The conjunction between coordination and subordination in missionary linguistics

Abstract

Although coordination is a basic and universal syntactic construction, the conjunction is a grammatical category or part of speech that has often been neglected in the history of linguistics. The cause can be traced to the lack of correspondence between the morphosyntactic features and the functional meanings of this category, which should rather be placed on a grammatical continuum between coordination and subordination. The difficulty of an unambiguous definition is already evident in the reflections of ancient grammarians. The case of missionary grammarians at the beginning of the modern era represents a turning point, given the difficulty of adapting the classifications of the European tradition to indigenous languages characterized by a completely different morphosyntactic system.