Types of conjunction usage

Abstract

This article is devoted to subordinating conjunctions, in particular conditional and causal conjunctions, which have two semantic valences - the valence of condition or cause and the valence of effect. These conjunctions can be used in two types of sentences: in sentences where both valences of conjunctions are expressed explicitly, and in sentences where one of the valences is not expressed. At the same time, the content of the valence can be information related to different levels of the semantics of the sentence - to the propositional and to the pragmatic levels. The propositional level is formed by information about the situation called by the sentence, and the pragmatic level consists of meanings reflecting various aspects of the speech situation. The pragmatic level, in particular, includes such semantic components as illocutionary, epistemic and metatextual. Thus, the subject of the study is the types of conjunctions usage, distinguished depending on how their valences are expressed and what their content is. When describing the constructions, we used the method that is applied to the analysis of linguistic units expressing various subjective meanings. This method consists in explicating the features of the speech situation related to the use of a given language unit (the speaker's evaluation of the denoted situation, information about it or his/her own utterance) and taking them into account when characterizing its meaning. The novelty of this study lies in the systematic approach to the analysis of subordinating conjunctions, which is based on the identification and classification of their usage depending on the level of semantic relations. Thus, in sentences with subordinating conjunctions (especially conditional and causal conjunctions) the valences of conjunctions differ in the way of expression and the level of semantics. This allows us to distinguish four types of conjunctions usage: propositional, illocutionary, epistemic and metatextual.