More than four years ago, a Miami, Florida-based Forum member posted a question about an English-grammar book’s classification of sentences into five types, namely simple, compound, complex, compound-complex, and complex-complex sentence. Kal knew there were only four types, but he said the book’s author gave an example of how the fifth type listed—the complex-complex sentence—would look like. Kal regretted though that he was unable to write down that example when he read that book two years before.
Kal said that having lost his paper copy of that book,
Words on Words: A Dictionary for Writers and Others who Care about Words by John Bremner, he tried a Google search and finally found the uploaded book, but the webpage that contained the example of the author’s example of a complex-complex sentence had been stricken out along with its definition. However, from what Kal could recall when he read that book, the author’s example ran something like this: “Now, popular kids were pursuing those that once pursued them that they had rejected in the past.”
COMPOUND-COMPLEX SENTENCES, YES, BUT THERE ARE
NO COMPLEX-COMPLEX SENTENCES
Then Kal asked: “What do you think?”
Let me say that I’ve always subscribed to the idea that structurally, there are just four types of sentences: the simple sentence, the compound sentence, the complex sentence, and the complex-compound sentence (or vice versa, according to some grammar books).
We all know the drill. A
simple sentence has only one independent clause and no dependent clause, as in “She likes avocado.” A
compound sentence has at least two independent clauses linked by a coordinating conjunction and with no dependent clause, as in “She likes avocado but I prefer oranges.” A
complex sentence has at least one independent clause linked to one or more dependent clauses by a subordinating conjunction, as in “She likes avocado when it’s in season.” And a
complex-compound sentence has two or more independent clauses plus one or more dependent clauses, as in “She likes avocado when it’s in season but she shifts to strawberries afterwards.”
Another Forum member, English teacher Michael, analyzed Kal’s example and concluded that it wasn’t a complex-complex sentence but just a complex sentence. Michael correctly argued that this is so because Kal’s sentence has an independent clause, “now, popular kids were pursuing those,” and two dependent clauses, (1) “that once pursued them” and (2) “that they had rejected in the past.” Indeed, Michael said it was the first time he heard of a complex-complex sentence and he was doubtful that there’s one such sentence structure.
As I said earlier, I doubted that fifth classification myself so I combed the World Wide Web to verify. Lo and behold! Of the 712,000 entries yielded by Google at that time, only one acknowledged that “complex-complex” sentences did exist. That contributed post in Using English.com defined it as “a sentence in which at least one subordinate clause itself has a subordinate clause.” It gives this example: “The man who saw the horse that was grazing in the field was sitting on the fence that enclosed the farm.”
That rather knotty sentence does seem to combine two complex sentences, “the man who saw the horse that was grazing in the field” and “(he) was sitting on the fence that enclosed the farm.” On closer inspection, however, we’ll find that “the man who saw the horse that was grazing in the field” is a noun clause that functions as the subject of the sentence, with “was sitting on the fence that enclosed the farm” as its predicate.
The phrases “that was grazing in the field” in the first clause and “that enclosed the farm” in the second clause are, in fact, not subordinate clauses but simply adjectival modifiers. So, that structure isn’t really a complex-complex sentence but just a simple sentence.
(Next:
Redundancies, imprecisions in mass media English) October 15, 2020
This essay, 2,014th of the series, appeared in the column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in the Campus Press section of the September 17, 2020 Internet edition of The Manila Times
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“Is there such a thing as a complex-complex sentence?”
