In last week’s column, I emphasized the importance of the
connectives as tools for helping readers or listeners navigate our thoughts—their linkages, their correlations, their jumps, their permutations, and their digressions. The three types of connectives, namely the
coordinating conjunctions,
subordinating conjunctions, and
conjunctive adverbs, explicitly signal the logical relations between clauses, between sentences, and between or across sentences and paragraphs.
Precisely what do these connectives do in our writing or speech? In English, as I pointed out last week, they are the primary operators for the interplay of
the six basic logical relationships in language, namely (1)
the additive relationship, (2)
the comparative relationship, (3)
the temporal or time relationship, (4)
the reason-result relationship, (5)
the conditional relationship, and (6)
the example relationship. The choice of connective depends mainly on two things: the logical relationship we want to establish, and the structure of the clauses that we want to connect.
We already know that
coordinating conjunctions and conjunctive adverbs perform essentially the same function:
to logically connect two independent and grammatically coequal clauses. In the following sentence, for instance, the coordinating conjunction “but” serves as the logical connective—a contrasting one—between the two independent clauses: “We achieved our sales targets,
but we fell short of our profit expectations.” Likewise, the conjunctive adverb “however” can establish that logical relationship: “We achieved our sales targets
; however, we fell short of our profit expectations.”
Although the logic of the two resulting compound sentences above is essentially the same, we can see that the conjunctive adverb “however” provides a more emphatic transition than the coordinating conjunction “but.” This more explicit and forceful transition is, in fact, what typically differentiates the conjunctive adverbs from the coordinating conjunctions. Indeed, we can very well say that the coordinating conjunctions provide a soft transition between two independent ideas, while the conjunctive adverbs provide a strong transition between them.
On the other hand, when we need to connect a subordinate clause to an independent clause, only a
subordinating conjunction can do the linking job properly. This type of connective not only provides grammatical linkage but also enables the subordinate clause to draw meaning from the independent clause. Structurally, when a subordinating conjunction links a dependent clause to an independent clause, the result is a
complex sentence: “We achieved our sales targets
although we fell short of our profit expectations.” Typically, such sentences can also be constructed with the subordinate clause positioned ahead of the independent clause: “
Although we fell short of our profit expectations, we achieved our sales targets.”
Since
coordinating conjunctions and conjunctive adverbs function in much the same way, we can freely choose between them to establish the desired logical relationship. The choice will strongly determine the language register or tone of our writing or speech. For informal, everyday language, the coordinating conjunctions usually suffice; for formal language, however, we may need the conjunctive adverbs every now and then to create particular nuances for the logical relationship we want to establish.
Let’s now survey the connectives available to us for establishing the various logical relationships between ideas:
For the additive relationship: We can routinely use the coordinating conjunction “and”—the only one of its kind—or, for much stronger emphasis, the conjunctive adverbs “moreover,” “additionally,” “furthermore,” “in addition,” and “besides.”
For contrast or opposition: To connect two independent, co-equal clauses, we can use the coordinating conjunctions “but” or “yet” or, for more forceful contrast, the conjunctive adverbs “however,” “nevertheless,” “nonetheless,” “conversely,” “in contrast,” “still,” and “otherwise.”
To establish contrast or opposition between subordinate clauses and independent clauses, however, we need the subordinating conjunctions “though,” “although,” “as though,” “even if,” “even though,” “than,” “rather than,” “where,” and “whereas.”
We will conclude this survey of connectives in next week’s column.
(Next:
Choosing the right connectives for our ideas - 2) June 1, 2017
This essay, 1041st of a series, appeared in the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in the Education Section of The Manila Times
, May 25, 2017 issue (print edition only), © 2017 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.
