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Let’s look at some examples:
Sally sings.
She loves you.
We are going to the mall this weekend.
In the first example, there are only two words! This is a little unusual, but it
goes to show that an independent clause can consist of nothing more than the
subject and verb, and yet contain a complete thought. Nothing else is needed. If
I told you, “Sally sings,” you may have extra questions, but you get my meaning.
Dependent Clauses
On the other hand, dependent clauses do not contain a complete thought. This
is because they almost always begin with a subordinator. A subordinator makes
this clause less important to the meaning of the whole sentence, and therefore it
must be attached to an independent clause to be fully understood. “Subordinate”
means “less important” and some people call these subordinate clauses for that
reason.
Take a look at this clause:
because he wanted to find out the answer.
Here, “because” is a subordinator. Alone, this could not function as a sentence.
It would be called a sentence fragment, meaning that it is only part of an idea.
Instead, we need to add it to an independent clause:
Allen went to the teacher’s office because he wanted to find out the
answer.
If I told you, “Allen went to the teacher’s office,” you would be able to under-
stand me. It is a completely self-contained idea, and therefore it is able to func-
tion as a sentence. However, it is possible to add more information. In this case,
we have added a dependent clause. The dependent clause could not function
alone because if I said to you “because he wanted to find out an answer,” you
simply could not understand my whole meaning.
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