THE CONJUNCTION

The problem of conjunctions is of the same order as that of prepositions, but it has attracted less attention.

Semantic features.Conjunctions express connections between things and phenomena.

Morphological features. Conjunctions are invariable.

Syntactic features. (a) They connect any two words, phrases or clauses. (b) In a sentence, conjunctions are never a special part of it. They either connect homogeneous parts of a sentence or homogeneous clauses (the so-called co-ordinating conjunctions), or they join a subordinate clause to its head clause (the so-called subordinating conjunctions).

A further remark is necessary here. We have said that prepositions express relations between phenomena, and conjunctions express connections between them. It must be acknowledged that the two notions, relations and connections, are somewhat hard to distinguish. This is confirmed by the well-known fact that phrases of one and the other kind may be more or less synonymous: cf., e. g., an old man and his son and an old man with his son. It is also confirmed by the fact that in some cases a preposition and a conjunction may be identical in sound and have the same meaning (e. g. before introducing a noun and before introducing a subordinate clause; the same about after). Since it is hard to distinguish between prepositions and conjunctions as far as meaning goes, and morphologically they are both invariable, the only palpable difference between them appears to be their syntactical function. It may be reasonably doubted whether this is a sufficient basis for considering them to be separate parts of speech. It might be argued that prepositions and conjunctions make up a single part of speech, with subdivisions based on the difference of syntactical functions. Such a view would go some way toward solving the awkward problem of homonymy with reference to such words as before, after, since, and the like. However, since this is an issue for further consideration, we will, for the time being, stick to the traditional view of prepositions and conjunctions as separate parts of speech.

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