Subject and predicate, form and syntax, nominative, possessive, and objective. The first dragon on the path to learning something new seems ever to be the special terminology that makes up an art or science. It can be greatly to our advantage, though, to be patient in familiarizing ourselves with these strange terms, because they have been coined for a reason by those who have preceded us, not the least of which is to help us ask the right question at the right time.
Here’s what I mean. A friend who tutors English came to me the other day a bit exasperated with the textbook he is required to use with his students, asking me how I would explain the construction of this sentence: We are looking for someone who can do the following: greet customers, wait on tables, and even help in the kitchen from time to time. The book, my friend explained, says that there must be a complete sentence before a colon, but how can that explanation help a student when the words we are looking for someone who can do the following do not sound complete? Anyone under that guidance would surely ask, the following what?
Both my friend’s question and the confusion his textbook unnecessarily causes arise from a simple problem: keeping the terms of the art of grammar straight and employing them methodically. To be referring to a sentence when one means an independent clause will only set up a student to appeal to the sound of the statement, because we all have heard from our earliest days that a sentence is a complete thought expressed in words. But to understand a sentence (in this context) is to see how its words work together, and so to refer to the term sentence when we must analyze a component of a sentence is to employ the wrong tool for the job. We’ve got an axe in our hand when we need a scalpel.
Instead, we should have at hand a few basic terms, some of which will serve us well on every occasion of grammatical analysis. A sentence is not a clause, and by clause we can mean either an independent clause or a subordinate one. A relative pronoun will begin a relative clause, and a relative clause may be restrictive or nonrestrictive. An adjective modifies a noun, but a substantive adjective has turned an adjective into a noun. All of these terms can appear daunting because they are so abstract, and so we hold them at arm’s length when we really should be getting comfortable with the precise distinctions they make—because precision is clarity and clarity is real knowledge.
So let’s look at what a few of these terms can do for us in answering my friend’s question. We’ve seen that sentence is too large a term for the ten words before the colon in the example, but we can’t simply substitute the term independent clause for it, because the ten words we are looking for someone who can do the following make up two clauses, one independent (we are looking for someone) and one subordinate (who can do the following). We know that those two elements work together logically because no comma separates the relative clause from the independent; taken together, then, they comprise a complex statement, and we can see (not hear) that such a statement is complete only when we determine that the adjective following is substantival: the following means the following things or tasks (just as the rich means rich people or the oppressed means oppressed men and women). On this more precise understanding, we could agree that the statement before the colon is grammatically complete and so the colon is in order to enumerate the specific tasks.
Technical terms will keep our attention attuned precisely to the structural detail on which a sentence is built. To analyze means, literally, to loosen apart, and the special terms of grammar (and any other art) help us both to find and to label all the constructive details we can identify with their help. To be daunted by the unfamiliar is to take a very long and winding path home.
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