"The English "Conjunctions

JN A CURRENTLY INFLUENTIAL VOLUME about the grammar of modern English, Owen Thomas comments that good reason school grammars tend to be obscure in their discussions of and adds that exact details have not been worked out in more acceptable treatments of English grammar either.2 Thomas is clearly right on both these points: neither the long-stagnant grammar of the schools, at one extreme, nor any modern theory-based approach (whether structural, transformationalgenerative, tagmemic, or stratificational) to grammatical analysis, at the other, has given the conjunctions the kind of careful, precise treatment they deserve. Even scholarly traditional grammars do not do particularly well with the conjunctions, one might add. It seems clear, too, that if we really want an explicit grammar of modern English, one of the matters we will need to concern ourselves with at an early point is the precise part played in the sentences in which they occur by the words and phrases commonly called coordinating and subordinating In the end, perhaps we should give up the term conjunction. The single words to which the term is commonly applied (and, after, if, that, etc.) do not function, as in the same ways; also, the multiword sequences to which it is sometimes applied (so that, as soon as, rather than, etc.) are in the main not syntactic units at all. Moreover, many words and phrases that neither coordinate nor subordinate have clear conjunctive force: for example, the too of She's dependable too and of If she's dependable too, we certainly should hire her, which in normal uses of these two clausal sentences would relate them to something said just before, as truly as the semantically similar and of She's bright, and she's dependable relates the main clause it begins to the main clause just preceding it. Yet whatever we call them, we should attempt a reasonably accurate account of the behavior of the coordinating and subordinating conjunctions

Linguistics · Lexicography and Language Studies · Linguistic Variation and Morphology · History · Philosophy

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  Open Access•Alexandra Y Aikhenvald•Journal of Linguistics•2008

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