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  #1  
Old 12-Jun-2008, 22:39
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allience is an unknown quantity at this point
Default Help: splitting complex sentence and clause function

Hello, I have trouble splitting long complex sentences into clauses and identifying their function. Please let me know if I did this right:

[The president of the company was annoyed]MC [to hear]Prepositional Object Clause [that all the members of the board complained]Direct Object Clause [that the new executive was difficult] Direct Object Clause [to work with.] Subject Clause

As I understood, each clause can only contain 1 verb, so I separated this sentence into 5 clauses. I'm not sure if "to hear" is a distinct clause. I also assigned the syntactic function of each clause but I don't think that I did it right.
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Old 20-Jun-2008, 00:16
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Default Re: Help: splitting complex sentence and clause function

Here’s what I make of it:“To hear” is the qualifying infinitive that does the work of an adverb. The MC should therefore include “to hear”. “That all the members of the board complained …” is the (subordinate) noun clause and “that the new executive was difficult to work with” is another (subordinate) noun clause within the first subordinate clause. The two noun clauses are as you indicated direct objects of the verbs “to hear” & “complained” respectively. “To work” is similar to “to hear” is also a qualifying infinitive that does the work of an adverb.
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