ENGLISH SENTENCE AND CLAUSE: CORRELATION AND

CORRESPONDENCE

Abstract

This treatise examines the similitude and correspondence between the English clause and
sentence. The paper argues that the English clause could be of the same status with the
English sentence on the basic premise that they both have the same (or very similar)
constitutive elements.

1. Introduction

Due to the nature of the interrelationship between a clause and a sentence (as an in-depth
understanding of the one is not possible without the understanding of the other), language
users find it very taxing and difficult to draw a line between them. Even from the basic level
of definition, their meanings tend to be so indistinct that it remains difficult to distinguish
one from the other.

Whereas, a clause is a group of words that may or may not have a finite verb and may or may
give a complete thought, a sentence is a set of words expressing a statement, a question, or an
order(usually containing a subject and a verb). Similarly, a clause is a sentence or a part of
sentence having a subject and a principal verb (predicate); it may express a complete thought
or may not.

The indistinguishability between the two grammatical units owes largely to their constitution
of very similar elements, thus the implications that they could be of the same status. It is
against this background that this paper examines the similitude between the two units, with
an objective to provide the bases for such position.