Calling It Like It Is: Noun Clause, Adjective Clause, Adverb Clause

Terminology is a problem in grammar. Maybe it is in lots of fields. Marine biologists get up in arms, I hear, when we call starfish starfish instead of the more correct, apparently, seastar. They aren’t fish, they tell us, so don’t call them fish. (They aren’t stars either, but whatever.)

I’ve already talked about the adverb/adverbial issue here, and a related one that I’ve been asked about is Noun Clause, Adjective Clause, and Adverb Clause. So let’s get to it.

These terms are pretty widespread, perhaps more so in teaching English to speakers of other languages, and in teaching other languages to speakers of English, but are also sometimes used in straight-up descriptions of English grammar to English speakers. Yeah, they’re everywhere.

So, on the one hand, the labels don’t matter that much; call things whatever you want. On the other hand (the more important hand), using these terms once again conflates form and function, which can confuse and mislead. I have discussed elsewhere why it’s better for students to take advantage of their intuitions about morphological and syntactic patterns, rather than on meaning-based definitions and functions. We have some techniques for identifying nouns, for example, (they can be made plural, they take determiners, etc.) but then these noun clauses don’t match up with what we know about nouns.

A noun clause is typically defined as a clause that functions as a noun. Let’s look at some typical examples of things labeled as noun clauses, the bracketed parts below;

She believes [that the fairies are real].
We wonder [when they will arrive].

Good old about.com gives us this – Noun clause: A dependent clause that functions as a noun (that is, as a subject, object, or complement) within a sentence. Also known as a nominal clause.

I would say, however, that these are both simply subordinate clauses. They are subordinate to the main clause and dependent upon the main verb in that clause. We can further label them that-clauses and wh-clauses, but there doesn’t seem to be any real advantage to calling them noun clauses. The reason they are considered nounish and labeled as noun clauses by some is that they serve as complements of a verb or as subjects, as nouns can. But it’s a lot more straightforward to simply call them subordinate or dependent clauses and ignore that noun part. You gain nothing from that label, and it leads students to doubt their intuitions about what nouns really are.

So let’s look at adjective clause and adverb clause, to see if those labels help shed light on the noun clause label – or on anything, for that matter.

Adjective clauses are also called (my preference) “relative clauses”. The term is preferable since it doesn’t conflate an actual adjective with the function of adjectives. These types of clauses serve to give more information about a noun, like adjectives do, but they are not adjectives themselves. They’re just clauses. They’re called relative clauses because they “relate” the info in the clause to the noun that the clause modifies.

The man [who I saw yesterday] left his hat here.
I saw the fox [that ate the chickens from our coop].
Let’s eat at the restaurant [where you went last night].

It’s clearer to me – and to my students and the students of other teachers I have worked with – to not use the terms noun clause and adjective clause. Let nouns be nouns and adjectives be adjectives.

Same for so-called adverb clauses. As discussed in this post, adverbs are a bit messy – and all kinds of things get labeled as adverbs. I believe that we should not add clauses to that. Here are some examples of the kinds of things that some people label adverb clauses:

Joe scrubbed the floor [until his arms ached].
The dogs had been barking [since the owners left].
Fay walked to the store [because she was out of eggs].

Huh? The claim is that these are all adverb clauses because they answer the questions where, when, or why. But lots of different kinds of phrases do that. These are prepositional phrases; I’ve discussed them here.

Nothing is gained, that I can see, by calling these adverbial. It confuses form and function, which wouldn’t be a problem if it wasn’t actually confusing!

It’s just clearer and more accurate to call nouns nouns, adjectives adjectives, adverbs adverbs, and clauses clauses. Are there benefits to distinguishing among the various kinds of clauses? Yeah, sure, there can be. But I’d want to use labels that don’t conflate form and function. I can discuss different types of subordinate clauses in another post. Till then, let's just call it like it is.