Chapter 14

Grammatical Coordination and Subordination

Brian Thill

You probably don’t spend much time each day thinking about grammar, but if you’re planning to do any reading or writing, whether in Humanities Core or in this lifetime, you should. The first purpose of grammar is to provide a set of rules and conventions for a given language so that the people using that language can communicate ideas in a complex, fluid, and efficient fashion.

For the purposes of this brief chapter, we want to focus on just two small but important parts of English grammar: grammatical coordination (also known as juxtaposition) and grammatical subordination. After we’ve defined the key terms and provided a few real-world examples drawn from some of this year’s course readings, we’ll explain how and why they’re important for the texts that contain them and how they can help us as readers and writers more generally.

Grammatical coordination describes the process by which a writer arranges different parts of a sentence into parallel or coordinated relationships, the way you might be inclined to wear matching socks. Basically it’s the grammatical feature that allows you to talk about related things without having to start new sentences each time. The specific coordinators we generally use to achieve this effect are “and” and “or,” those tiny little words that neatly link parts of a sentence together like the couplings on each end of a train car. And like linked train-cars, they are working in tandem, moving along a parallel track. The parts of a sentence that are connected by these coordinators are independent clauses. These clauses are “independent” because each clause contains the necessary components that a sentence requires (a subject and verb or predicate), and thus could stand on their own as smaller sentences and still be grammatically coherent. In this sense, coordinating grammar allows you to make each sentence do more than it might have, had you written simpler sentences. Since the way you craft your sentences best communicates your style, tone, ideas, and perspective, this kind of thing actually matters quite a bit.

Let’s take an example from one of the assigned texts for this course. In an English translation of Bereishit, the first book of the Torah, or in the Biblical Book of Genesis, we read: “And God said, ‘Let there be light,’ and there was light.” Seems straightforward enough. But it isn’t just several bits of information we’re being given in one compact sentence. In this instance, the grammatical coordination also establishes a clear causal relationship that has theological and dramatic importance. If instead we were to read that God said, “Let there be light, and then maybe like a nice wicker chair in the corner,” that sentence would still express grammatical coordination, but it would be of a different order. It’s not just two things being discussed in one sentence. It matters that the two things being described (in this case, God’s utterance and the act of creation) are grammatically unified in this instance because it matters to the very notion of God being described. This God’s word is his deed, and therefore that little coordinating and is not some simple way to talk about light and wicker chairs, but is instead a grammatically efficient way of explaining God’s power and immediacy, where the dramatic effect of light follows hard on the heels of the call for light.

We can also describe this kind of coordination as grammatical juxtaposition, wherein more than one idea runs parallel within a complex sentence, and in so doing establishing independent actions or ideas as related in important ways. The sentence is complex because it moves beyond the “See Spot run” method of sentence construction, where there is always one simple subject and one simple predicate. If we want to know what happened to Spot after he ran, or what his little puppy mind was thinking as he ran, we have to look elsewhere, because the storybook sentence won’t tell us. The same applies with our sentence from the Torah and the Book of Genesis. If only the content mattered, and not the way that content was organized through grammatical choices, other alternatives might suffice – perhaps something like “Then God did something else. He said, ‘Let there be light.’ There was light.” These would also be grammatically correct, since each little sentence has a subject and a predicate, but they’re about as fluid and stirring as “See Spot run” – too simple, too elementary. Using coordination properly not only allows for grammatical coherence, but also provides for a mode of communication that can achieve its desired effects on its readers.

Grammatical subordination is related, but different. Subordination describes syntactical constructions in which clauses within a sentence are dependent on the main clause in that same sentence, and which may not have parallel functions within a sentence. Subordinate clauses are usually introduced by complementizing terms like “if” or “whether,” or, more often, by subordinated conjunctions such as “because” or “while” or “before” or “after.” If used wisely, subordination, like coordination, can provide you with a compact way to embed more depth and insight into a sentence than you might have otherwise.

Looking at another example from our course readings, we find in the Qu’ran the following: “Go ye forth, (whether equipped) lightly or heavily, and strive and struggle, with your goods and your persons, in the cause of Allah. That is best for you, if ye (but) knew.” That dependent clause (“whether equipped…”) helps to explain the conditions within which the first part (“Go ye forth”) is to be made meaningful or comprehensible. In this example, going forth is the primary command, but the inclusion of that dependent clause describing the lightness or heaviness of equipment does more than just clarify or expand – it effectively alters the entire dynamic of the sentence and its meanings.

Notice how the meaning is changed in a sentence like that by way of this simple grammatical construction. Grammatically subordinated clauses depend on the primary clause in the sentence to possess any meaning (uttered by themselves, they’d make no sense), but at the same time, so much of what a reader is supposed to get from a text depends on what those dependent clauses say. In this instance, it’s not just the command to go forth and strive in the cause of Allah that is important. It also seems to matter that how well- or ill-equipped you are does not matter with respect to this imperative. The struggle for the sake of the cause is essential, but your sense of whether or not you’re suitably equipped to undertake that struggle is not. For a reader or listener to hear that the lightness or heaviness of their equipment isn’t important to this pursuit of the cause of Allah might end up being as important to that listener as anything else that sentence says.

This is a dramatically different transformation in meaning, all due to the use of the subordinate clause. This is why a brief little dependent clause, helpless and incoherent on its own (as a coordinating “and” would be, left by itself), is in fact a critical component in these sentences, and your own. Since the Humanities Core Course is as much about the development of your own writing as it is about your ability to engage critically with the writings of others, it’s critical to devote as much attention to how coordination and subordination serve to communicate meaning or obscure it, whether in the works you read or the works you’re beginning to write.