Subordination (linguistics)

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In linguistics, subordination is a complex syntactic construction in which one or more clauses are dependent on the main clause, such as The dog ran home after it had played with the ball. The italicized text is the subordinate clause. The grammatical structure associated with subordination is hypotaxis, or the grammatical arrangement of "unequal" constructs (hypo="beneath", taxis="arrangement").

Dependent clauses are also called "subordinate clauses".

Subordinate clauses are introduced by a complementizer (e.g. that, if, whether) or a subordinating conjunction (e.g. after, because, while).

• subordinate complement clause: I don't know if George is awake yet.
• subordinate modifier clause: George overslept because his alarm clock was broken.

[edit] See also

• Complex sentence
• Coordination (linguistics)