Conjunctions are a part of speech that
allow us to tie different parts of the
sentence together. So these different
parts can be clauses or phrases or words.
And I've drawn a couple of really crappy
pictures here just to illustrate how
conjunctions work. So you can think of
conjunctions as a kind of hinge or as a
bridge, which allows us to move from one
part of the sentence to another, and it
brings these parts together. So if we use
an example here just to introduce
conjunctions, we could take a couple of
sentences and we could say, "I love my dog."
There's sentence one. And then
you could also say, "she does not play
fetch."
And if we want to
tie these two together, we can use a
conjunction. So we can add a word like
"although" or "but," if we want. And then this
conjunction allows us to put these two
sentences together to form one
new sentence. And that's what we'll talk
about in this video--what the most common
conjunctions are and how they work in
particular sentences.
There are three kinds of conjunctions,
and we'll start here with the
coordinating conjunctions. And what these
conjunctions do is they tied together two
equal elements.
There are seven coordinating
conjunctions, and it's probably a good
idea to memorize them because you're
going to see them all the time. So we
have "for," and "nor," "but," "or," "yet," and "so." As
you can see, there's this acronym, FANBOYS,
which helps some people at least to
remember them. The way I like to think
about them is to put together "and" and
"but"--these are the most common and they
create a kind of contrast. So "and" ties together
two
things that are similar--there's
continuity. Whereas, "but" focuses more on
difference and going in a new direction.
Then we have "for," "or," "nor," and "or," and
these rhyme. I tend to think of them as
like the dwarves--if you
think of the dwarves in The Lord of
the Rings, then you can think of these as
kind of the rhyming conjunction versions.
And then we have a couple of other ones,
"yet" and "so," as our remaining two. Do be
careful because "so," for instance, can
easily be an adverb, and everything
as always depends on context. If we were to
put these in a sentence--
let's just make up a sentence here--we
could say something like, "I love work,
but I'm always late," which would be
terrible behavior.
And what we can see here is that
"but" ties together two equal elements. In
this case, two entire clauses. You can also
have smaller elements that are connected.
So you could say something like, "fish and
chips," if you wanted to, and in this case
"and" is connecting two nouns. So that's
what coordinating conjunctions do--they
tie together two equal elements. Our
second conjunction is the correlative
conjunction, and the correlative
conjunction is a pair of conjunctions
that work together. So I like to think of
these as relatives, cousins maybe, and
they're working together to do the job.
These are "either ... or," "neither ... nor," "whether ...
or," and so on.
So if we were to create a sentence out of
this, we could say, "both T.S. Eliot and
(there's our second one-- )
Ezra Pound where modernist
poets," let's just
say. So we could finish our sentence with,
"both TS Eliot and Ezra Pound where
modernist poets." That's our second kind
of conjunction, the correlative, not
quite as common but still one to watch
out for.
Our last kind of conjunction is the
subordinating conjunction, and what these
do is they tie together two unequal
elements. So the idea
of subordination is that one thing is
less important or is dependent on
another thing. A nice illustration for
this is if you think about a tree, for
instance. So we'll just draw a quick picture
here (I don't promise that this will be
great art or anything like that).
So there's the bottom part
of our tree, and then we'll just add some
foliage here, and there we go.
If we think of the trunk of the tree as
the independent clause, so let's just say,
"I would go on a date with you,"
that can stand by itself as a
complete sentence--we have a subject and
a verb. We've got everything for a
complete sentence. Now a subordinating
conjunction allows us to add something
to this trunk of the tree.
We can do away with everything else, but
you still need a trunk. So if we think of
the dependent clause that we're going to
add as the branch of the tree, then we
could say something like, "I would go on a
date with you if you pay." And this is a
dependent clause so it cannot stand by
itself. It's the conjunction, the
subordinating conjunction "if" that makes
it dependent. So the idea of the tree
branches is that if you didn't have the
trunk then the branch would just fall to
the ground--it could not stand by itself.
And the idea, then, is that with
independent clauses we can add all sorts
of stuff to them if we have
subordinating conjunctions. So the
subordinating conjunction then ties together
two unequal elements. There are
many many subordinating conjunctions--
it's best just to look at a list.
They include things like "although,"
"because," "since," and so on, but the main
thing for now is just to recognize the
pattern and what these conjunctions
actually do.