Please note that the content of this book primarily consists of articles available from Wikipedia or other free sources online. In linguistics, a dependent clause (sometimes called a subordinate clause) is a clause that augments an independent clause with additional information, but which cannot stand alone as a sentence. Dependent clauses modify the independent clause of a sentence or serve as a component of it. Some grammarians use the term subordinate clause as a synonym for dependent clause, but in some grammars subordinate clause refers only to adverbial dependent clauses.