Introducing Subordinate Clauses

If you look here, you will see an diagrammed example of what is called a subordinate clause.

From the page on clauses

With rare exceptions, every subordinate clause functions as a noun, adjective, or adverb within another clause. This means that a subordinate clause is embedded in, and thus a part of, a main clause. The easiest way to identify clauses is to first identify the S/V/C patterns.

Here's a step by step on how to identify clauses

I should mention that if you are getting confused here, don't worry. We are covering this quickly in order to give you an overview of different parts of sentences. For now, the main thing to remember is that:

• prepositional phrases are nouns or noun phrases with a preposition in front of them (like "with a preposition" in this sentence).

• Clauses are sentence patterns -- they have a subject/verb, or subject/verb/complement pattern. There are two sentence patterns in that last sentence.

• compound sentences are two main clauses (that can each stand on their own) which are united by a joining word, a conjunction; sometimes, they are united by a semi-colon (like this sentence ; -)).

• complex sentences are sentences with a main clause and a subordinate clause. (Although I tried to come up with a complex sentence structure for this sentence, I couldn't until just now ;-)).

Try this quiz on identifying simple, compound and complex sentences. There are several really tricky ones. Do your best.

Hint:

The trickiest ones are probably the ones that look like compound sentences but are really simple sentences with compound elements, like this one:

The teacher walked (into the classroom), greeted the students, and took attendance.

You can see that there is one subject (the teacher) who did three things (walked, greeted, and took) and there are two direct objects (the students, attendance).

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