Definition:
A sentence that contains an independent clause and at least one dependent clause.
The complex sentence is one of the four basic sentence structures. The other structures are the simple sentence, the compound sentence, and the compound-complex sentence.
See also:
- Exercise in Identifying Sentences by Structure
- Sentence-Imitation Exercise: Complex Sentences
- Basic Sentence Structures
- Hypotaxis
- Main Clause
- Subordinate Clause
- Subordinating Conjunction
Examples and Observations:
- "He was like a cock who thought the sun had risen to hear him crow."
(George Eliot, Adam Bede) - "If a man does not keep pace with his companions, perhaps it is because he hears a different drummer. Let him step to the music which he hears, however measured, or far away."
(Henry David Thoreau) - "[D]ependent clauses cannot be sentences on their own. They depend on an independent clause to support them. The independent clause in a complex sentence carries the main meaning, but either clause may come first. When the dependent clause comes first, it is always followed by a comma."
(A. Robert Young and Ann O. Strauch, Nitty Gritty Grammar: Sentence Essentials for Writers. Cambridge Univ. Press, 2006) - "Most of the sentences we use in writing or in continuous speech are complex. Earlier in this chapter we tried to compose a piece of narrative in simple sentences. It would be difficult to do this at any great length, and in some types of discourse, e.g. the conduct of argument, it would be virtually impossible. There is a recurrent need to expound facts or concepts in greater elaboration than the structure of the simple sentence permits."
(Walter Nash, English Usage: A Guide to First Principles. Routledge, 1986) - "Complex sentences can offer dramatic development, extending a metaphor, as Melville's Captain Ahab reminds us: 'The path to my fixed purpose is laid on iron rails, on which my soul is grooved to run.'"
(Philip Gerard, Creative Nonfiction: Researching and Crafting Stories of Real Life. Story Press, 1996) - "Although volume upon volume is written to prove slavery a very good thing, we never hear of the man who wishes to take the good of it by being a slave himself."
(Abraham Lincoln) - "When we remember we are all mad, the mysteries disappear and life stands explained."
(Mark Twain) - "I think we ought to have as great a regard for religion as we can, so as to keep it out of as many things as possible."
(Sean O'Casey, The Plough and the Stars) - "Courage is rightly esteemed the first of human qualities because it is the quality which guarantees all others."
(Winston Churchill) - "Maturity is a bitter disappointment for which no remedy exists, unless laughter can be said to remedy anything."
(Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.)
