clause
| 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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