From text to clause

Abstract

INTRODUCTION Having now completed the internal view of the clause, this relatively short chapter looks at how to recognize the boundaries of the clause within text. It may seem odd that what will be the first step in analysing text is presented after the analysis of the clause but this is because, in order to identify the boundaries of the clause, it is essential to have a firm understanding of the way that the components of the clause work both structurally and functionally. This information has to be relied upon in order to recognize clauses within a text. This chapter together with Chapter 8 provides the full set of guidelines for text analysis. This chapter, as already stated, explains how clause boundaries can be identified within a text, and Chapter 8 summarizes the guidelines that have been being developed throughout this book. These two chapters combined offer a complete view of analysing text. However, as is explained in Chapter 9, this is only the first stage in understanding language. Grammatical analysis forms the basis on which to build an interpretation of text. Chapter 9 describes how to manage the results of grammatical analysis so that the patterns of meaning in text can be understood.