In writing, a sentence is any sequence of words which begins with a
capital letter and ends with a full stop (period), a question mark or an exclamation mark:
Paul plays football.
Amy prefers tennis.
Who lives in the house next door?
Where did you buy your car?
What a silly thing to say!
How big you’ve grown!
These are all simple sentences. We can combine two simple sentences using but or and:
[1] Paul plays football.
[2] Amy prefers tennis.
[1]+[2] Paul plays football but/and Amy prefers tennis.
A combination of two or more simple sentences is called a compound sentence.
A complex sentence contains another ‘sentence-like’ construction within it:
When the plane landed, the ground crew removed the cargo.
Here, the sentence as a whole contains the sentence-like construction
When the plane landed. We refer to this construction as a clause:
Sentence
<ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ>
Clause
<ــــــــــــــــــــــــ>
When the plane landed the ground crew removed the cargo.
We will discuss clauses, as well as complex sentences,in later
In this chapter we concentrate on simple sentences. A simple sentence isa sentence which contains no clause within it.
A complex sentence contains another ‘sentence-like’ construction within it:
When the plane landed, the ground crew removed the cargo.
Here, the sentence as a whole contains the sentence-like construction
When the plane landed. We refer to this construction as a clause:
Sentence
<ـــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــــ>
Clause
<ــــــــــــــــــــــــ>
When the plane landed the ground crew removed the cargo.
We will discuss clauses, as well as complex sentences,in later
In this chapter we concentrate on simple sentences. A simple sentence isa sentence which contains no clause within it.
