7-3 Adverb Clauses: Subordinators

As you learned, adverbs can be single words such as "here", "very", and "quickly". However, adverbs can also appear as a clause. As you have learned, a clause contains a subject and a verb. Look at the following three examples to compare adverbs, adverb phrases, and adverb clauses.

Although you can see that all three adverb forms answer the question "when" the person went boating, the adverb clause has a subject (I) and verb (left). The word in the green is a word called the subordinator. The subordinator connects the main sentence with the adverb clause by showing how they relate.