In his rich and heartfelt Meanjin essay ‘In Praise of the Long Sentence’ (no. 1, 2016, pages 56–65), the novelist Gerald Murnane disclaims having received any thorough grounding in English grammar during his ‘patchy’ education across a number of schools. Nonetheless much of his essay is strong on, even you might say soaked in, grammatical analysis, particularly with regard to the structure of paragraph-long sentences. Unfortunately, despite Murnane’s confident presentation and his rightly esteemed fine literary record, his own sentence analysis occasionally invites challenge.

The essential concept here is the distinction between main and subordinate clauses, a main or principal clause being one that can stand by itself as a sentence while the subordinates, like branches from a tree, enrich the main with further information but are unable to stand independently. The two quotations here from his essay include his own quotations of another’s and of his own work. The racial issue and literary taste involved in the first inner quotation are weighty and even eye-goggling but not to the present point.