Dependent Clauses

Abstract

The basic elements of the sentence were dealt with in chapter 5; in chapter 6 we found that, of the various kinds of word-groups, the subordinative ones contained, besides a leading element, which could be a word or a word-group, one or more elements which were modifiers of the leading element. These modifiers are often called secondary elements. It has also been pointed out before that both basic and secondary elements could be groups of words which have the same formal characteristics as a sentence in that they contain a verb which agrees with the subject, and sometimes other basic and secondary elements of a sentence. Such groups are not sentences, since they do not stand by themselves, or, to use Bloomfield’s terminology, since they are “included grammatically in a larger structure,” viz. the sentence. Notwithstanding their formal resemblance to sentences, they are merely basic or secondary elements of the larger structure in which they are included. They are therefore called dependent or subordinate clauses (sometimes sub-clauses).