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I have heard the following type of sentence in many stories, podcasts, etc.:

All were happy that the bus suddenly came and everyone got upset.

I would rather wonder whether conjunction that is an adverb clause introducer here, or is another type of clauses.

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    Answered at Part of speech of that, which was closed for lack of research. // The sentence doesn't make sense.
    – Edwin Ashworth
    Commented Jul 31, 2016 at 16:33
  • "That" is a subordinator. It is introducing the subordinate content clause "that the bus suddenly came and everyone got upset" which is functioning as complement to the adjective "happy".
    – BillJ
    Commented Jul 31, 2016 at 16:34
  • Btw, I agree with Edwin that the sentence doesn't make much sense.
    – BillJ
    Commented Jul 31, 2016 at 18:44
  • @BillJ: It may introduce that clause, or it may only introduce the first clause and not the conjoined clauses. That would be something like All were happy when the bus came, and (then) everyone got upset, to clarify it. That doesn't make much more sense, but at least things happened in temporal sequence.
    – John Lawler
    Commented Aug 1, 2016 at 2:31

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A commonly used term for the "that" in "They were happy that the bus came" is complementizer. It is added at the beginning of the sentence "the bus came" in order to convert it into the complement "that the bus came".

This, in turn, is the object complement of the preposition "at", which here is understood. The complement can be pronominalized to "it"/"this"/"that", in which case the "at" is explicit: "The bus came, and they were happy at that."

"that" complements also occur as the subject and object complements of verbs: "That the bus came pleased them," "They knew that the bus came." Some nouns, like "fact", can also take a "that" complement: "The fact that the bus came surprised them."

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  • The content clause introduced by the subordinator "that" is a direct complement of the adjective "happy", the item that licenses it. There is no 'understood' preposition "at"
    – BillJ
    Commented Jul 31, 2016 at 18:31
  • Because I am not a native speaker, I could not realize that it does not make much sense ,so I apologize for it. Isn't it better to say "All were happy but the bus suddenly came and everyone got upset." or do you suggest a better sentence instead?
    – Amirhosein Rajabi
    Commented Aug 1, 2016 at 13:37

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