Prepositions vs. Conjunctions

The Preposition	The Conjunction
o Function (form) words, not ‘parts of speech’ proper Linking words that connect
two notional words	notional words, or phrases, or clauses
o Semantics: don’t name, only indicate different types of grammatical or semantic relations Do they have any lexical meaning? → a lot of controversy
o Have no formal morphological markers (= are unchangeable)

o Syntactically: they are not sentence constituents Are used:

1) in a phrase: - they indicate a relation between two words the first of which governs the second (→ which are at different levels of the syntactic hierarchy).   The choice of the preposition is determined by - the Verb / Noun / Adjective which precedes it, or - the Noun/ ProN which follows it

1) in a phrase: - Coordinating Conjunctions (Coordinators) join two≤ words of equal status   2) in a simple sentence: - Coordinating Conjunctions join two≤ homogeneous sentence constituents (of equal status)   3) in a composite sentence: - Coordinating Conjunctions join two≤ clauses of equal status - Subordinating Conjunctions (Subordinators) join a subordinate clause to the main clause (→ which are at different levels of the syntactic hierarchy).

THE ARTICLE

o How many articles are there in English? → 2 points of view:

1) the combination ‘article + noun’ is seen as an analytical noun form → there are 3 articles: ‘ a’, ‘the’, and the zero article;

2) an article is seen as a separate function word → there are 2 articles: ‘ a’ and ‘ the’. ↓

o Function words

o Formal function: realise the Category of Definiteness / Indefiniteness and serve as noun determiners.

o Semantics: have lexical meaning; only the grammatical meaning of Definiteness / Indefiniteness.

o Their semantic function is to specify the kind of reference a noun has; to establish a relation between the referent of a noun and the actual communicative situation (актуализация понятия)

o → means of contextual information: the indefinite article introduces new info; the definite article identifies previously mentioned/ known info. + other uses of the articles.