clause

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Part of a sentence that contains a subject and a verb, and is joined to the rest of the sentence by a conjunction.

In English, two ‘main’ clauses are joined by the conjunctions and, but, or, and are said to be coordinated, as in ‘I love cherries but I hate apples’. Main clauses can always stand as independent sentences.

Use of any other conjunction indicates a subordinate clause, which depends on the main clause for its meaning, as in ‘She wept, after she went to the funeral.’

It should be noted that English word order can transpose subordinating conjunctions to the beginning of the whole sentence, as in ‘After she went to the funeral, she wept.’

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