Lesson 9
COMPLEX SENTENCE STRUCTURE

Objective : Upon completion of this lesson, you will:

• Compound parts of sentences.
• Compounded phrases and clauses.
• Compound and complex sentences.

Up to this point, we’ve been discussing some very basic sentence types. There are, of course, ways to make more complicated and more interesting sentences. In English, we do this by making compound phrases or compound and/or complex sentences.

COMPOUND PHRASES
A phrase, remember, is a series of related words that does not have both a subject and a verb. Suppose you have two sentences that are very similar, but have a single phrase that is significantly different. You may combine these sentences, creating a compound phrase by using a conjunction. Although there are many conjunctions, the most common conjunctions are and, but, and or. Some conjunctions combine with other words, such as both, and, not only, and but also, to form correlative conjunctions.

Sentence Structure (continued)