' utility from a practical perspective. For example:
Under a traditional linguistic analysis -
So far we can infer that innovators in the linguistic fraternity changed from using "main clause" to "independent clause" due to the lack of saliency in treating a clause like "That's" as somehow implying the main idea of a sentence. The linguistic problem with the parsing given above, however, is that it requires viewing "when" as a conjunction despite how "when" also can be construed as an adverb. Consider:
Thus we can infer how traditionalists in the linguistic fraternity are happy that "my sister texted me with the news" no longer has its dependent/subordinate status; however, does the clause - in a practical sense - convey the gist of the sentence it comprises? I don't think so.
For anyone who wants the long and short of what happened (i.e. based on texted information from my sister as I got home at midnight), it's that "mom had suffered a stroke and was in the hospital's ICU." That's the
propositional clause (which has no published definition to date). The remainder of the sentence comprises
adjunctive clauses despite how
adjunctive clause has no published definition to date.
Sadly, traditional linguistics tend to be stuck on traditional ways of trying to explain things despite well-founded disruptions to their inherited models. --Kent Dominic 15:28, 26 April 2020 (UTC) — Preceding
unsigned comment added by
Kent Dominic (
talk •
contribs)
In a sentence such as, I take it for granted that you've come here in search of knowledge, the "that you've come here in search of knowledge" clause qualifies as embedded and as dependent in the ordinary sense of those words as linguistically applied. Yet, labeling the clause as relative is meaningless for anyone who's unfamiliar with that linguistic term, and labeling it as subordinate has a pejorative connotation for the uninitiated. Neither relative clause nor subordinate clause makes much sense in other languages from a cross-linguistic perspective. For someone who's applying the ordinary meaning of main (i.e. chief; principal) and subordinate (i.e. placed in or occupying a lower class, rank, or position: INFERIOR), it's counterintuitive that "I take it for granted" qualifies as a main clause (rather than an expositive clause) while "you've come here in search of knowledge" qualifies as a subordinate clause (rather than a propositional clause). "Main clause," "relative clause," and "subordinate clause" need definition in the historical context of their archaic approaches to linguistic analysis but they have don't pass academic muster when used capriciously or casually in an article such as dependent clause.
Another year, another rant. Anyone listening? Or care? Is there even one capable and enterprising editor out there, @ Megaman en m: or @ Mathglot:? Since I'm fond of apophasis, I won't even mention how the "that" in I take it for granted that you've come here in search of knowledge has a hard time justifying its label as a pronoun, notwithstanding its traditional pedigree and despite the complementizer claimants' better knowledge (and egregiously complex terminology) that it's a conjunction. Why couldn't they call it a nominal conjunction that in fact - pardon the 17th century verbiage - relates in an anaphoric sense? They're still calling it a relative pronoun in the 21st century? Why? Beats me. It'd make sense if people today commonly said stuff like they used to say, "That you've come here in search of knowledge is what I take for granted." - Kent Dominic·(talk) 11:06, 22 March 2021 (UTC)
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"basti ka hasti bro, not the structure of the clause itself. I think that misleading statement should be removed, but as I see there have been some wars over this article already I'd sooner leave that to a more experienced editor. Digitig ( talk) 14:17, 9 February 2011 (UTC)
I believe this is the dependent clause in that sentence: "is basti ka hasti bro "
I vaguely remember a teacher in high school using a word for dependent clauses used alone for emphasis. "It's so cold out!" "I'm so hungry." The only examples I can think of involve "so," but I'm not sure if it is the only case or if these are even correct examples. I can't seem to find any information on this concept. Am I imagining things? I am so confused. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Unprompted ( talk • contribs) 0:21, 13 February 2007 (UTC)
what is noun clause ?????? **** —Preceding unsigned comment added by 68.28.230.230 ( talk) 19:15, 5 February 2010 (UTC)
"He saw Mary when he was in New York" and "They studied hard because they had a test" are both examples of adverb clauses.
This could cause some confusion. Wouldn't it be better to say they are both examples CONTAINING adverb clauses?
89.102.4.222 17:13, 18 October 2007 (UTC)
Because it is offensive. No need to say something like: "Avoid creating a sentence fragment." Nothing wrong with sentence fragments in informal contexts. Questionable prescriptionist advice in an encyclopedia? Better not.
Well, I guess one should not overdo it. In any case I made a half-hearted attempt to deal with this. I did not delete the section, because it contains valuable advice for the victims of the predictionist extremism often practised in schools. -- Hans Adler ( talk) 12:12, 17 November 2007 (UTC)
By the way, what's the name of the "owner" of a dependent clause, i.e. the part of the sentence that it depends on? (This is what led me here.) -- Hans Adler ( talk) 13:08, 17 November 2007 (UTC)
Second and third question first. In my opinion, the second fragment in what I wrote above clearly expresses as complete a thought as most complete sentences. So does the third. And, arguably, the fourth. And how about this self-referencing rhetorical question? And the fragments preceding it? Lots of fragments that express complete thoughts. OK, admittedly none of my fragments so far was an adjective clause.
Now look at the example "Whose big, brown eyes pleaded for another cookie." What happens if we replace the relative pronoun by a personal pronoun? The fragment becomes a sentence, but the only added information (if it is not clear from context) is whether "who" is a "he", "she", or "it". So is this example an incomplete thought, while "Her big, brown eyes pleaded for another cookie" is a complete thought? Certainly not. Three possibilities remain:
There is a very fine line between relative pronouns and personal pronouns, and in Latin, for example, it seems to be even finer. Sometimes a sentence (or "fragment") refers to the previous one in such a way that the two are best understood as a single unit. Which makes things complicated. (This was an example for that.) But this does not mean that they should be joined, because the trick here is that you first read the first sentence, think about it, and once you have understood it you get an additional relative clause disguised as the next sentence. This is often very good style, and that's why the best authors do it. (When they were young, they probably did it in school as well, even though some teachers gave them bad marks for this.)
The next example, "Why Fred cannot stand sitting across from his sister Melanie" could be used as a perfectly good title. You will easily find an analogous example that could be used, as a title, even in extremely formal contexts. I think that, again, it contains about as complete a thought as the average complete sentence.
As to the first question: WP:NOT#GUIDE – Wikipedia is not a repository for instruction manuals. As a consequence: WP:NOT#DICT — "Descriptive articles about languages, dialects or types of slang (such as Klingon language, Cockney or Leet) are desirable. Prescriptive guides for prospective speakers of such languages are not." For further information you can follow the link to Linguistic prescription that I provided above, and perhaps have a look at its Talk page.
As I see it there are two challenges here. One is to get the advice right. And the other is to formulate it so it's appropriate for an encyclopedia. I must admit that my version wasn't ideal, either, but I will revert to it now, restoring the POV tag, and go to bed. (It's 3:30 am for me.) -- Hans Adler ( talk) 03:54, 18 November 2007 (UTC)
By the way, Dependent clause#Fragments looks as if copied directly from a handout used by a teacher. So there might be a copyright problem as well (if it was copied without the author's consent). We might consider replacing the examples. The rest must be rephrased anyway to make it fit into Wikipedia. -- Hans Adler ( talk) 04:01/ 04:02, 18 November 2007 (UTC)
As the discussion between Torc2 and me ( Hans Adler) took a lot of space (my fault, I admit) without getting us closer to a resolution, it's probably best to start again in a new section, with a new format.
Two editors disagree whether the following statement is reasonable: "Since an adjective clause does not express a complete thought, it cannot stand alone as a sentence." Should it be flagged as POV? If the editors cannot agree whether it should be flagged, who bears the burden of proof: The editor who claims that it is a POV conflict, or the editor who claims that it isn't? Discuss.
You are using faulty logic on so many levels that it is hard to catch them all. Sorry for the language, but this is really getting on my nerves, and I feel that I cannot leave your repeated untrue assertions without comment.
-- Hans Adler ( talk) 10:38, 19 November 2007 (UTC)
I just realised that you have rephrased the issue in a distorting way, to make it easier to prove. When I responded to "stands alone as a complete thought" I automatically interpreted it as meaning "expresses a complete thought". The difference is important:
-- Hans Adler ( talk) 10:58, 19 November 2007 (UTC)
Outsider responding to RfC: If I read right, the conflict is over the word "thought." There is no disagreement over whether an adjective clause can stand as a sentence alone; it can't. I don't see a POV issue here, since the article is inherently prescriptivist, and POV objectors would include those who dislike formal grammatical rules entirely - who wouldn't read or use this article. Perhaps change the word "thought" to something less ambiguous and open to interpretation, or some word that is complete in itself; "idea," maybe. Pishogue ( talk) 05:51, 26 November 2007 (UTC)
Seems to me the solution is obvious; just cite "Since an adjective clause does not express a complete thought,..." to some grammar that gives this justification. It seems the justification is what is in question. Ben Standeven ( talk) 15:48, 28 November 2007 (UTC)
The punctuation section refers to "essential" and "non-essential" dependent clauses. Other readers are likely to recognize the distinction as "restrictive" and "non-restrictive" when describing the rule for using "that" or ", which" to set off a clause. Fowler also uses "defining" and "non-defining".
The different choices might be regionalisms or nationalisms, and we are not specifying a particular English as the target of this article's discussion, so we can afford to be inclusive and accommodating.
Would it, therefore, make sense to add a parenthetical mention of "restrictive/defining versus non-restrictive/non-defining", so that all the commonly used pairings are available in the the one place where they are needed (this article)?
Kevinmcl ( talk) 17:51, 4 June 2008 (UTC)
Under the heading "Noun clause", in the first sentence "....in the same way as a noun, adjective, verb, or pronoun", should the word "verb" be "adverb" instead?
202.130.125.102 ( talk) 01:58, 6 June 2008 (UTC)
If we could recruit enough wikipedians from other countries (especially people who speak a non-Indoeuropean language), we might expand this article to cover other languages. If you have contact to e.g. Finnish, Turkish, Japanese, etc. wikipedians or are yourself one, have a look at this article and see if other languages have comparable structures. Trigaranus ( talk) 18:24, 4 January 2009 (UTC)
There are no examples in the section of a noun clause as an ADJ or V. I can't think of any.
Wikinetman ( talk) 16:18, 12 March 2009 (UTC)
In addition to some small edits, I have removed this sentence:
Please give one example of where it is not. In fact, the statement before this sentence contradicts this statement unless there exists a third class of clauses:
I believe that in such cases, it would be grammatically incorrect. Furthermore, I have integrated the sentence, minus the misleading usually, into the surrounding sentences to be more concise. -- 124.150.94.103 ( talk) 18:45, 22 October 2010 (UTC)
Here’s one.
I suggest you leave the building.
In fact, the classification of clauses into dependent and independent, that given in the first lines of this article and most everywhere else, does not account for their use as subjects:
What Billy did shocked his friends.
or as the complements of transitive and linking verbs:
Billy’s friends didn’t know that he couldn’t swim.
Billy’s mistake was that he refused to take lessons.
The last three examples are taken from the DeAnza College website http://faculty.deanza.edu/flemingjohn/stories/storyReader$23 where too the clause relations are unaccounted for. The Internet Grammar of English website http://www.ucl.ac.uk/internet-grammar/clauses/xclau1.htm does better with a different classification. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.83.88.21 ( talk) 23:45, 20 March 2011 (UTC)
In the introductory section of this article, it states "Some grammarians use the term subordinate clause to refer only to adverbial dependent clauses." I haven't seen any proof of that. Could someone (perhaps the person that contributed that sentence) explain the rationale behind it - or better yet: provide some references, preferably from such grammarians that consider subordinate and dependent different terms? Thanks. — Preceding unsigned comment added by Arryc ( talk • contribs) 20:57, 20 November 2018 (UTC)
I can't pinpoint when linguists coined " dependent clause" as a term that has largely supplanted " subordinate clause," but both terms stand in contrast to the notion of an " independent clause (formerly called a " main clause"). All of those terms rely on naïve assumptions about how we actually use language. Furthermore, traditional linguistic models that employ those terms either (1) routinely present simplistic examples that comport with a preferred outcome, or (2) generate anomalies and exceptions that eviscerate the terms' utility from a practical perspective. For example:
Under a traditional linguistic analysis -
So far we can infer that innovators in the linguistic fraternity changed from using "main clause" to "independent clause" due to the lack of saliency in treating a clause like "That's" as somehow implying the main idea of a sentence. The linguistic problem with the parsing given above, however, is that it requires viewing "when" as a conjunction despite how "when" also can be construed as an adverb. Consider:
Thus we can infer how traditionalists in the linguistic fraternity are happy that "my sister texted me with the news" no longer has its dependent/subordinate status; however, does the clause - in a practical sense - convey the gist of the sentence it comprises? I don't think so.
For anyone who wants the long and short of what happened (i.e. based on texted information from my sister as I got home at midnight), it's that "mom had suffered a stroke and was in the hospital's ICU." That's the
propositional clause (which has no published definition to date). The remainder of the sentence comprises
adjunctive clauses despite how
adjunctive clause has no published definition to date.
Sadly, traditional linguistics tend to be stuck on traditional ways of trying to explain things despite well-founded disruptions to their inherited models. --Kent Dominic 15:28, 26 April 2020 (UTC) — Preceding
unsigned comment added by
Kent Dominic (
talk •
contribs)
In a sentence such as, I take it for granted that you've come here in search of knowledge, the "that you've come here in search of knowledge" clause qualifies as embedded and as dependent in the ordinary sense of those words as linguistically applied. Yet, labeling the clause as relative is meaningless for anyone who's unfamiliar with that linguistic term, and labeling it as subordinate has a pejorative connotation for the uninitiated. Neither relative clause nor subordinate clause makes much sense in other languages from a cross-linguistic perspective. For someone who's applying the ordinary meaning of main (i.e. chief; principal) and subordinate (i.e. placed in or occupying a lower class, rank, or position: INFERIOR), it's counterintuitive that "I take it for granted" qualifies as a main clause (rather than an expositive clause) while "you've come here in search of knowledge" qualifies as a subordinate clause (rather than a propositional clause). "Main clause," "relative clause," and "subordinate clause" need definition in the historical context of their archaic approaches to linguistic analysis but they have don't pass academic muster when used capriciously or casually in an article such as dependent clause.
Another year, another rant. Anyone listening? Or care? Is there even one capable and enterprising editor out there, @ Megaman en m: or @ Mathglot:? Since I'm fond of apophasis, I won't even mention how the "that" in I take it for granted that you've come here in search of knowledge has a hard time justifying its label as a pronoun, notwithstanding its traditional pedigree and despite the complementizer claimants' better knowledge (and egregiously complex terminology) that it's a conjunction. Why couldn't they call it a nominal conjunction that in fact - pardon the 17th century verbiage - relates in an anaphoric sense? They're still calling it a relative pronoun in the 21st century? Why? Beats me. It'd make sense if people today commonly said stuff like they used to say, "That you've come here in search of knowledge is what I take for granted." - Kent Dominic·(talk) 11:06, 22 March 2021 (UTC)