Abstract
Connectives include traditional prepositions, conjunctions, and relative pronouns. Here it is shown that several other important distinctions must be made, and that there is a fair amount of cross-classification, so that some items cannot be simply classified as “prepositions” or “conjunctions”. The traditional class of conjunctions, in particular, is not a real category, since it includes items of very different grammatical behavior. In this area, many traditional insights are no doubt valid, but some others must still be taken into account, in particular the fact that classification must be defined by distinctive features, which yield not a set of classes, but reveal a great variety in the grammatical behavior of lexical items.
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Notes
- 1.
This definition does not cover precisely all items traditionally called connectives: it fails in the case of so-called coordinating conjunctions; see below.
- 2.
There is a good study of Portuguese connectives in Ilari (ed.) 2015, to which I owe part of the following discussion.
- 3.
The question was already introduced in Chap. 4; here I bring in some more examples that show new aspects of the complexity of the matter.
- 4.
A unit A is “in construction with” another unit B when both, together, form a higher-order unit, [AB]C.
- 5.
The definitions given in traditional grammars are all but useless, but from the practice of analysis a more coherent picture emerges.
- 6.
See 4.5.4 for a fuller discussion, with refutation of a frequent, but inadequate, proposal to circumvent the dilemma.
- 7.
Actually, como occurs before an infinitive in não sei como escapar dessa ‘I don’t know how to escape this (situation)’; here it is an indirect interrogative, with features that do not appear in this table.
- 8.
- 9.
The classification found in traditional analysis is preposition and adverb, according to context.
- 10.
This argumentative analysis follows Ducrot (1980).
- 11.
Adverbs “appear in the sentence as partners of the verb, the adjective or another adverb” (Castilho et al. 2014, p. 267).
- 12.
Let us use this word, colloquially, to mean “an item in one of the functions traditionally attributed to prepositions”.
- 13.
I am not totally sure about the acceptability of the English versions; Portuguese is rather liberal in allowing the fronting of topicalized constituents.
- 14.
Cf. Hauy (2014, pp. 804–805).
- 15.
Quando takes the so-called future subjunctive (quando você quiser ‘whenever you want’), but it has already been shown that this form is not a subjunctive at all, but a second form of the future indicative (Perini 1978).
- 16.
In this sentence grammarians often insist in writing the prepositions and the article separately: depois de o cachorro comer; as this rule is not consistently observed in writing, and never in speaking, it is ignored here.
- 17.
Called in traditional grammar “adjective constructions”; this is actually a better term, but I keep “relative” because it is more usual in linguistic works.
- 18.
These constructions with de often correspond to English two-noun constructions: stone house; in other cases English makes use of prepositions, most frequently of: the capital of Greece.
- 19.
In Spanish, which is very similar to Portuguese in so many details, the verb acercarse ‘come close’ takes the regular preposition a: el perrito se acercó a la niña.
- 20.
This is the “inductive way” I refer to in Sect. 4.8.
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Perini, M.A. (2021). Towards a Taxonomy of Connectives. In: Function and Class in Linguistic Description. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-78173-6_11
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