Advanced English Grammar: Noun Clauses

Watch Adam's series on clauses!

TRANSCRIPT

So before we begin, let's review: What is a clause? A clause is a combination of words that must contain a subject and a verb. Okay? Now, every sentence has at least one independent clause. The noun clause is a dependent clause. Okay? I'm going to write that here. It's a dependent. What that means is that this clause cannot be a sentence by itself. It is always part of a sentence that contains an independent clause, but the noun clause can be part of the independent clause, and we're going to see that in a moment.

But before we do that, we also have to look at the conjunctions. Okay? So these are the words... The conjunctions are the words that join the noun clause to its independent clause or that begin the noun clause. Okay? And again, we're going to look at examples. So these are the ones you need to know: "that", "which", "who", "whom", "whose", "what", "if", "whether", "when", "where", "how", "why", and then: "whoever", "whomever", "whenever", "wherever", "whatever", "whichever". These can all be conjunctions. Now, you have to be careful with a few of them. Some of these can also be conjunctions to adjective clauses, which will be a different video lesson entirely. And you also have to remember that this clause in particular: "that", is quite often removed. Means it's understood to be there, it's implied, but we don't actually have to write it or say it when we're using the noun clause. And again, we're going to look at examples of that.

Another thing to remember is that only some of these can be both the conjunction, the thing that starts the clause, and the subject of the clause. So, for example: "which" can be the subject, "who" can be the subject, "whom" is always an object, never a subject, and "what" can be the subject. "Who", "whoever", "whatever", "whichever" can also be subjects. So I'm going to put an "s" for these. Okay? So it's very important to remember these because sometimes you have to recognize that it is both the conjunction and the clause, and recognize it as a noun clause. Now, of course, it will be much easier to understand all this when we see actual examples, so let's do that.

Okay, so now we're going to look at when to use the noun clause and how to use the noun clause. So, noun clauses have basically four uses. Okay? Or actually five, but one of them is similar. First of all we're going to look at it as the subject. So, a noun clause can be the subject of a clause, of an independent clause.

So let's look at this example: "What she wore to the party really turned some heads." So, what is the noun clause? "What she wore to the party". Okay? So here's our conjunction, here's our subject, and here's our verb. Okay? And then here's another verb. Now, remember: In every sentence, you're going to have one tense verb, will have one subject that corresponds to it. Here I have two tense verbs, which means I need two subjects. So the subject for "wore" is "she", the subject for "turned" is the entire clause. This is the noun clause subject to this verb. Okay? Turned what? Some heads. And, here, we have the object of the whole sentence. So this sentence is essentially SVO, so we have an independent clause, but the subject of the independent clause is a noun clause. So although you have one independent clause, this is still a complex sentence because we're using an independent and the subordinate, and the dependent clause to build it.

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[Baby_Dinosaur]

I’m teaching noun clauses right now in an ESL grammar class, and I’m a very new teacher so this is really helpful to summarize the points I will teach. Thank you for the video!

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I have a test tomorrow and this REALLY helped me. Thank you!

[abdrnasr]

I will put "that" even if I don't need just to increase the word count

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As someone who learned English via immersion, this is a fascinating video.
I know that this is how English works but I have never given any thought to the logic behind it all, so this gave me a new perspective.
Thank you!

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[hoaigiangtruong]

What you taught about how to use noun clauses is very informative for those who want to improve their English. Thank you, Adam!

[SoumenRoy]

Thank you, Adam, for teaching this. I have been suffering for a long time to apply the clauses appropriately in sentences. Your videos are very helpful.

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