coordinating conjunction

coordinating conjunction

By Richard Nordquist, About.com Guide

See More About:

• grammatical and rhetorical terms

A mnemonic for the coordinating conjunctions: for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so

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Definition:

A conjunction that joins two similarly constructed and/or syntactically equal words or phrases or clauses within a sentence.

The coordinating conjunctions are and, but, for, nor, or, so, yet. Compare with Subordinating Conjunction.

See also:

• Sentence-Imitation Exercise: Compound Sentences
• Coordination
• Coordinating Words, Phrases, and Clauses
• Coordination in O'Neill's Netherland
• Paired Construction
• Practice in Identifying Coordinating and Correlative Conjunctions
• Syndeton

Examples:

• "I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones."
  (Albert Einstein)

• "My wife Mary and I have been married for 47 years and not once have we had an argument serious enough to consider divorce; murder, yes, but divorce, never."
  (Jack Benny)

• "She must have been tired, for she fell asleep the moment she inclined her head."
  (Nikos Kazantzakis, Report to Greco, 1965)

• "Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps, for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference between what things are, and what they might have been."
  (William Hazlitt)

• "In no other city does life seem such a perpetual balancing of debits and credits, of evils and virtues, as it does in New York. No other city seems so charming yet so crude, so civilized yet so uncouth."
  (Joseph Epstein, "You Take Manhattan," 1983)

• "She does not come here to worship or to pray, but she has a sense of rightness and ritual about being here, a sense of duty fulfilled, of some unstated covenant's renewal."
  (Stephen King, Rose Madder, 1995)

• "I didn't know, nor did any of my family seem to know, that this medicinal leaf my grandma burned was marijuana."
  (E.L. Doctorow, World's Fair, 1985)

• "The mind plays tricks on you. You play tricks back! It's like you're unraveling a big cable-knit sweater that someone keeps knitting and knitting and knitting and knitting and knitting and knitting."
  (Pee Wee in Pee-wee's Big Adventure, 1985)

• "It's tough to stay married. My wife kisses the dog on the lips, yet she won't drink from my glass."
  (Rodney Dangerfield)

• "You have the American dream! The American dream is to be born in the gutter and have nothing. Then to rise and have all the money in the world, and stick it in your ears and go 'PLBTLBTLBLTLBTLBLT!' That's a pretty good dream."
  (Eddie Izzard)

• "They were not cordial to Negro patronage, unless you were a celebrity like Bojangles. So Harlem Negroes did not like the Cotton Club and never appreciated its Jim Crow policy in the very heart of their dark community. Nor did ordinary Negroes like the growing influx of whites toward Harlem after sundown . . .."
  (Langston Hughes, The Big Sea, 1940)

• "Every Englishman must have a hobby. Some like to collect the stamp, some like to make the jam, but the most fun is to kill a little animal with a shotgun or rip them up with wild dog."
  (Sacha Baron Cohen as Borat)

• Use of a Coordinating Conjunction at the Beginning of a Sentence
  
  And did those feet in ancient time
  Walk upon England’s mountains green?
  And was the holy Lamb of God,
  On England's pleasant pastures seen?
  
  And did the Countenance Divine,
  Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
  And was Jerusalem builded here,
  Among these dark Satanic Mills?
  (William Blake, "Jerusalem." Preface to Milton, 1804-1810)
  
  "And at the beginning of a sentence? During the 19th century, some schoolteachers took against the practice of beginning a sentence with a word like butorand, presumably because they noticed the way young children often overused them in their writing. But instead of gently weaning the children away from overuse, they banned the usage altogether! Generations of children were taught they should 'never' begin a sentence with a conjunction. Some still are.
  
  "There was never any authority behind this condemnation. It isn't one of the rules laid down by the first prescriptive grammarians. Indeed, one of those grammarians, Bishop Lowth, uses dozens of examples of sentences beginning with and. And in the 20th century, Henry Fowler, in his famous Dictionary of Modern English Usage, went so far as to call it a 'superstition.' He was right. There are sentences starting with And that date back to Anglo-Saxon times."
  (David Crystal, The Story of English in 100 Words. St. Martin's Press, 2012)