Name: Advanced English Grammar: Multi-Clause Sentences (Embedded Clauses)
Uploaded: 2025-06-17T18:36:28.000Z
Duration: 15 min 24 s
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Hi everybody, welcome to www.engvid.com, I'm Adam.

Transition words & phrases

In today's lesson I have a little bit of an advanced grammar lesson, so make sure you take your time and concentrate because this can be a little bit difficult, okay?

What I'm going to show you is how to look at a multi-clause sentence, a sentence that has more than one clause or quite a few clauses, and some of these clauses are inside other clauses.

Now you can have very simple embedded clauses, this is not simple, okay?

Before I show you all the different clauses in this sentence, I want you to take a moment and try to identify them by yourself.

You can press pause on your video player, try to identify all the different clauses, and then when you're ready, press play, come back, and I'll walk you through this sentence slowly and show you all the different clauses, and then show you how all the relationships work or how all the different pieces work together, okay?

Many young people are taught that if they work hard while they are young, they will have a good life as adults because they will have the money to do what they want.

Legitimate sentence, it's actually not even that long because there's enough information in it, it's properly organized, but there are quite a few different pieces to it.

So you need to start understanding the relationships between all these different pieces and how they work together.

Many young people are taught, you have a subject, you have a verb, a passive, but it's still a verb, are taught something, right?

So this is your independent clause because subject, verb, and there's an object coming.

So we're going to leave that there, I'm just going to work with these two markers here.

Now, first thing you notice, here's a that, and I'm going to put this in a little bit of a square.

So I need an object for taught, and this is the beginning of my object.

And I'll tell you a little bit more about noun clauses, adjective clauses, all that after.

So, basically, from here, actually I'm going to do this differently.

Everything between the two brackets is the object are taught.

They are taught all of this, beginning with a noun clause conjunction, or a noun clause marker.

So you have a conjunction, subject, and verb.

So right away, you have your second clause.

This is a clause I mentioned, it's a noun clause.

So what is the subject and verb that goes with that?

So right away, you can notice that both of these conjunctions are actually sharing a clause, a subject and a verb combination.

So if I break it down like this, so, young people are taught that they will have a good life as adults, right?

This is your independent clause with the object noun clause.

Now, if they work hard while they are young, they will have...

When will they have or how will they have a good life as adults?

If they work hard, they will have a good life as adults.

So I have this conjunction and this conjunction sharing one clause.

And this is where people get confused, because they don't...

You have to understand that clauses can be shared.

Independent clause is independent and must be able to stand by itself.

Dependents, you can start playing with them, you can share, etc.

But this one is very specific to a part of this here.

This is an adverb clause, answering the question when about this verb, work.

So this verb, work, is right now working on three different clauses, right?

While they are young, and subject verb, objects of...

Subject object, subject verb of the adverb clause.

So the entire adverb clause is answering the question of when about work.

I'm going to try to slow it down a little bit.

So, if they work hard while they are young, they will have a good life.

Why will they have a good life as adults?

Because, and I'm starting another adverb clause, because they will have.

So now I have another adverb clause working on this verb.

Adverb clauses have a relationship with some sort of verb.

That's why they're called adverb clauses.

But you can share verbs, you can share clauses, so you can have more than one clause.

So this is a complement phrase, but do needs an object.

Now, I have another noun clause acting as the object to the verb do, a transitive object.

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Advanced English Grammar: Multi-Clause Sentences (Embedded Clauses)

specific

properly

practice

identify