OPIS VEZNIKA U GRAMATIKAMA BOSANSKOGA JEZIKA
THE DESCRIPTION OF THE CONJUNCTIONS IN THE GRAMMARS OF BOSNIAN

Summary/Abstract: The Bosnian grammars give mostly a wrong interpretation of the conjunctions as a separate morphological word class, but not syntactic, which nodoubt they are. Almost all Bosnian grammars offer the basic descriptions of conjunctions in the morphology section using its methodology and terminology, which is absolutely unappropriate. The morphological approach inevitably leeds to heaping up of the terms which refer to the conjunctions (for example, conjunctional word, conjunctional expression, conjunctional construction, conjunctional adverb, particle with conjunctional function etc.), which seriously makes unclear the notion of the conjunctions and causes confusion (as if we spoke about ‘nominal words’ implying nouns, or ‘pronominal nouns’,or ‘verbs with nominal function’ etc.). The defining of the conjunctions in the Bosnian grammars is not based on clear criteria. That is the reason why we have numerous dilemmas about words and constructions of words, whether they belong to the category of conjunctions or not. As a result, we find the lists of conjunctions which contain many words that are not conjunctions and at the same time many words that belong to the category of conjunctions are missing. Finally, the wrong approach to the conjunctions in the Bosnian grammars leads to their classifications which are not too useful, or which are even harmful. Moreover, the Bosnian grammarians are not mostly aware of the role of conjunctions as formal indicators of the basic division between the coordination and the subordination in syntax, which is very important. It seems to me that a lot of missunderstanding and confusion will be avoided if we accept the following definition: the conjunctions are words or functionally unified constructions of words which connect the syntactic elements in syntactic units of the same or higher syntactic level. The conjunctions as a category are asyntactic notion and consequently have to be described in the scope of syntax, using its methodology and terminology.

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