Final remarks on subordination

The synsemantic character and overlapping relations observed in va rious types of composite sentences bear immediate relevance to their lexico-grammatical organisation, the potential valency of connectives introducing sub-clauses, in particular. Conjunctions, adverbs and conjunctive phrases perform contained syntactic functions of a remarkable variety of types.

That is well known, for instance, as a clause-marker introducing subject, object, predicative, attributive clauses and adverbial sub-clauses of purpose; in adverbial clauses of result, time, condition and concession that is fairly common as correlated with other pronominal or adverbial words: so... that, for all that, now that, but that.

The use of that is common in emphatic patterns with it is... that.

It is to be noted that the traditional classification of conjunctions into coordinative and subordinative must be taken with some points of reservation. Instances are not few when clauses introduced by subordinative connectives and clauses to which they are joined are equal in their functional level. This is the case, for instance, with descriptive attributive clauses or, say, clauses introduced by the coordinative conjunction for that very often functions as absolutely synonymous with the subordinative because.

In some patterns with the subordinative conjunction though the opposition between hypotaxis and parataxis comes to be neutralised. The conjunction though can introduce independent sentences. Terminal punctuation and initial capital letters will make it clear in the written language.

The potential meaning of a given category is, in fact, the sum of the common parts of its actual meanings in various contexts of use. An attempt to identify some potential meaning without considering all the actual occurrences of the category will be futile.

Certain specialised parts of actual meanings are not covered by a potential meaning statement, although in characterising the distributional value of a given category these parts are just as significant as the more general components.

It is also important to remember that not all the general potential meaning of a category will be relevant in each occurrence.

This, however, must be taken with much reservation, for indeed it is hardly possible to make potential meaning statements that would apply to each occurrence of a certain category. The meaningful segmentations may vary from sentence to sentence.

A distinction that is relevant to one occurrence of the pattern may sometimes have no bearing at all on another use.

Borderline cases will be found in clauses introduced by the conjunctive word while used in some contexts with the implication of contrast rather than temporal relations.

Difficulties of grammatical analysis sometimes arise in sentences with the coordinative conjunctions yet and so.

Variation in the functional level of clauses introduced by such connectives is always signalled by the lexico-grammatical organisation of the whole sentence, the meaning of the connective word itself, in particular. What may sometimes be ambiguous in the written language is made clear in spoken language by the terminal pauses of intonation which will always show how the components of the utterance group themselves in each context.

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