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I've been told that this is an example of a complex sentence:

But then he took a great leap, trying to pull a high kick out of the sky.

I see that the "but then" serves as a cohesive conjunction to join the previous paragraph and create contrast. But I can't work out which clause is the dependent one and which is independent - unless the ellipsed subject in the second clause makes it the independent one.

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    The clause with the subject and the tensed verb is the independent one. The clause with thea missing subject and the non-finite verb is the dependent one.
    – John Lawler
    Commented May 27, 2015 at 1:46

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The structure of your example is:

[S But then he took a great leap, [S (he was) 
trying to pull a high kick out of the sky ] ]

or, more schematically, [S ... [S ... ] ] , that is, it is a sentence (S) within a sentence. That is what a complex sentence is: a sentence with another sentence inside it. I've added the "(he was)", which I take to be understood elements, to make sense of it.

The outermost sentence is the independent part and the inner sentence (with the understood elements) is the dependent part. In this particular case, you can tell the independent S by the fact that it is the one with the finite verb "took". Finite means tense-bearing -- "took" is in the past tense. There is no explicit finite verb in the dependent sentence, but the understood "was" is a finite verb.

Looking for a finite verb is one strategy for identifying independent clauses, and it works here, but it won't work in general. I can't think of a single rule that would always work to identify independent sentences.

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  • Thanks. And I suppose that the implied temporal conjunction also gives it complexity 'WHILE he was trying...'
    – melita
    Commented May 27, 2015 at 4:10
  • If that really is implied, then you can tell which clause is dependent by identifying the nature of the dependency as temporal. I didn't say that in my answer, because I wasn't sure that while was actually implied.
    – Greg Lee
    Commented May 27, 2015 at 4:15

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