Perclause

Perclause is a term used in some linguistic annotation schemes to denote a single clause within a sentence, treated as an independent unit for analysis. It is commonly defined as the minimal syntactic unit that carries a predicate together with its core arguments, with optional modifiers. In this sense, a perclause corresponds to the clause-level building block used for downstream analyses such as parsing and semantics.

A perclause typically includes a finite predicate and its primary arguments, such as subject and object, along with optional adverbial or adjectival modifiers. Annotations at the perclause level may record features such as tense, aspect, mood, voice, polarity, and grammatical relations between the predicate and its arguments. Some frameworks also note inter-clausal relationships when multiple perclauses occur within a single sentence.

In practice, sentences with multiple clauses are segmented into perclauses for uniform analysis. This segmentation positions perclause as an intermediate unit between phrase-level annotations and sentence-level interpretation, allowing researchers to compare clause structure and meaning across a corpus.

Applications of perclause annotation include corpus linguistics, statistical parsing evaluation, machine translation training, and readability or syntactic complexity metrics. It supports clause-level alignment, predicate-argument mapping, and cross-language comparisons where clause boundaries differ.

Example: In the sentence “The cat slept, and the dog barked,” there are two perclauses: “The cat slept” and “the dog barked.” Each perclause carries its own predicate and arguments, illustrating clause-level segmentation within a multi-clause sentence. See also clause, sentence, syntax, corpus annotation.