5. Sentence Structure

Simple Sentence တစ္ခုမွာ clause တစ္ခုသာရွိတယ္။

The children are laughing.

John wanted a new bicycle.

All the girls are learning English.

Compound Sentences

Compound sentence မွာေတာ့ clause ႏွစ္ခု၊ ႏွစ္ခုထက္ပုိတယ္။

(We stayed behind) and (finished the job).

(We stayed behind) and (finished the job), then (we went home).

Compound sentence ထဲက clause ေတြကို co-ordination conjunctions ေတြနဲ႔ ဆက္ရတယ္။

John shouted and everybody waved.

We looked everywhere but we couldn’t find him.

They are coming by car so they should be here soon.

Common co-ordination conjunction ေတြကေတာ့ and; but; or; nor; so; then; yet တုိ႔ျဖစ္ပါတယ္။

Complex sentences

Complex sentence ေတြမွာ main clause တစ္ခုႏွင့္ adverbial clause တစ္ခု၊ သုိ႔မဟုတ္ တစ္ခုထက္ပုိပါေလ့ရွိတယ္။ Adverbial clause ေတြဟာ ပံုမွန္အားျဖင့္ main clause ရဲ႕ေနာက္က လာေလ့ရွိတယ္။

Her father died when she was very young.

Her father died (main clause)

when (subordinating conjunction)

she was very young (adverbial clause)

She had a difficult childhood because her father died when she was very young.

She had a difficult childhood (main clause)

because (subordinating conjunction)

her father died (adverbial clause)

when (subordinating conjunction)

she was very young (adverbial clause)

အခ်ိဳ႕ subordinate clause ေတြဟာ main clause ရဲ႕ ေရွ႕ကလာေလ့ရွိတယ္။

Although a few snakes are dangerous, most of them are quite harmless.

Although (subordinating conjunction)

a few snakes are dangerous (adverbial clause)

most of them are harmless (main clause)

Sentence တစ္ခုမွာ subordinate clause ႏွင့္ co-ordinate clause ႏွစ္မ်ိဳးလံုးပါ၀င္ႏုိင္တယ္။

Although she has always lived in France, she speaks fluent English because her mother was American and her father was Nigerian.

Although (subordinating conjunction)

she has always lived in France (adverbial clause)

she speaks fluent English (main clause)

because (subordinating conjunction)

her mother was American (adverbial clause)

and (coordinating conjunction)

her father was Nigerian (adverbial clause)

Adverbial Clause ခုႏွစ္မ်ိဳးရွိတယ္။

	Common conjunctions
Contrast clauses	although; though; even though; while
Reason clauses	because; since; as
Place clauses	where; wherever; everywhere
Purpose clauses	so that; so; because + want
Result clauses	so that; so … that; such … that
Time clauses	when; before; after; since; while; as; as soon as; by the time; until
Conditional clauses	if; unless; provided (that); as long as