In English you can use participles for the same use as the Spanish gerund: 'I left the place singing'. In Spanish you can make an adverbial subordinate clause by using the gerund form for instance, for instance cantando which means 'while I/you/he/she/we/they sing'. I think those are the most common strategies, but there are also strategies that fall outside those two types. Other languages make more extensive use of this strategy called nominalization, for instance Turkish. Wikipedia gives the following example: Iūlia dīcit sē bonam discipulam esse which has as a more literal translation 'Julia says herself to be a good student.', but the translation that is grammatical in English is 'Julia says she is a good student'.In this example the subject of the subordinate clause se 'herself' is in the accusative case, the case used for objects in Latin, and the verb of the subordinate clause, esse 'to be' is in the infinitive.

In Latin for instance one way of forming a subordinate clause which is the object of the verb of the main clause is having the verb of the main clause in the infinitive (which is sort of a noun) and having the subject of the subordinate clause in the accusative. You know one common way, especially but not exclusively in Indo-European languages, and that is having a subordinate conjunction (sometimes called 'complementizer').Īnother common strategy is to make the verb of the subordinate clause some sort of noun. Subordination is a wide subject there are subordinate clauses which are subjects or objects of the main verb, as in your example 'I know that you like her', there are adverbial subordinate clauses, like 'I left when I saw him', and there are relative clauses, like 'I know the man that you saw'.

Language subordination process 3 steps