Subordinators (subordinating conjunctions) connect finite clauses, to-infinitive clauses, bare infinitive clauses, -ing clauses, -ed clauses and verbless clauses. Many of them can also act as prepositions (not marked here). The tectogrammatical representation regards subordinators as function words, i.e. they usually do not have their own nodes. Though, as a preliminary solution, we keep a tectogrammatical node for the noun in preposition-noun phrase-preposition sequences that act as complex prepositions (e.g. in the aftermath of). For more detail and a list see Section 2, “Multi-word expressions acting as prepositions or subordinators”.

According to their form, subordinators can be divided into several groups: