Cohesive Devices: Subordinators

The use of subordinators (also called subordinating conjunctions) contributes greatly to the cohesion of a text. Unlike coordinators, these words and phrases introduce ideas that are dependent to the main clause in a sentence.

There are three types of subordinators:

  • simple
  • complex
  • correlative

The exercises in the following pages will familiarize you with the first two types of subordinators and give you a little practice using them.

We will look at correlative subordinators later in the semester