Types of Independent Clauses
I am curious if anyone is aware of a list of different types or categories of independent clauses. By comparison, there are four types of sentences (simple, compound, complex, and compounds complex), and many types of subordinate clauses (comparative clauses, that-clauses, contact clauses, etc.). However, I haven't been able to find a breakdown of different types of independent clause. I'm especially interested in a categorization by structure. For example, some sentences have compound subjects, others have compound predicates, others have the verbs omitted, etc. I have tried on my own, but I fear I'm reinventing the wheel. Your help is certainly appreciated.
To say "independent clause" is to say "simple sentence". A single clause that stands by itself is a main clause, and that's all you need for simple sentencehood.
There are many different things one can do to a main clause,
but normally independent utterances are classified by pragmatic function:
- statements (declarative) He closed the door.
- questions (interrogative) Did he close the door?
- orders (imperative) Close the door.
- blessings (benedictive) May this house be safe from tigers
- curses (maledictive) May you spend eternity rollerskating on cobblestones
The names in parentheses are often called "moods" because Latin (and other ancient languages) had special verb forms for them and gave them these names. The technical term for them is "speech acts", and they're different in pragmatics -- use -- but not really in semantics -- meaning.
That is, there's no real semantic difference between the first three sentences; they refer to the same idea in the same words. The difference is in what the speaker expects the listener to do:
believe the statement, answer the question, or obey the order.
Since an independent clause is a simple sentence, the answer you seek would basically be a list of possible subject structures combined with a list of possible predicate structures1. These lists have not been commonly combined, but studied and categorized separately.
1Wikipedia does not include a link to Carlson's full 1977 paper. Here is one.