A very easy guide to the use of conjunctions in English Language
Welcome on board, my brothers and sisters from all over the world.
It's time to learn how to join things up. How to join two words together
Have you heard of the word "cohesion"? If you are a science guru you probably must be thinking about Adhesion and Cohesion in Physics.
Well well, I'll explain properly on this post as we begin to break down sentences and their constituents.
You'll find out that many constituents contain tiny clues which suggest a linkage to other constituents in the sentence.
The adverbials are an easy way to start. If we try to isolate and adverbial clause, for instance "be cause he was married". Now the word "because" has told us something.
Can you guess what it is?
It just told us that a previous statement has already been made. "Because" indicates the presence of a pre existing statement.
This is also goes for clauses beginning with similar words, like "when" for example.
We can see immediately, that these clauses are subordinate to some thing else and they therefore can't stand alone.
We can't say "Because he was married" or "when I was fifteen" and leave it like that, it would make no sense and be an incomplete sentence.
Conjunctions and Subordinators
For this reason, words like "because" and "when" can be called subordinating conjunctions or subordinators. This reminds us that they have the properties mentioned in the previous paragraph. "when" and "because", though parts of adverbials, have this other function for which an alternative term is required.
It cannot be emphasized too often that we must be prepared to reasonably flexible with our descriptive terms.
Earlier I made mention of a couple of things which I really hope you haven't forgotten. We can look at individual words and strings of words in different ways. This is because they can have a number of functions and enter into a number of different relationships with other words and groups of words.
This is not so different from what happens to words in a non grammatical context. A "woman" can be a "sister", " daughter", "wife", "mother", "aunt", "grandmother" and so on. After we have described her gender and maturity by the term "woman", we can also describe the other relationships into which she can enter. To do this, we can change our descriptive term according to the relationship we are trying to highlight.
In the same way nouns can function as subjects, complements, objects and as parts of nominal groups as well as being part of noun and phrases and clauses. We can change the descriptive term as it suits us.
Linking Words
I hope you are enjoying this piece. At the beginning of this interesting write up, I have used the phrase "joining things up" to emphasize the linking purpose of conjunctions.
Conjunctions are essentially linking words, and we must not over simplify this.
Linkage which remains static and undiversified would seem wooden. Not only that it would fail to do justice to the richness and complexity of English cohesion.
Just take a look at this :
"... and he went to the market and he stood there looking at everything and he went to a veg stall and he stopped and he took out his money and he asked the lady for some potatoes and he put them in his bag..."
Compare what I wrote above to the one below :
" After this, Mr James went out to the market to buy some vegetables. For a time he stood at the varieties and and whole lot of options but he had to make on choice. On one particular stall, he noticed some very fine potatoes, so he decided to buy them. He approached the stall and, having taken out of his purse to pay for them, asked the stall-holder for three kilograms of potatoes, which she supplied readily. Mr James handed over his money and went happily on his way. "
Now hope you've read and digested the two stories.
One is better than the other.. Yeah it's the second one, but if we were to remove some common conjunctions used then the cohesiveness will be completely lost.
We need to properly understand the sequence of actions and how they are related.
Watch out for a second part of a very easy guide to understand conjuction in English language.
Till I write to you again
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