what is the meaning of clause ?
In this sentence it means a particular kind of sentence, “a noun clause”.
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Here’s some more details.
Clause means a part of a sentence as a syntactic unit that has the subject and predicate.
Predicate here means verb or adjective phrase that describes the subject.
So a clause is almost like a full sentence in structure but it is functioning as a part of another longer sentence.
Compare it with a “phrase”, which is also a multi-word syntactic unit but has no subject + predicate structure.
The bold part below shows a word, phrase, or clause that has similar grammatical role.
- I asked him 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭. (word)
- I asked him 𝐡𝐢𝐬 𝐧𝐚𝐦𝐞. (phrase)
- I asked him 𝐰𝐡𝐞𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐡𝐞 𝐜𝐨𝐮𝐥𝐝 𝐝𝐨 𝐢𝐭 (clause - subject:: he, predicate: could do it)
Some other examples:
- 𝐢𝐟 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐰𝐡𝐞𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫 𝐢𝐬 𝐠𝐨𝐨𝐝, I will go. (adverbial clause - gives a condition)
- I know 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐭 𝐡𝐞 𝐰𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐬𝐮𝐜𝐜𝐞𝐞𝐝 𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐮𝐚𝐥𝐥𝐲. (noun clause - functions like a noun)
- I live in a house 𝐰𝐡𝐢𝐜𝐡 𝐡𝐚𝐬 𝐟𝐨𝐮𝐫 𝐫𝐨𝐨𝐦𝐬. (“relative” clause - relates to the noun “house”)`