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The subordinate unit is called the dependent, and the superordinate unit the head. Thus anytime two syntactic units are in a head-dependent relationship, subordination obtains. For example: black dog with patience clean the bathroom. The word in bold in each case is dependent on the other word, which is its head.
A dependent clause, also known as a subordinate clause, subclause or embedded clause, is a certain type of clause that juxtaposes an independent clause within a complex sentence. For instance, in the sentence "I know Bette is a dolphin", the clause "Bette is a dolphin" occurs as the complement of the verb "know" rather than as a freestanding ...
A sentence consisting of at least one dependent clause and at least two independent clauses may be called a complex-compound sentence or compound-complex sentence. Sentence 1 is an example of a simple sentence. Sentence 2 is compound because "so" is considered a coordinating conjunction in English, and sentence 3 is complex.
A periodic sentence is a sentence with a stylistic device featuring syntactical subordination to a single main idea, which usually is not complete until the very end of the sentence. [1] The periodic sentence emphasizes its main idea by placing it at the end, following all the subordinate clauses and other modifiers that support the principal ...
The definition may be extended to idiomatic phrases that behave as a unit and perform the same function, e.g. "as well as", "provided that". A simple literary example of a conjunction is "the truth of nature, and the power of giving interest" (Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Biographia Literaria). [3]
In linguistics, an absolute construction is a grammatical construction standing apart from a normal or usual syntactical relation with other words or sentence elements. It can be a non-finite clause that is subordinate in form and modifies an entire sentence, an adjective or possessive pronoun standing alone without a modified substantive, or a transitive verb when its object is implied but ...
A primary division for the discussion of clauses is the distinction between independent clauses and dependent clauses. [3] An independent clause can stand alone, i.e. it can constitute a complete sentence by itself. A dependent clause, by contrast, relies on an independent clause's presence to be efficiently utilizable.
Another definition of "sentence length" is the number of clauses in the sentence, whereas the "clause length" is the number of phones in the clause. [ 12 ] Research by Erik Schils and Pieter de Haan by sampling five texts showed that two adjacent sentences are more likely to have similar lengths than two non-adjacent sentences, and almost ...