Conjunction

The fourth type of cohesive device proposed by Halliday and Hasan (1976) is known as conjunction. According to Halliday and Hasan (1976), conjunction is made up of any connectives words or expressions that link the two of more clauses or sentences together in order to produce coherent relations. Halliday and Hasan (1976) further divided conjunction into four types of semantic logical relations; namely, the additives, the adversatives, the causals and the temporals. The overview of Halliday and Hasan conjunctive relations (1976) is presented in Table 2.3 on the next page.

Additive Simple and, nor, or

19) She broke her legs.

And she had to quit the dancing competition.

Complex furthermore, alternatively

20) He is old and unpopular. Furthermore, he has at best only two years of political life ahead of him.

Apposition that is, for instance

21) Ways to safeguard our mother Earth are many.

For instance, people can practise carpooling in order to reduce the pollution.

Comparison likewise, in the same way

22) The clams were delicious. Likewise, the eggplant is excellent.

Adversative Adversative ‘proper’ yet, but, however

23) Yesterday she fell sick but she still went to work as usual.

Contrastive in fact, on the other hand 24) They informed him that her car was only worth RM6000. In fact it was worth RM 8000.

Correction instead, rather

25) One year ago, he decided not to work with his current company anymore. Instead, he planned to set up his own company and become a boss himself.

Dismissal in any case, anyhow

26) He cannot leave the country for this moment. In any case, he needs to solve all the company problems

first.

Causal Causal, general so, consequently

27) She always forgets to lock her house gate.

Consequently, her house has been broken in by burglars for several times.

Causal, specific for this reason, as a result 28) Mary likes to study History. For this reason, she becomes a History teacher.

Reversed causal for, because, it follows 29) Mary rejected her friend’s invitation to the party last night because she preferred to stay at home and rest.

Conditional in that case, otherwise 30) Ali should act fast in applying for the scholarship to study abroad. Otherwise, he would not be able to submit his application on time.

Respective in this respect, aside from this

31) Everything goes on smoothly in the wedding hall aside from the lousy sound system.

Temporal Temporal, simple then, precisely

32) The human resource department will first weed out unqualified applicants during the HR meeting.

Then they will hold the first interview session with the qualified applicants.

Complex at once, meanwhile, until

then

33) We have to wait for the official report from the authority concerned before

we can start our business.

Meanwhile, we have to concentrate on renovating our restaurant.

Internal temporal next, secondly, then

34) Firstly, we have to wash and peel the potatoes.

Secondly, we have to cut them into small cubes.

Correlative forms first….then, in the end, finally

35) Due to the

overwhelming anxiety, she forgot half of the lyric during the singing competition. In the end, she lost the competition.

“Here” and now” up to now, from now on 36) The examination is just around the corner. Thus, from now on, Ali would have to start to study hard in order to excel in the examination.

Summary to sum up, in short, briefly.

37) In short, there are five ways that have been mentioned by the author regarding the ways to prevent AIDS.

Table 2.3: Overview of Conjunctive Relations Adapted from Halliday and Hasan (1976, p. 242-243)

The section 2.9 describes the Taxonomy of Grammatical Cohesion established by Halliday and Hasan (1976). In sum, there are four types of cohesive devices identified by Halliday and Hasan (1976), namely the reference, substitution, ellipsis and conjunction.

With regard to the fourth type of cohesive device i.e the conjunction, many scholars have offered their own classification and semantic functions to the conjunctive items.

For instance, the additive conjunction ‘also’ was named as conjunctive adverbial by Celce- Murcia &Larsen- Freeman (1999) or conjunct by Quirk and Greenbaum (1990).

In terms of the additive conjunction ‘and’, Celce- Murcia & Larsen -Freeman (1999) and Quirk and Greenbaum (1990) named it as coordinating conjunction. Greenbaum and Quirk (1990) who named the conjunction ‘and’ as coordinator mentioned that ‘and’

indicates that ‘there is some relation between the contents of the linked clauses’; for instance, ‘and’ can be used to show that ‘the event in the second clause is chronologically sequent to that in the first’ and ‘the event in the second clause is a consequence or result of the event in the first. Celce-Murcia and Larsen Freeman (1999) also stated that the coordinator ‘and’ can be used as logical operator, inferential connective or as a marker which signals the speaker continuation. Ying (2009) stated that the conjunction ‘and’ can express the additive, adversative, causal and temporal sense depending on the context where the conjunction ‘and’ was detected.

In terms of the adversative conjunction ‘but’, Halliday and Hasan (1976) stated that the conjunction ‘but’ can express either the adversative or the contrastive sense of meaning depending on the context where it is found. Greenbaum and Quirk (1990) who named the conjunction ‘but’ as coordinator claimed that ‘but’ can be used to indicate either

“the content of the second clause is unexpected in view of the content of the first” or

“the second clause expresses in positive terms of what the negation in the first clause conveys.” Celce-Murcia and Larsen- Freeman (1999) also stated that the coordinator

‘but’ can be used to conveys three types of semantic meaning. Firstly it is used as the marker that expresses the denial of expectation. Secondly, it is used as the marker that demonstrates the semantic contrast and thirdly it is also used to signal the speaker's return especially in recovering the lost point when the other speaker digressed from the

main points. Bell (2007) who studied the pattern of occurrences and functions of sentence initial ‘But’ in academic writing claimed that generally sentence initial “But”

plays three major functions. The functions of sentence initial “But” are firstly to coordinate ideas; secondly, to develop arguments, and thirdly, to shift the topic domain.

Bell (2007) further reported that out of the three major functions, sentence initial “But”

was mostly used in developing argument. It is said that by cancelling and refining the previous argument, sentence initial ‘BUT’ helps in developing argument. According to Halliday and Hasan (1976), the adversative conjunction ‘however’ has two semantic meanings. The first semantic meaning is it expresses the sense of ‘contrary to expectation’ and the second is its use to express semantic contrast. Celce- Murcia and Larsen-Freeman (1999) categorised ‘however’ under adversative conjunctive adverbial category and they stated that ‘however’ not only can be used to express semantic contrast, but it can also be used as a topic shift marker. Below are the three examples of sentences in which each adversative conjunction 'however' conveys different semantic meaning.

(I) 'However' that expresses the sense of 'contrary to expectation'

He is not a hardworking student. However, he has performed well in his final year exam recently.

(II) 'However' that expresses the sense of semantic contrast

Soo is an introvert and she lives in solitude. However, her sister is an extrovert who loves hanging out with friends.

(III) 'However' that is used as a topic shift marker

My house was broken into by a burglar last night. However, let's talk about something else.

Next, when causal conjunction is concerned, ‘because’ was widely known as a subordinating conjunction (Quirk and Greenbaum, 1990; Celce- Murcia and Larsen- Freeman, 1999).and ‘so’ was known as a coordinating conjunction (Celce -Murcia and Larsen- Freeman, 1999). Lopes (2009) who studied the causal conjunction ‘because’

from the pragmatic coherence relations perspective, stated that the causal conjunction

‘because’ could be used to express both justification and cause and effect relations. In their study of the argumentative writing, Prommas and Sinwongsuwat (2011) found that the conjunction ‘because’ was used by both Thai learners and native speakers to state reasons more than cause. The researcher stated that this observation was caused by the fact that the argumentative writing genre often requires the students to provide reasons to support their claims; rendering them to use ‘because’ to state the reasons more frequently than using it to express cause and effect relation.

As for temporal conjunction, Celce -Murcia and Larsen- Freeman (1999) named conjunction such as ‘then’ and ‘first’ as sequential conjunctive adverbial. Greenbaum and Quirk (1990) on the other hand, named both ‘then’ and ‘first’ as conjunct which have the semantic meaning as enumerative. In the following section, several studies related to grammatical cohesive devices will be outlined.