Lesson 5: Complex Sentences
Sentence-Combining Conjunctions
con·junc·tion a word that connects other words, phrases, clauses, or sentences
Conjunctions combine things. Common examples of conjunctions are and, but, for, and because. As for what they connect, you already know what words and sentences are, but what are phrases and clauses? A phrase is a group of words that form a conceptual unit within a sentence. You have already been introduced to prepositional phrases, and you will meet still others in Lesson 6. A clause, on the other hand, has all of the parts to be a complete sentence unto itself. We will learn more about clauses later in this lesson.
Sentence-Combining Conjunctions
“And when he had said these things, as they were looking on, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him out of their sight.” (Acts 1:9)
Sometimes there is a word at the beginning of a sentence that is not part of the structure or meaning of that particular sentence, but rather connects it to the sentence or wider context that came before. Examples of this kind of “sentence-combining” conjunction are somewhat common in modern English, but they are very common in Scripture. The reason you see such conjunctions all over Scripture is that they were an integral part of Hebrew and Greek narrative style. In the example above, the conjunction “and” connects it to the flow of the narrative, but does not actually contribute to the sentence itself.
Sentence-combining conjunctions are considered a type of Coordinating Conjunction, a category you will learn about in the next step, and they are labeled Cc. But note that however important sentence-combining conjunctions may be in Scripture, they are still not an actual part of the grammatical structure or meaning of the sentence they are a part of, and so they are diagrammed “floating” up and off to the side of the main sentence, as seen below.
Now take a look at our super sentence. The first word is “therefore” and it is a sentence-combining conjunction. You may have wondered what it is doing there. We wonder the same thing, and we wrote it! The fact is that it doesn’t have any particular meaning in the super sentence, but only within the greater story that the super sentence is hypothetically a part of. So in the diagram, it floats by itself in the upper left.