Sentence and Clause

We distinguish two main types of sentence: a clausal sentence, which has the form of a single clause, and a compound sentence, which has the form of two or more coordinated clauses, usually joined by a coordinator (such as and, or, but):

 i Sue went to London last week. [clausal sentence]


ii Sue went to London last week and her father went with her. [compound sentence]



Note that such an example as We stayed at the hotel which you recommended is also a clausal sentence even though it contains two clauses. This is because one clause, which you recommended, is part of the other, rather than separate from it (more specifically, the which you recommended is part of the noun phrase the hotel which you recommended); the larger clause is thus We stayed at the hotel which you recommended, and this does constitute the whole sentence, like that in [i].

The fact that the two types of sentence are distinguished in terms of clauses implies that we take the clause to be a more basic unit than the sentence, which reflects the fact that in speech it tends to be more difficult to determine the boundaries between sentences than the boundaries between clauses.