Can an independent clause have an implied (or null) subject?

I'm trying to determine whether a clause with an implied subject can be considered independent - specifically in the case of compound sentences. For example: "I was tired, but went to the party anyway." To my thinking, the second clause is an independent clause because the reiterated "I" is implied, but I can't find much to back this up. Thoughts?

85.8k 12 12 gold badges 154 154 silver badges 270 270 bronze badges asked Jan 12, 2014 at 6:36 119 1 1 gold badge 1 1 silver badge 3 3 bronze badges

This is of course a bit different from your example, but imperative clauses are definitely independent clauses that have, mandatorily, a null subject.

Commented Jan 12, 2014 at 10:21

Traditionally, you would not write that comma (although I agree it often looks better or easier to parse if you do add one). You would either write I was tired but went to the party anyway or I was tired, but I went to the party anyway.

Commented Jan 13, 2014 at 19:02

Note that the second "clause" in your example is went to the party anyway (the conjunction but isn't part of either clause). And since went to the party anyway isn't a valid sentence, it's probably not helpful to call it an independent clause. It's just a "sentence fragment" that can only be valid in contexts where preceding text unambiguously specifies the missing ("deleted") subject.

Commented Sep 14, 2023 at 15:28

8 Answers 8

Bill J puts it clearly (I admit I've tidied a bit):

‘They have appeared on message boards and in blogs, and have been spread by word of mouth’.

Concerning your question about the conjoining of clauses: although . the second clause above may seem dependent because it appears to have no subject, that’s not actually the case. ‘They’ is the subject of both clauses, but it is left out of the second clause because it would otherwise repeat what has been said in the first clause. This process is called ellipsis. [Both] the clauses [here] are independent. Bill J

As usual, accepted terminology can hide some of the facts. You'd never say 'I went to the party anyway' without previous context showing that this was a rather unexpected course of action. 'I went to the party', yes. So 'independent' is perhaps a not totally accurate label here. However, it's the accepted one, and addresses the syntactic structure rather than the semantics involved.

The usual term for what follows the subject in a sentence where a single subject does double duty for two independent clauses joined by a conjunction is a compound predicate: