This chapter introduces conjunctions in Chinese. The focus is on distinguishing conjunctions, prepositions, and adverbs. This chapter also provides detailed information on the usages of common conjunctions and connective expressions.

This chapter focuses on grammatical resources for construing logical relations between clauses. The chapter begins by clarifying the distinction between a clause simplex and a clause complex and the distinction between a clause complex and a verbal group complex. Subsequently the basic oppositions between parataxis and hypotaxis on the one hand and between projection and expansion on the other are introduced and relevant resources are then presented, section by section, in more detail. A sample analysis of a longer clause complex rounds off the discussion.

In Old Chinese, where two or more verb phrases within a single clause (including adjectival and adverbial phrases) had to be connected by the conjunction ér or qiè, serial verb construction did not exist. In this grammatical system, it was impossible for any fusion and reanalysis across verb phrases to take place because the reanalysis had to involve a context consisting of more than one element that occurred adjacently. However, these conjunctions started to decline in Late Old Chinese and eventually died out in the first half of the Middle Chinese period, which enabled many grammatical changes to happen. Then, the first verb in a serial verb construction became grammaticalized into one of various grammatical markers.

Stage 4 of the journey follows with an example of how implementation of a formal metalanguage helps with, but also hinders, the analysis of meaning of natural-language expressions. In particular, it addresses operations on sentences and introduces the connectives of propositional logic, assessing the degree of fit between them and their natural-language counterparts. In the process, it addesses the question of ambiguity and/or underspecification of the latter and concludes with some ‘food for thought’ on the usefulness of a formal semantic analysis.

Complex sentences stand at the edge of discourse: they represent conventionalized forms of discourse cohesion. Coordination and adverbial subordination express the same types of semantic relations between events. Coordination packages the related events in a symmetrical, complex figure construal; adverbial subordination packages them in an asymmetrical, figure--ground construal between a matrix clause and a dependent clause. Referents and other concepts may be coordinated as well. Both coordination and adverbial subordination share the same strategies. Both may use conjunctions to express the relation between events, although the semantic categories expressed by coordinating conjunctions differ from those expressed by adverbializers. Both may use either a balanced or deranked strategy for the form of the predicates expressing the events. Crosslinguistically, one can distinguish two types of deranked predicate forms: converbs (for adverbial subordination) and action nominals. Conjunctions typically originate from discourse markers. Deranked coordination appears to originate in deranked subordination; in some languages, both are expressed identically.

Incidental learning from guessing the meanings of words from context through listening and reading is the most important of all the sources of vocabulary learning. This is particularly true for native speakers learning their first language, but it should also be true for second language learners, but many do not experience the conditions that are needed for this kind of learning to occur. A major goal of this chapter is to look at these conditions and see how they can be established. We will look at how successful learners can be at guessing from context, how much and what kind of learning can occur from this guessing, and how learners can be helped to become skilful at guessing from context. The chapter includes a description of a guessing from context strategy which can be used for learner training. To become good at guessing from context, learners need to develop their reading skill, need to read material which as at the right level for them, and need to practice the guessing strategy.

Categorially obscure words of relations, sometimes accompanied by semantic obscurity too, characteristically occur between the connected constituents regardless of the specific word-order setting of a language. This chapter investigates two kinds of such connectors, the conjunctions and the linkers. It is argued that the functional void of UG responsible for the grammatical behaviors of connectors is that UG cannot project any lexical item without a categorial specification. If a lexical item does not acquire a category for some independent reason, its consequential lack of syntactic representation leads to unique grammatical behavior dependent on the specific semantic relation it encodes. In the case of conjunctions, the symmetric nature of ‘and’ and ‘or’, triggering linear iconicity while restricted by the isomorphic implementation of the USM, results in representing conjuncts on parallel planes of which one is the “default” due to computational cost. It is this simultaneous symmetry–asymmetry enforced by the UG-iconicity interface that explains a large set of apparently self-contradictory traits of coordination. Linkers from Mandarin Chinese, Chamorro and Cantonese are analyzed in a similar manner.

Unlike other constructions, coordinations are headless, consisting of two or more strings in coordinate function, often phrases of the same category and typically linked by means of a coordinator in marker function (mainly ‘and’, ‘or’, and ‘but’). The marker is a dependent in an expanded coordinate. Those without a marker are bare coordinates.

A coordination is permitted roughly wherever all of its coordinates, unlimited in number, would be permitted. Coordinates are required to be syntactically similar in potential function.

The order of coordinates is not always free. When the order of a pair of coordinates may be switched, they are symmetric. Otherwise, they’re asymmetric. An expanded coordinate can never be preposed. Sometimes semantic considerations require a particular order, and some coordinates are fixed phrases. The interpretation of a coordination may be joint or distributive.When a coordinate itself is a coordination, the coordinations are said to be layered. Finally, we note a number of Non-basic cases: expansion of coordinates by adjuncts, gapped coordination, coordination of non-constituents, delayed right constituent coordination, and end-attached coordinates.