The idea of link is used in the field of grammar to refer to the element that relates words, phrases and sentences thanks to its syntactic function. According to their characteristics, it is possible to differentiate between disjunctive links , adversative links , conditional links , consecutive links , explanatory links , subordinating links and temporal links , among others.
This time we are going to focus on copulative connections , also known as copulative conjunctions . These links allow homogeneous components to be joined in the same sentence .
Copulative links serve to create a list of terms . Its inclusion makes it possible to add elements that acquire a joint meaning.
For example: “Esteban and Bruno confirmed their attendance at the party.” As noted, the copulative link “and” serves to mention that two people ( “Esteban” and “Bruno” ) confirmed that they will attend a certain event.
In order not to produce a cacophony, the copulative link “and” becomes “e” if the second term begins with the letter I (or with an H followed by I ): “Sociologists and historians met to debate the new habits promoted due to technological changes” , “Mother and daughter decided to take a trip together” , “Pablo and Ismael went to the theater” .
It is important to mention that the addition brought about by a copulatory link can be negative . In the sentence “My nephew does not work or study,” the copulative link “nor” links two actions that an individual does not perform: in this particular case, “work” and “study.” The meaning of the expression is equivalent to “My nephew does not work and does not study” (here the copulative link used is “and” ).
Although the meaning of the previous sentence is negative from a strictly technical point of view, since it denies the performance of two actions, the perception that the sender and the interlocutor have of its meaning can be either positive, neutral or negative, depending on the context. This particular example speaks of a reality that society usually views with a bad eye, since it is believed that a person who does not study or work is lazy, that he does nothing with his life; However, there are those who think differently and could say the same sentence with pride.
In fact, perhaps it would be enough to add a little more information ; If after the previous sentence we said "however, he dedicates the entire day to his personal project, which he intends to convert into his source of economic income in the future" , clearly we would not be talking about a person lacking willpower or determination in life. , but quite the opposite.
The copulative nexus is one of the most used in everyday speech, since we usually list events and objects very frequently . However, perhaps for this same reason it is quite treacherous if we use it excessively. This happens especially with the link and , which we often abuse when we want to relate several intertwined facts.
In the following sentence we will see an excessive use of this copulative link, which dirtyes the communication and makes understanding difficult for the receiver: «Yesterday we finally met at the shopping center and we went to eat, and then we walked for a while and talked about everything. "What I told you, and when I got home I realized that he had left my phone in his car, and then I wrote him an email and he told me to meet this afternoon."
A very simple solution to this problem is to break the message into several sentences , placing them all in the same paragraph so that the recipient understands that they deal with the same topic. We should not underestimate the contextual nature of our language, nor ignore the multitude of expressions it offers us to string together propositions and sentences without falling into redundancy.