An Investigation into the Contrastive Study of Conjunctions in Persian and English

The conjunctions join part of discourse and show the relation between them. Every language has its own set of conjunction which may vary across language in term of structure and usage. Based on cohesion theory proposed by Halliday and Hasan (1976), the purpose of this study is to determine to what extent conjunctions are different or similar in Farsi and English. To meet the goal of the study, the researcher provided by listing thirty examples in each English and Persian and analyzed them in terms of the role and structure of conjunctions. Comparing the structure and function of conjunctions in English and Persian shows that the function of conjunctions in English and Persian is the same; however, they may differ in structure and usage. In Persian “Ke” is the only word for the conjunction “that” representing its equivalent in English while in English we have more than one word depending on the preceding words in the sentence. In Persian, we have also correlative conjunctions which belong to a subcategory of coordinate conjunctions but they are not comprised of two words. Meanwhile, both in English and Persian, there are some subordinating conjunctions which function as adverb or preposition like since in English and TA (until) in Persian.

Keywords:

Contrastive Analysis , Conjunction , Cohesion , Persian and English Language