subordinator

1. (grammar) Any of a lexical class of words that join clauses at a subordinate syntactic level (subordinate clauses).Examples: "Near-synonym: subordinating conjunction"; "Subordinators / English has a tiny set of essentially meaningless words that mark the beginnings of certain subordinate clauses (that is, clauses contained inside larger clauses). I’ll call these words subordinators (some linguists call them “complementizers,” and traditional grammars call them “subordinating conjunctions” and wrongly throw a whole bunch of prepositions in with them). I’ll discuss just three items that definitely have to be called subordinators."Synonyms: complementizer