Fiona Rossette

Université Paris X, France

More ANDs and BUTs about conjunction : interpersonal roles in sentence-initial position

Connectors have received considerable attention in language education. Students’ misuse/overuse of these items do indeed jeopardise the effective functioning of the text. Debate has centred on adverbial elements (e.g. therefore, however,, to conclude) and less emphasis has been given to the coordinating conjunctions and and but. Yet these are the most frequent forms of explicit clause linkage present in most genres in English. Are they therefore unproblematic ? How may we account for the choices involved in their use?

I will present a quantitative and a contextual study of and and but in both argumentation and fiction, analysing their interplay with other discursive phenomena such as topic progression and position of the clause within a larger unit of text (i.e. the paragraph). I will also compare sentence-initial position (explained in terms of cohesion in SFL) and linkage within the sentence (where coordination is analysed as structurally akin to adverbs, under the “parataxis” banner). Do these two positions coincide respectively with the “symmetrical” and “asymmetrical” values identified by Lakoff (1971) ? In fact, I will argue that the particularly marked form of conjunction realised by and and but in sentence-initial position needs explaining not so much in terms of the textual but the interpersonal metafunction.

Selected references:

Bolton, K. et al (2002) “A corpus-based study of connectors in student writing.” International Journal of Corpus linguistics, 7 (2), 165-182.

Clachar, A. (2003) “Paratactic conjunctions in Creole speakers’ and ESL learners’ academic writing.” World Englishes, 22 (30), 271-289.

Lakoff, R. (1971) “If’s, and’s and but’s about conjunction.” In C. J. Fillmore & D. T. Langendoen (eds) Studies in Linguistic Semantics. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Wilson.