Recipe

Classify a clause as independent or dependent

Use when: you're looking at one clause -- inside a longer sentence, or on its own -- and need to know whether it's independent or dependent. A clause can now be triggered by either a subordinator or a relative pronoun.

Goal: a confident independent-or-dependent call for any clause this course can throw at you, plus the one word responsible for the answer

Taught in Dependent Clauses and Subordinators · extends Tell a phrase from a clause from a sentence

1. 1

   Make sure you're looking at a clause and not a phrase: is there a subject doing or being something, with its own verb? If there's no pair at all, you're not classifying a clause yet.

   • no pair — this isn't a clause; reclassify it as a phrase instead.
   • a pair exists — continue to Step 2.

   Why: independent versus dependent is a question about clauses specifically; asking it of a bare phrase doesn't make sense yet.

2. 2

   Read the clause starting at its first word. Does a subordinator (because, although, since, when, if, unless, while...) or a relative pronoun (who, whom, whose, which, that) sit right at the front, ahead of the subject-verb pair you just found?

   Example

   the delegates finally reached an agreement: pair found (delegates / reached). No subordinator, no relative pronoun up front. It lands as a finished statement. Independent. whom the committee had already interviewed: pair found (committee / had... interviewed), with whom out front as its object. It never lands as a finished statement on its own. Dependent -- and the mechanism this time is a relative pronoun, not a subordinator.

   • neither one is present, and the clause lands as a finished statement — it's independent; it can stand alone as its own sentence.
   • a subordinating conjunction is doing the job — it's dependent; strip that one word off and the same clause would stand alone.
   • a relative pronoun is doing the job, sometimes even serving as the clause's own subject (the book which sits on the table, where which is what's sitting) — it's dependent all the same. The mechanism is a relative pronoun instead of a subordinator; the clause still can't stand alone as written.

   Why: the mechanism is always one word sitting at the front of the pair. Once you know which of the two families that word belongs to, you already know the clause is dependent. There's no need for a separate rule for each type of dependent clause the next three sections are about to name.