Saturday, October 29, 2016

When independent clauses are not truly independent

If I write



My car can go pretty far and it gets good mileage



I have combined two independent clauses to create a compound sentence. I might just as easily write



My car can go pretty far. And it gets good mileage.



But if I write




Surprisingly, my car can go pretty far and it gets good mileage,



meaning that it is a surprise my car has both of these attributes, then the independence of each clause seems diminished, because one without the other is not surprising. In other words, I cannot write



Surprisingly, my car can go pretty far. And it gets good mileage.



Is there a way to describe this difference? Is there an overriding term for two or more independent clauses that actually do not mean the same thing when not joined?

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