clause

Pluralclauses

Formsclauses, clausing, claused

1. 1
   nouncountable

   A distinct section of a contract, will, or other legal document, setting out a single provision or condition.

   The contract's confidentiality clause prevented her from discussing the settlement.

   A late-payment clause in the lease let the landlord charge extra fees.

   Similarprovision, stipulation, condition, term, article

   Note

   Legal documents are carved into clauses, and so are statutes. The Railway Magazine of April 1951 recalls one of the clauses of an 1897 Act, which provided that the North British Railway should work a line in perpetuity. Everyday usage names a clause by what it governs, as in confidentiality clause or late-payment clause, and reports its content with "provided that" or "provides that."

2. 2
   nouncountable

   A group of words containing a subject and a verb, which may form a complete sentence or function as part of one.

   A single sentence can contain several clauses linked by conjunctions.

   This clause has its own subject and verb, so it could stand alone.

   Note

   This is the sense that keeps closest to its Latin origin. Clausula meant "close, end" and also "the close of a period," from claudere, "to shut." Close is its doublet. Sentence is its nearest neighbor, but the two are not interchangeable. A sentence can hold several clauses, while a clause is the unit that has its own subject and verb.

3. 3
   nouncountable

   A verb along with its subject and any modifiers; it is independent when it expresses a complete thought and dependent when it cannot stand on its own.

   The dependent clause "because it rained" cannot stand alone as a sentence.

   Joining two independent clauses with only a comma creates a run-on error.

   Note

   Here the interest is in classification. Independent clauses can stand as sentences, and dependent ones cannot. Andrew Radford's Transformational grammar (1988) treats "would she get a degree?" in "Your sister could go to College, but would she get a degree?" as a clause in its own right, one with an inverted auxiliary, joined to the first by but. Superordinate and subordinate are the technical alternatives to independent and dependent.

4. 4
   nouncountable

   A verb, the grammatical arguments it requires, and any optional adjuncts that modify them.

   Each clause centers on a verb and the arguments it selects.

   Optional adjuncts can be added to a clause without changing its core meaning.

   Note

   A linguist's definition that starts from the verb rather than the subject. The verb decides what must be present, and those required pieces are its arguments. Adjuncts such as time or place phrases can be added or dropped without breaking the structure. That makes it broader than the subject-and-verb definition, because it does not insist on a subject at all.

5. 5
   nouncountable

   A component part of a statement or query, performing a defined role within the larger command.

   The WHERE clause restricts the query to active users only.

   Developers optimized the join clause to speed up the report.

   Note

   In query languages, each part of a command is usually named by the keyword that opens it. The WHERE clause filters rows, the ORDER BY clause sorts them, and a join clause combines tables. Programmers speak of adding, removing or rewriting a clause, much as drafters do with the legal sense.

6. 6
   verbtransitive

   To formally amend a bill of lading or another similar shipping document.

   The chief officer claused the bill of lading to record the water-stained cartons.

   Inspectors clause shipping documents whenever goods are loaded in damaged condition.

   Note

   Shipping turned the noun into a verb meaning to add a reservation to a bill of lading, typically one suggesting the goods are defective. A clean bill carries no such remark. A 1970 Asian-African Legal Consultative Committee report calls clausing "dirtying," which impairs a bill's negotiability. That is why shippers strenuously resist it, and why a carrier who clauses a bill unnecessarily raises questions of liability.

Showing meanings only. Show all 6