Complex sentences in Russian have a heterogeneous structure, different means of communication and shades of meaning. The subordinate parts in them are divided into explanatory, attributive, adverbial.
Explanatory clauses
Like all types of complex sentences, NGN with an explanatory clause is built on the principle of semantic and structural incompleteness in the main part, which is a necessary condition for the presence of a clause as a complementary and explanatory component. In syntactic constructions of this type, as a rule, one of the members is missing in the main part: subject or object. The task of the subordinate part is to fill in the missing elements, explain them, if necessary, disseminate them: Long chilly nights I dreamed that one day the sun would warm, spring would come, and all this hell of cold and damp would leave us at least for a while.
The subordinate explanatory sentence is attached to the main one with the help of allied words and conjunctions: how much, where, what, how much, so that, as if, etc. The main type of connection between the two parts is control: verb formsthe main one controls the grammatical forms of other members of the subordinate clause: He is naive and stupid who believes that a scoundrel can be corrected, re-educated.
A subordinate explanatory clause is required for a compound sentence that contains:
1. Verbs of lexical-semantic groups:
- "perception": feel, hear, feel, etc.;
- "emotional-psychological state": want, be bored, rejoice, be sad, regret, etc.;
- “speaking”: explain, agree, tell, shout, yell, speak, etc.;
- "thinking process": count, understand, think, etc.;
- "emotional message": threaten, plead, complain.
2. Adjectives that perform the function of control and express different shades of emotional states: happy, agree, guilty.
3. Modal-predicative units: necessary, painful, sorry.
In a sentence, an explanatory clause is always found after the words it defines. This criterion is the main limitation. The place of the subordinate clause can be after the main one or inside it: The fact that many laws of nature stop working has been seriously discussed by scientists recently.
NGN lexical groups with explanatory clauses
Conjunctions that attach the subordinate clause to the main clause help express some of the semantic relationships that arise between NGN constructions, for example:
- Explanatory clause with conjunction that tells about facts that are real and have a place to be: I was not mistaken in asserting that the thunderstorm will not begin until evening.
- Conjunction as in NGN refers to those words in the main sentence that are associated with the expression of thought processes and perception: We noticed how one of the horsemen stood out from the general mass and galloped a little further away.
- The explanatory clause attached to the main by conjunctions as if, as if, as if, etc. give the predicative unit a general shade of semantic uncertainty, an element of presumption of what it says: It seemed to him that his mother was not entirely satisfied with him.
There are, of course, a lot of such additional shades. Thanks to them, the communicative and informational framework of complex sentences expands and their total number in our speech increases.
