Topic 2: Dependent Clauses
The inverse of independent clauses, dependent clauses do not make sense by themselves and need to be “propped up” by an independent clause to be grammatically correct.
- Dependent clause:
- A dependent clause is an incomplete sentence. It “depends” on an independent clause.
- These are incomplete sentences because they are not complete thoughts. Since it is not a complete thought, it does not make sense on its own. To make it a complete thought and a complete sentence, we need to add more to the sentence, like those parts of speech we talked about in the last section: subjects, verbs, and objects.
- It is important to remember that, if we do not change the dependent clause, it will need an independent clause to be correct.