Because I'm worth it

Abstract

Summary: Most people would probably find it straightforward to recognize sentences in novels, letters, newspaper articles and other written forms. Longer and more complex sentences are made up of clauses, where one or several are more important structurally and semantically compared to others. We can thus organize larger parts of written sentences into main and subordinate clauses and specify how they are linked to each other. This type of analysis runs in problems when we find subordinate clauses without main clauses (If you could just move a little) and clauses which are structurally subordinate but semantically independent (I think stress can melt away after a good long holiday). Particularly in spoken language, many of our criteria for identifying and classifying subordinate clauses seem to break down. There is a disconnect between what speakers say and what the grammatical theory – based largely on written language – expects them to say.