Dick,

The anecdote you tell about your eight-grade teacher is exactly the
analysis that I've noticed both students (and some teachers that I've
trained) gravitating towards even without any explicit statement.

I believe that at least part of the problem is terminological. Several
years back, I stopped using the terms "independent clause" and
"dependent clause" in my classes.

I observed over and over again that students seemed to treat these terms
implicitly as disjoint despite my explicit warnings. Even worse, many
students who came to me with a prior, semantic definition of an
independent clause as a clause that could stand on its own often got the
dependent and independent distinction exactly backwards.

Consider, for example, the sentence, "She said that she was my friend."

Before giving my explanation of clause types, I would try such sentences
out on my classes, and inevitably, some proportion of the class would
identify "she was my friend" as an independent clause and "She said
that" as the dependent clause. After all, that string of words can stand
on its own as a sentence, and what's left over must be the dependent
part, right?

The morphology of "dependent" and "independent" encourages people to
view them as opposites, and therefore non-overlapping.

I've found that by talking about them as main and subordinate clauses,
it only takes one short lecture for students to get the concept that
subordinate clauses are contained within the main clause. The
terminology helps reinforce that idea.

Regards,

Karl

On 06/01/11 09:19, Dick Veit wrote:
> Karl asks an important question.
> 
> A "clause" is an abstract concept that has no existence independent of
> the minds of those who use it. Grammar being a diverse and heterogeneous
> discipline, different grammarians will stipulate different definitions
> for "clause." Lacking a consensus, one cannot argue that one's own
> definition is inherently right and natural; one can only attempt to
> demonstrate that it is useful and explanatory. Karl is justified in
> saying, make the case.
> 
> While we're at it, a definition of "clause" would also have to specify
> what the clauses are in a sentence like Iago's "Who steals my purse
> steals trash."  This would seem to present a problem for my eighth grade
> teacher, who, if I remember correctly, claimed that "main clauses" and
> "subordinate clauses" were mutually exclusive. Is "steals trash" a main
> clause? Others would define "clause" to have the entire sentence be a
> clause, which contained within it the clause "Who steals my purse."
> 
> Equally stipulative is the definition of "phrase." The definition I find
> most useful (something like "a group of words that we intuit as forming
> a grammatical unit") would include not just noun phrases, prepositional
> phrases, and the like, but also clauses and sentences as types of phrases.
> 
> Dick
> 
> On Wed, Jun 1, 2011 at 11:03 AM, Karl Hagen <[log in to unmask]
> <mailto:[log in to unmask]>> wrote:
> 
>     TJ,
> 
>     I still don't get why you want to make the finite distinction. In what
>     way do finite verbs in subordinate clauses "sustain" a sentence in a way
>     that a nonfinite verb does not? Neither a subordinate clause nor an
>     infinitive whatever-we-want-to-call-it will "sustain" a complete
>     sentence.
> 
>     I don't think teaching the distinction between finite and nonfinite is
>     problematic. I just think that tying the "clause" label to finite verbs
>     alone is neither accurate nor pedagogically helpful.
> 
>     Karl
> 
> 
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