English clause syntax

This article describes the syntax of clauses in the English language, chiefly in Modern English. A clause is often said to be the smallest grammatical unit that can express a complete proposition. But this semantic idea of a clause leaves out much of English clause syntax. For example, clauses can be questions, but questions are not propositions. A syntactic description of an English clause is that it is a subject and a verb. But this too fails, as a clause need not have a subject, as with the imperative, and, in many theories, an English clause may be verbless. The idea of what qualifies varies between theories and has changed over time. The earliest use of the word clause in Middle English is non-technical and similar to the current everyday meaning of phrase: "A sentence or clause, a brief statement, a short passage, a short text or quotation; in a ~, briefly, in short; (b) a written message or letter; a story; a long passage in an author's source." The first English grammar, Pamphlet for Grammar by William Bullokar, was published in 1586 and briefly mentions clause once, without explaining the concept. A technical meaning is evident from at least 1865, when Walter Scott Dalgleish describe a clause as "a term of a sentence containing a predicate within itself; as... a man who is wise." In the early days of generative grammar, new conceptions of the clause were emerging. Paul Postal and Noam Chomsky argued that every verb phrase had a subject, even if none was expressed, (though Joan Bresnan and Michael Brame disagreed). As a result, every verb phrase (VP) was thought to head a clause. The idea of verbless clauses was perhaps introduced by James McCawley in the early 1980s with examples like the underlined part of with John in jail... meaning "John is in jail". Clauses can be classified as independent (main clauses) and dependent (subordinate clauses). An orthogonal way of classifying clauses is by the speech act they are typically associated with.