Dependent Clauses and Sentence Structure
A sentence with an independent clause and one or more dependent clauses is referred to as a complex sentence. One with two or more independent clauses and one or more dependent clauses is referred to as a compound-complex sentence. Here are some English examples:
My sister cried because she scraped her knee. (complex sentence)
- Subjects: My sister, she
- Predicates: cried, scraped her knee
- Subordinating conjunction: because
When they told me (that) I won the contest, I cried, but I didn't faint. **(compound-complex sentence)
- Subjects: they, I, I, I
- Predicates: told me, won the contest, cried, didn't faint
- Subordinating conjunctions: when, that (explicit or understood)
- Coordinating conjunction: but
The above sentence contains two dependent clauses. "When they told me" is one; the other is "(that) I won the contest", which serves as the object of the verb "told." The connecting word "that," if not explicitly included, is understood to implicitly precede "I won" and in either case functions as a subordinating conjunction. This sentence also includes two independent clauses, "I cried" and "I didn't faint," connected by the coordinating conjunction "but." The first dependent clause, together with its object (the second dependent clause), adverbially modifies the verbs of both main clauses.
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Famous quotes containing the words dependent, sentence and/or structure:
“Man is so muddled, so dependent on the things immediately before his eyes, that every day even the most submissive believer can be seen to risk the torments of the afterlife for the smallest pleasure.”
—Joseph De Maistre (1753–1821)
“There is then creative reading as well as creative writing. When the mind is braced by labor and invention, the page of whatever book we read becomes luminous with manifold allusion. Every sentence is doubly significant, and the sense of our author is as broad as the world.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“There is no such thing as a language, not if a language is anything like what many philosophers and linguists have supposed. There is therefore no such thing to be learned, mastered, or born with. We must give up the idea of a clearly defined shared structure which language-users acquire and then apply to cases.”
—Donald Davidson (b. 1917)