Complex sentences

What do we know so far? Last week we learnt that sentence are made up of: Words barked dog big And that words form single pieces of information called phrases: A subject or noun phrase and a verb phrase barked The big dog Together these small pieces of information come together to provide a bit more detail in the form of a clause. A clause contains at least two phrases; a subject and verb phrase. the big dog barked Then we just need to add the punctuation and a capital letter, and we have a simple sentence.: The big dog barked.

When I arrived the big dog barked. Complex sentences A simple sentence has just one clause that contains a noun and a verb; it puts a across one simple idea. A complex sentence is used when you want to put across more detailed ideas. It contains one main clause and one or more minor clauses that are linked to it. When I arrived the big dog barked. The big dog barked is the main or independent clause because it has a subject and a verb. It can stand on its own, making sense without any help. When I arrived is the minor or dependent clause. It relies on the main clause to make sense.

More complex sentences We can add more dependent clauses to make a more complex sentence: When I arrived the big dog barked because it was lonely We can even split the independent clause with a minor clause and still have a complex sentence: When I arrived the big dog which was lonely barked.