CLAUSE ANALYSIS, also general analysis. A technique of formal grammatical analysis once common in schools in English-speaking countries and English-medium schools elsewhere. It involves the division of longer sentences into their constituent clauses: for example, the analysis of the complex sentence When they arrived, they found that there was not enough food into: they found (main or principal clause); when they arrived (subordinate adverbial CLAUSE of time, modifying the verb found); that there was not enough food (subordinate noun clause, object of the verb found). Such analysis was routine grammatical work in many secondary classrooms until the 1950s, but from the 1960s fell into disfavour. Most teachers and linguists currently present four arguments against such work: (1) It rests on a narrow theoretical base derived from the study of Latin, and ignores the range of types of clauses that can be identified in English. (2) It concentrates on only one aspect of grammar. (3) It is highly formal and remote from everyday language. (4) Most students did not respond well to it and many teachers did not like teaching it. As a result of the precipitous decline in teaching such analysis, students since the 1960s have generally had little organized instruction in sentence forms. Clause analysis continues to be favoured by many older, usually middle-class people, who argue that training in such analysis is useful in developing linguistic skills, especially in writing. See PARSING.