Clause

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Clause [ ˈklɔːz ] is the group of words in the sentence that consists of a finite verb ( personal form of a verb) and the words that depend on it. In quantitative linguistics, the term is often used as an easily identifiable, approximate equivalent to and therefore also instead of a partial sentence .

Examples for explanation

A sentence like “He should come as quickly as possible so that he can help his parents” contains two verbs in the personal form: “should” and “can”; the two infinitives “come” and “help” are irrelevant. The example sentence therefore consists of two clauses in accordance with the definition given, which in this case also correspond to two sub-clauses, separated by a comma.

A sentence like "He runs just as fast as Inge and panting audibly" also consists of two clauses (finite verbs: "runs" and "panting"), but they are not both independent sub-clauses.

The terms “clause” and “sub-clause” do not entirely coincide. A complete sentence that contains only one finite verb contains only one clause, but does not have to be identical with this: "Uhu, Uhu, is that you?" Contains two occurrences of beyond the clause "Eagle Owl".

Meaning of the term

Clause is used in quantitative linguistics as well as in quantitative stylistics as a unit to determine the length of sentences ( sentence length ) and to differentiate text types with regard to the average Clauselength . The term is also used to research the laws of language ; one of them concerns the relationship between the sentence length and the Claus length, a specification of Menzerath's law .

literature

  • Ursula Pieper: About the significance of statistical methods for linguistic style analysis. Narr, Tübingen 1979. ISBN 3-87808-355-6
  • Gabriela Heups: Investigations into the relationship between sentence length and Claus length using the example of German texts in different text classes. In: R. Köhler , J. Boy (ed.): Glottometrika 5. Brockmeyer, Bochum 1983, pp. 113-133. ISBN 3-88339-307-X .
  • Martin Wittek: On the development of sentence length in contemporary German. In: Karl-Heinz Best (Ed.): Frequency distributions in texts. Peust & Gutschmidt Verlag, Göttingen 2001, 219–247

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Pieper 1979, p. 27.
  2. ↑ Pieper 1979, p. 67.
  3. ↑ Gabriela Heups: Investigations into the relationship between sentence length and Claus length using the example of German texts in different text classes . In: Reinhard Köhler & Joachim Boy (eds.): Glottometrika 5 . Brockmeyer, Bochum 1983, pp. 113-133. ISBN 3-88339-307-X .