What Is a Sentence?

A sentence consists of at least one main clause and can include further related subordinate clauses to form a group of words that conveys a completed thought or idea.

What is a clause?

To understand what constitutes a sentence, we must first understand the idea of a clause. There are two types of clauses: main (or independent) clauses and subordinate (or dependent) clauses.

What is a main clause?

A main clause must form a standalone statement, which means it requires a subject (the person, animal or object that we are talking about) and a predicate (what we want to say about the subject). In other words, at least one noun and an associated verb.

What is a subordinate clause?

A subordinate clause is one that is dependent on a main clause in order to complete the meaning. It therefore cannot stand alone.

For example, “The dog is in the kitchen,” is a main clause. “It is hungry,” is also a main clause.

However if we said “Because it is hungry,” on its own, then we have a subordinate clause, because information is missing to make this clause make sense. Therefore “The dog is in the kitchen because it is hungry,” is now a sentence, with complete meaning, made up of a main independent clause (“The dog is in the kitchen”) and a subordinate, or dependent, clause (“because it is hungry”).

The word ‘because’ is a conjunction, which joins clauses together.

Other common conjunctions include ‘and,’ ‘but’ and ‘although.’

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