Conjunction Junction

During the homeschooled years of my childhood, I was introduced to some of the Schoolhouse Rock videos: the pinnacle of 1970s educational content ranging from the times tables to parts of speech to basic governmental functions. The videos put simple concepts into song to help children learn via catchy tunes, and boy howdy are they effective! There are a few of these songs that just exist permanently in my psyche now.

One of my favourites (i.e. most thoroughly embedded) is “Conjunction Junction”, which focuses on the three most common conjunctions: “and”, “but”, and “or”.

Conjunction Junction, what’s your function? Hooking up words and phrases and clauses…

So what is a conjunction anyway?

As you would have heard in the song (is it stuck in your head too yet?), conjunctions are used to join words, phrases, and clauses. As well as the three commonly used words featured in “Conjunction Junction”, “and”, “but”, and “or”, other useful conjunctions include:

• Yet
• Although
• Despite
• If
• While
• Then
• Therefore
• Nevertheless
• Also

…And many others. A conjunction will often be a single word, but may sometimes be a short phrase, such as “in spite of” or “in order to”.

Where are they used, and how?

Conjunctions have three main jobs: coordinating, subordinating, and correlating.

Coordinative conjunctions are very straightforward: they simply join together multiple parts of a sentence (anything from words up to full independent clauses) that hold the same level of prominence. This category is discrete, and includes the words “and”, “or” and “nor”, “but” and “yet”, “for”, and “so”. In practice, this is what these conjuctions look like:

Jamie went to the store and bought some pasta for dinner.

They couldn’t find any penne, but there was plenty of macaroni, so they got that instead.

The resulting pasta bake was tasty, yet hard to keep on a fork.

Subordinative conjunctions are used specifically when joining an independent clause to a dependent clause that relies on the independent clause for meaning. They are also used to introduce adverbial clauses (which I have also discussed in my post about clauses). Some examples of subordinative conjunctions are:

My cats keep going outside, even though it’s raining.

They love to come and cuddle while also being soaking wet.

I never realise how damp they are until I put my hand on them.

Sometimes, I suspect they do it on purpose so that they can get a reaction out of me!

Correlative conjunctions are quite fun, because they come in pairs! These will include your “if/then”, “both/and”, “either/or”, and “not/but” duos, among others. Occasionally, one of the two conjunctions may be implied, but not explicitly included, such as in “if the snow gets heavy, then I will bring the animals in.” Other examples of correlative conjunctions include:

Jeff would rather gnaw his own leg off than let anyone else drive his car.

It doesn’t matter whether you are family, friend, or foe—no-one else touches it.

Unfortunately, Jeff is neither rich enough to maintain it properly nor capable of driving it safely.

While the Schoolhouse Rock video is a great way to cover the basics, there’s clearly a lot more depth to conjunctions than that. We use them all the time, and for a bunch of different jobs. Conjunctions tend to fly under the radar a lot because they aren’t flashy words, but perhaps now you’ll be a bit more attuned to them.