# causal conjunction / coordinating conjunction



## balo_cius

Hi! I wonder how a conjunction which expresses causality can introduce a main clause... I thought causal conjunctions always introduce a subordinate clause. At least this is the case in italian and english (if we exclude the archaic conjunction 'for', used mostly in poetry). However, it bugs me that _for_ (as a conjunction) and also _denn _in German [and maybe even other causal conjunctions I'm not aware of] are classified as coordinating conjunctions, introducing main clauses. How is this possible on Earth? I've always thought word classes / lexical classes (aka 'parts of speech) and their further inner partitions are the same for every language (ex. you won't find any language qualifying an adjective like 'nice' as a verb, a nuon like 'kid' ad a preposition, an article like 'the' as an adverb or, say, a copulative or a disjunctive conjunction like 'and' and 'or' as a subordinating conjunction. Then how can a causal conjunction coordinate two sentences? It's beyond my understanding...
Sorry for the lenght and thank you for your answers.


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## velisarius

Hello balo_cius, and welcome to the forum.

It would help us (...well, me, actually) quite a lot if you provided one or two example sentences to show us exactly what you mean.


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## balo_cius

Sure!
Well, consider the following sentences:
_I go to the park every Sunday, *for* I love to watch the ducks on the lake._
Here *for* is a coordinating conjunction which introduce a main clause, namely an intependent sentence. You could replace *for* with _*because* _(a subordinating conjunction) in the same sentence and then the second sentence would become a subordinate one, which depends on the first.

Likewise, in German _denn_ introduces a main clause: _Ich bleibe zu Hause *denn* ich bin müde _(= _I stay at home for I'm tired_), whereas _Weil_ introduces a subordinate one: [_Warum bleibst du zu Hause?_]_ Ich bleibe zu Hause, *weil* ich müde bin _(= [_Why do you stay at home?_]_ I stay at home because I'm tired_). I could have omitted the question aswell, since _weil_ is not used just for answering, but also while claming something.

My question is how can a causal conjunction not introduce a subordinate clause but a main one (namely how can it be a coordinating comjunction and not a subordinating one)? It seems to me that this goes against grammar rules... I'd classify each conjunction I listed above (for, because, denn, weil) as subordinating and the sentences following them as subordinate clauses, but the English and the German grammar define *for* and *denn* as coordinating conjunction and thus they introduce main clauses, according to the grammar rules. It seems unexplainable to me...


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## suzi br

I don’t understand all the vocabulary in your actual question but I DO think your point about what we choose to call things is a bit “back to front”. 

We have a living organic language that we use, then we stick descriptive grammar terminolgy on it. We don’t fix the labels first. 

In fact, lots of words can be classified in different ways depending on their job in context. 
So take everday nouns like dog and table. They are nouns. Right. 
Except when they are not, when they are being verbs, for example. 

If you ditch your idea that ANY word only has a singular grammatical classification you’d find your problem disappears. It’s what the word is doing in a sentence that earns it its label. The label does not define what a word can do. The word is doing something and we find a descriptor for it. Simples!


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## balo_cius

suzi br said:


> I don’t understand all the vocabulary in your actual question but I DO think your point about what we choose to call things is a bit “back to front”.
> 
> We have a living organic language that we use, then we stick descriptive grammar terminolgy on it. We don’t fix the labels first.
> 
> In fact, lots of words can be classified in different ways depending on their job in context.
> So take everday nouns like dog and table. They are nouns. Right.
> Except when they are not, when they are being verbs, for example.
> 
> If you ditch your idea that ANY word only has a singular grammatical classification you’d find your problem disappears. It’s what the word is doing in a sentence that earns it its label. The label does not define what a word can do. The word is doing something and we find a descriptor for it. Simples!


Thank you for replying, but that was not quite my point. I know some words belong to more grammar classes (ex. _denn _in German can be either a conjunction or a modal particle and _schnell_ can be either an adjective or an adverb) and I'm aware the perscriptive approach of grammars is far from being perfect and its "superficiality" is exposed by linguistics, a science which choose a descriptive approach and therefore sometimes goes against grammatical rules, showing many exceptions to them.
But that's not what I meant to say. Some classifications and rules must be true, in order to avoid incoherence and this is that case. Have you ever heard someone using 'and' instread of 'because'? Or 'or' instead of 'since'? I guess not... otherwise we wouldn't understand each other anymore. It's not a matter of 'this must be that way and exceptions mustn't exist' but it's about syntactic coherence.


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## JulianStuart

balo_cius said:


> Sure!
> Well, consider the following sentences:
> _I go to the park every Sunday, *for* I love to watch the ducks on the lake._
> Here *for* is a coordinating conjunction which introduce a main clause, namely an intependent sentence. You could replace *for* with _*because* _(a subordinating conjunction) in the same sentence and then the second sentence would become a subordinate one, which depends on the first.
> .


*<...>*

In your for/because example, the reason I go to the park is because I love to watch the ducks.  My love of watching the ducks causes me to go to the lake.  So it's not clear why you are not calling it causal.  If I replace "for" with "and" I break the causal relationship and simply join two plain sentences - in what I think you are calling a coordinating fashion. Coordinating conjunctions need to come between the two plain sentences to create a complete sentence.   I accept that when using "because" I can put it first "Because I love to watch ducks, I go to the park often" - perhaps a characteristic of a subordinating conjunction.  This could not be done with "for" so they are different somehow.

It would help if you provided links to sites where this "classification" that you find so irksome is presented. Then you can point out the issue more clearly for those for whom these terms are less well-studied.  (I was not taught these distinctions for my native language)


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## Loob

Hi balo_cius

It bugs me that "for" is considered a co-ordinating conjunction, too.

It was only after I became a member of WRF that I discovered that some people thought it was.  It seems that at least some American schoolchildren are taught that there are seven co-ordinating conjunctions -  *for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so* - represented by the acronym FANBOYS.

I find this ... odd.


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## Määränpää

balo_cius said:


> However, it bugs me that _for_ (as a conjunction) and also _denn _in German [and maybe even other causal conjunctions I'm not aware of] are classified as coordinating conjunctions, introducing main clauses. How is this possible on Earth?





JulianStuart said:


> So it's not clear why you are not calling it causal.  If I replace "for" with "and" I break the causal relationship and simply join two plain sentences - in what I think you are calling a coordinating fashion. Coordinating conjunctions need to come between the two plain sentences to create a complete sentence.


In some Germanic languages, the words that are in a subordinate clause have to be put in an abnormal order. If the words are in a normal order, you can't classify the clause as a subordinate clause. Therefore you have to call it another main clause, which means that you have to call the conjunction a coordinating conjunction.


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## balo_cius

JulianStuart said:


> (I will ignore the German examples because this is the English Only forum - in any case what happens in German is irrelevant to what happens in English).
> 
> In your for/because example, the reason I go to the park is because I love to watch the ducks.  My love of watching the ducks causes me to go to the lake.  So it's not clear why you are not calling it causal.  If I replace "for" with "and" I break the causal relationship and simply join two plain sentences - in what I think you are calling a coordinating fashion. Coordinating conjunctions need to come between the two plain sentences to create a complete sentence.   I accept that when using "because" I can put it first "Because I love to watch ducks, I go to the park often" - perhaps a characteristic of a subordinating conjunction.  This could not be done with "for" so they are different somehow.
> 
> It would help if you provided links to sites where this "classification" that you find so irksome is presented. Then you can point out the issue more clearly for those for whom these terms are less well-studied.  (I was not taught these distinctions for my native language)


I'm calling it causal but not coordinating. You have a point when you say that "for" could be substituted with "and" so that we get two main clauses. But I could do that with "because" aswell. That does not imply it was a coordinated clause in the original sentence. And you're right when you say they're different cause "because" can be put first and "for" can't (it's the same in Italian with poiché, which can be put first, and perché, which can't; however both of them are considered subordinating conjunctions). The fact one can come first and the other can't it's unrelated to the kind of clause it introduces (at least I think so). It's just a way to distinguish their usage.


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## balo_cius

Loob said:


> Hi balo_cius
> 
> It bugs me that "for" is considered a co-ordinating conjunction, too.
> 
> It was only after I became a member of WRF that I discovered that some people thought it was.  It seems that at least some American schoolchildren are taught that there are seven co-ordinating conjunctions -  *for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so* - represented by the acronym FANBOYS.
> 
> I find this ... odd.


That's exactly my point... I find it kinda weird too. For should be a subordinating conjunction IMO...


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## Truffula

Here's an example from a translation of the New Testament of use of "and" in a somewhat causative context, followed by "for" with a similar meaning.

"Ask and it will be given to you; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you.  For everyone who asks receives; he who seeks finds; and to him who knocks, the door will be opened."


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## balo_cius

Määränpää said:


> In some Germanic languages, the words that are in a subordinate clause have to be put in an abnormal order. If the words are in a normal order, you can't classify the clause as a subordinate clause. Therefore you have to call it another main clause, which means that you have to call the conjunction a coordinating conjunction.


Well, that may be an answer. If they consider just the order of words and not the value/function of the conjunction, then yes, it's perfectly clear. One could follow the rule "if the verb does not go at the end it can't be a subordinated clause, hence it's a coordinated one". But I find it odd since I've never considered the wording, but the value of the conjunction which introduces the sentence. Maybe I used to think that way, because in Italian the order of the words doesn't change (it's the same in both main / coordinated clauses and subordinated clauses).


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## Loob

Määränpää said:


> In some Germanic languages, the words that are in a subordinate clause have to be put in an abnormal order. If the words are in a normal order, you can't classify the clause as a subordinate clause. Therefore you have to call it another main clause, which means that you have to call the conjunction a coordinating conjunction.


I honestly don't see how word order in other Germanic languages should affect how we classify things in English, Määränpää.


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## Määränpää

Loob said:


> I honestly don't see how word order in other Germanic languages should affect how we classify things in English, Määränpää.


Maybe "for" was a coordinating conjunction in Old English, I don't know. Or maybe the teachers of those American schoolkids wanted to prepare them because they hoped they would study German one day.


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## Cagey

balo_cius said:


> The fact one can come first and the other can't it's unrelated to the kind of clause it introduces (at least I think so). It's just a way to distinguish their usage.


This does seem to be the basis of the distinction. The classification is apparently based on syntax, in which sense it has a basis similar to the one Määränpää has given for the German distinction. 

In this thread: so: coordinating conjunction or subordinating conjunction Natkretep offers this test:


natkretep said:


> [...]My test is that if you use a subordinating conjunction, you can move the clauses around.
> 
> I was late because I missed the bus.
> Because I missed the bus, I was late.
> [....]


 If you can't do this, it is a coordinating conjunction.

_ *For* I love to watch the ducks on the lake, I go to the park every Sunday. _doesn't work.​
The classification depends on how the word works syntactically, not on the the sense. We generally are taught to make the distinction according to their sense sense; conjunctions that mark an what follows as explanatory as subordinating conjunctions.  

However, the 'fanboys' do constitute a group of words that require a similar syntax, and so are put in the same category.


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## Loob

I'm sorry, Cagey, that makes no sense to me.

The archetypal co-ordinating conjunction is "and":
_I go to the park every Sunday and I love to watch the ducks on the lake.
I love to watch the ducks on the lake and I go to the park every Sunday._

Like balo_cius, it seems to me that "for" has much more in common with "because" than it has with "and".


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## balo_cius

Loob said:


> I honestly don't see how word order in other Germanic languages should affect how we classify things in English, Määränpää.


Maybe it affects just their classification and thus it answers half of my question (the one which unfortunately was cut by the mod). There might be other languages with their own reasons to classify causal conjunctions as coordinating. I mentioned just English and German cause I've noticed this classification only in these languages by now. The reason it happens in German might be the one given by Määränpää.


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## balo_cius

Määränpää said:


> Maybe "for" was a coordinating conjunction in Old English, I don't know. Or maybe the teachers of those American schoolkids wanted to prepare them because they hoped they would study German one day.


I find this both funny and somehow possible (expecially the first part).


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## Määränpää

balo_cius said:


> I find this both funny and somehow possible (expecially the first part).


I guess I'll keep the message up then. I was going to delete it because I find this more convincing:


Cagey said:


> the 'fanboys' do constitute a group of words that require a similar syntax, and so are put in the same category


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## balo_cius

Cagey said:


> This does seem to be the basis of the distinction. The classification is apparently based on syntax, in which sense it has a basis similar to the one Määränpää has given for the German distinction.
> 
> In this thread: so: coordinating conjunction or subordinating conjunction Natkretep offers this test:
> If you can't do this, it is a coordinating conjunction.
> 
> _ *For* I love to watch the ducks on the lake, I go to the park every Sunday. _doesn't work.​
> The classification depends on how the word works syntactically, not on the the sense. We generally are taught to make the distinction according to their sense sense; conjunctions that mark an what follows as explanatory as subordinating conjunctions.
> 
> However, the 'fanboys' do constitute a group of words that require a similar syntax, and so are put in the same category.


This 'rule' is not always reliable, at least it's not true for every language. In Italian there are many subordinating conjunctions that can't come first (es. perché) and others that must come first (es. siccome). They could never coordinate two sentences.


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## balo_cius

To Määränpää: The fact "for" belongs to that group is convincing aswell, but it just explains why the order of the clauses can't be swapped, not how "for" can be considered a coordinating conjunction...
The "swappable vs non swappable" rule used to distinguish coordinated and subordinated clauses doesn't seem very reliable to me... considering also the syntax of other languages.


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## Loob

Ah ... I'm slow to catch on ... Are people saying that what distinguishes co-ordinating conjunctions is that they can't appear as the first word in a two-clause sentence?

That seems a rather peculiar definition to me.  But if that's what justifies FANBOYS, so be it.


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## Määränpää

balo_cius said:


> There might be other languages with their own reasons to classify causal conjunctions as coordinating.


This seems credible, too.


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## balo_cius

Määränpää said:


> I guess I'll keep the message up then. I was going to delete it because I find this more convincing:





Loob said:


> Ah ... I'm slow to catch on ... Are people saying that what distinguishes co-ordinating conjunctions is that they can't appear as the first word in a two-clause sentence?
> 
> That seems a rather peculiar definition to me.  But if that's what justifies FANBOYS, so be it.


It seems very peculiar to me aswell... expecially considering that's often the case for some subordinating conjunction in many languages.


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## balo_cius

For Cagey and Julian Stuart: I know it's an English only forum, but the phenomenon is interlinguistic. If I take just one random language the issue might not even be present. Ex. in Italian a causal conjunction can't be a coordinating one. And it seems very logical and true for almost all languages, if not all. At least that was what I thought, before considering the words "for" and "denn". Then I wondered how could be possible such incoherence. It's like waking up tomorrow and noticing that in some languages "though", a concessive conjunction which always introduces subordinate clauses (like all the concessive conjunctions do), introduces coordinate clauses. Now wouldn't that seem odd, since all of us assumed concessive conjunctions could only introduce subordinated clauses in all languages? It seems to break general / universal syntax rules and common logic (how can a cause or an admitted condition be a main clause?).


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## Loob

In the end, balo, it probably doesn't matter.

You and I can carry on thinking that classifying "for"as a co-ordinating conjunction is strange. It won't affect how we write and speak English.


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## JulianStuart

balo_cius said:


> For Cagey and Julian Stuart: I know it's an English only forum, but the phenomenon is interlinguistic. If I take just one random language the issue might not even be present. Ex. in Italian a causal conjunction can't be a coordinating one. And it seems very logical and true for almost all languages, if not all. At least that was what I thought, before considering the words "for" and "denn". Then I wondered how could be possible such incoherence. It's like waking up tomorrow and noticing that in some languages "though", a concessive conjunction which always introduces subordinate clauses (like all the concessive conjunctions do), introduces coordinate clauses. Now wouldn't that seem odd, since all of us assumed concessive conjunctions could only introduce subordinated clauses in all languages? It seems to break general / universal syntax rules and common logic (how can a cause or an admitted condition be a main clause?).


*<...>*

As it stands, I am not a fan of discussions about how various authorities "categorize" words in English and insist their system is better than other systems that categorize the same words either differently or using different terms and then discuss which may better. I will follow along in some of them just to be aware they exist, but they often devolve into discussions that are of limited appeal or help to learners.  In any case, inEnglish there is no language authority to settle such squabbles anyway  (Or, as Loob puts it: it probably doesn't matter)


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## Määränpää

Curiouser and curiouser!
Conjunctions - English Grammar Today - Cambridge Dictionary


> Common subordinating conjunctions are: _after, (al)though, as, before, if, since, that, until, when, whereas, while, once, so, as soon as, provided that_.


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## balo_cius

Loob said:


> In the end, balo, it probably doesn't matter.
> 
> You and I can carry on thinking that classifying "for"as a co-ordinating conjunction is strange. It won't affect how we write and speak English.


That's a great idea! I guess I'll definitely stick to it... at least for now


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## balo_cius

Määränpää said:


> Curiouser and curiouser!
> Conjunctions - English Grammar Today - Cambridge Dictionary


I saw it coming somehow... ahah


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## Loob

balo_cius said:


> That's a great idea! I guess I'll definitely stick to it... at least for now


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## balo_cius

JulianStuart said:


> There is a separate forum where you may find more interest in what happens across languages Etymology, History of languages, and Linguistics (EHL)
> 
> As it stands, I am not a fan of discussions about how various authorities "categorize" words in English and insist their system is better than other systems that categorize the same words either differently or using different terms and then discuss which may better. I will follow along in some of them just to be aware they exist, but they often devolve into discussions that are of limited appeal or help to learners.  In any case, inEnglish there is no language authority to settle such squabbles anyway  (Or, as Loob puts it: it probably doesn't matter)


Thanks for the suggestion, I'll check that forum too. And yeah, it might not be that big of an issue after all. It just seemed very odd to me and it bothered me quite a bit. You know, it felt like finding out 2 can also be an odd number, not only an even one. Something just wrong and impossible from my perspective


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## SevenDays

balo_cius said:


> Hi! I wonder how a conjunction which expresses causality can introduce a main clause... I thought causal conjunctions always introduce a subordinate clause. At least this is the case in italian and english (if we exclude the archaic conjunction 'for', used mostly in poetry). However, it bugs me that _for_ (as a conjunction) and also _denn _in German [and maybe even other causal conjunctions I'm not aware of] are classified as coordinating conjunctions, introducing main clauses. How is this possible on Earth? I've always thought word classes / lexical classes (aka 'parts of speech) and their further inner partitions are the same for every language (ex. you won't find any language qualifying an adjective like 'nice' as a verb, a nuon like 'kid' ad a preposition, an article like 'the' as an adverb or, say, a copulative or a disjunctive conjunction like 'and' and 'or' as a subordinating conjunction. Then how can a causal conjunction coordinate two sentences? It's beyond my understanding...
> Sorry for the lenght and thank you for your answers.



There are least two reasons for not calling "for" a "subordinating conjunction" in _I go to the park every Sunday, *for* I love to watch the ducks on the lake. _(1), as already mentioned, "for," and the clause it introduces, can't be "fronted" (something easily done with subordinating conjunctions): _*For* I love to watch the ducks on the lake, I go to the park every Sunday _(???); (2), the clause "for I love to watch the duck on the lake" is not _embedded/part of a higher clause_, which is also a feature of subordinate clauses. As a result, "for" is labeled a coordinating conjunction (for the fact that it "joins" two clauses), which, accordingly, introduces an independent clause.

Now,  it's true that "for" is the _semantic_ equivalent of "because" (_I go to the park every Sunday, *because* I love to watch the ducks on the lake_). It's also true that "because + clause" can be fronted (_*Because* I love to watch the ducks on the lake, I go to the park every Sunday_). You might conclude that, if "because" is a subordinating conjunction (the view of traditional grammar), then "for" must also _be_ a subordinating conjunction. However, in modern grammars, "because" is classified as a _preposition_. In sentence structure, "because" doesn't behave like a typical subordinating conjunction or a typical coordinating conjunction (like "that" and "and" do, respectively), but "because" does behave like a typical preposition (it can introduce elements such as _noun phrases_ and _clauses_, or nothing at all). The implication of this is that the function of "joining" clauses isn't exclusively the work of conjunctions; prepositions can do the same thing.


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## velisarius

Loob said:


> Hi balo_cius
> 
> It bugs me that "for" is considered a co-ordinating conjunction, too.
> 
> It was only after I became a member of WRF that I discovered that some people thought it was.  It seems that at least some American schoolchildren are taught that there are seven co-ordinating conjunctions -  *for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so* - represented by the acronym FANBOYS.
> 
> I find this ... odd.



I'd never heard of the mnemonic FANBOYS either until I came to this forum. The more I read about conjunctions, the more confused I get. Still, I'm glad to see that the experts find inconsistencies in the traditional classifications.


"FANBOYS has taken on a mythical status far beyond its utility or basis in reality."
There's a nice study here on _The Myth of Fanboys _from Brett Reynolds, an English professor at Humber College Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning (Toronto, Canada):
http://www.teslcanadajournal.ca/index.php/tesl/article/viewFile/1092/911

This too, from editor Erin Brenner:
The Trouble with FANBOYS : Word Count : Thinkmap Visual Thesaurus


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## Loob

Thank you, veli  - that makes me feel much better!

This sentence from your first link neatly sums things up:
_In short, FANBOYS includes a number of marginal and noncoordinators better analyzed as adverbs or prepositions contrary to the claim that they are all coordinators._


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