Conjunctions link together two words, phrases or independent clauses in an English sentence. This allows you to string together a series of nouns or actions in a single sentence. For example, the sentences "John went to the store" and "He bought milk" can be combined using the conjunction "and." This creates the compound sentence, "John went to the store and bought milk." In this case, the pronoun "he" is dropped due to the fact that it refers to the subject, John, who is mentioned at the beginning of the compound sentences. Conjunctions are used in this way to fit more information into a single sentence.
Coordinating conjunctions join together two parts of a sentence that are of equal importance syntactically. This means that the separate parts could be written into independent sentences. For example, in the sentence "I drove to the beach and went sailing," the separate actions of driving to the beach and sailing are linked with the coordinating conjunction "and." Other common coordinating conjunctions in English include "but," "or," "so" and "for."
Subordinating conjunctions are used to link a dependent clause in a sentence to an independent clause. Dependent clauses syntactically depend on an independent clause to make a grammatically correct sentence. For example, in the sentence "This is the picture that I told you about," the subordinating conjunction "that" links the independent clause "This is the picture" with the dependent clause "I told you about." Since the latter clause lacks a predicate, it cannot be written as a complete sentence. In addition to appearing between two clauses, subordinating conjunctions may appear at the beginning of a sentence in order to introduce the dependent clause first. Common subordinating conjunctions include "since," "if" and "unless."
Single word conjunctions, as seen in the previous examples, consist of one word. Additionally, there are compound conjunction phrases, such as "in order that" and "as long as." The words in these phrases function together as a single conjunction. Finally, there are correlative conjunctions that are placed around a word or phrase in the sentence. For example, in the sentence "Either she will go to Las Vegas or Quebec" the correlative conjunction "either … or" is used to differentiate two possible actions. Other common correlative conjunctions include "so … that" and "both … and."