confuzing grammar... help much appreciated

[Unregistered]

I have a few questions...

1) Is "to call" an infinitive or an auxillary verb? If not what is an infinitive verb?

2) Is "What if this PM asks people to trust him again?” a complex sentence

3) Is “so they can spend more time tackling drug dealers, muggers and yobs” an adverbial subordinate clause or is it more than one clause

4) In, “it will put us on the line in a way that no government has ever been before” is "that no government has ever been before” a relative or a noun subordinate clause

help would really be appreciated especially with the clauses as I get myself in a bit of a mess

 

[Mohammed Abu Risha]

1) Is "to call" an infinitive or an auxillary verb? If not what is an infinitive verb?

To call: This is an infinitive verb.

2) Is "What if this PM asks people to trust him again?” a complex sentence

Yes, it is a complex sentence because one of its constituents is made up of a clause. In other words, it is a complex sentence because it has a main clause and a subordinate clause.

3) Is “so they can spend more time tackling drug dealers, muggers and yobs” an adverbial subordinate clause or is it more than one clause

Your question is unclear. Let us have the following sentence and see the explanation below:

They have hired more policemen so that they can spend more time tackling drug dealers, muggers and yobs.

They= Subject
have hired= Verb
More policemen= Object
so that......yobs= Adverbial

Therefore, if you are talking about: so....yobs, then it is one clause: an adverbial

But this adverbial already contains an embedded clause, which is: "tackling.....yobs"

For clarification, I would say: the clause that you have mentioned, if looked at as a constituent of the bigger sentence (the matrix sentence), is one unit" An Adverbial.

But if your question is simply: how many clauses are there in "So....yobs", then my answer is that we do have another clause embeded inside the adverbial clause.

4) In, “it will put us on the line in a way that no government has ever been before” is "that no government has ever been before” a relative or a noun subordinate clause

Noun subordinate clause.