Uses of Conjunction “and”

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A conjunction is a linking or joining word that bring together phrases or words in a sentence. There are three types of conjunctions, coordinating conjunctions, subordinating conjunctions and correlative conjunctions (Singh 2016). In this essay, we will be looking at the uses of “and” which is a coordination conjunction.

The conjunction “and” is used to suggest that one action follows the other in chronological order or that one idea is as a result of another (Onions 2015). For example, “I sent my letter of resignation and waited for a response”. Meaning that these activities followed each other but sending the letter was first. Another example is, “It began raining and the water flowed more rapidly”. This one signifies the effect of one activity to the other. The water only flowed rapidly as a result of the raining that had happened.

Another use of “and” is as a comment to something mentioned before (Maguire 2018). For instance, “He caught a flu – and it was hardly surprising as he stayed in the cold. In such a case a hyphen can or cannot be used depending on the nature of the objects. The second clause expounds more on the reasons why he got a flu.

Lastly, “and” is in a list. When mentioning objects in a list, and is used before the last list item. For example, “He has a house, a car, land and a wife”. The conjunction here is used in a list together with commas. In another case, the list would have only two items of which the conjunction would still be needed, for example. “He has a house and a car”. And is the most used conjunction in the English language and is not complicated at all (Geva 2017).

References

Geva, E. (2017). Conjunction use in school children’s oral language and reading. In Talking Texts (pp. 271-294). Routledge.

Maguire, P., Moser, P., Maguire, R., & Keane, M. T. (2018). Why the Conjunction Effect Is Rarely a Fallacy: How Learning Influences Uncertainty and the Conjunction Rule. Frontiers in psychology, 9, 1011.

Onions, C. T. (2015). An Advanced English syntax: Based on the principles and requirements of the Grammatical Society. Routledge.

Singh, R., Wexler, K., Astle-Rahim, A., Kamawar, D., & Fox, D. (2016). Children interpret disjunction as conjunction: Consequences for theories of implicature and child development. Natural Language Semantics, 24(4), 305-352.