Junction and nexus
Junction and nexus are two kinds of syntactic relationship, according to the Danish linguist Otto Jespersen, who was keen to demonstrate the parallels as well as the contrast between them. An example of either junction or nexus is described in terms of the rank of each word, or "word group", that makes it up.
Origin and development
Jespersen first wrote of junction and nexus in the book Sprogets Logik, after which his theory of ranks and of nexus versus junction "remained substantially unchanged" but was described more fully in De to Hovedarter av grammattiske Forbindelser, The Philosophy of Grammar, and Analytic Syntax.Rank and junction
Both nexus and junction involve what Jespersen calls rank. The rank of a word used in a particular context depends on the word's "mutual relations" with other words. As a simple example:In the combination extremely hot weather the last word weather, which is evidently the chief idea, may be called primary; hot, which defines weather, secondary, and extremely, which defines hot, tertiary.
"Extremely hot weather" is a simple example of what Jespersen terms junction.
In a more complex example, adds Jespersen, a tertiary word might be said to be defined by a quaternary and the quaternary by a quinary; however, "it is needless to distinguish more than three ranks, as there are no formal or other traits that distinguish words of these lower orders from tertiary words".
With examples such as burning hot soup, Jespersen shows that the distinction between secondary and tertiary is not always clear.
Rank and part of speech
In Jespersen's analysis, a given part of speech is more or less likely to be employed as a primary, secondary, or tertiary.- Substantives are typically primaries, but they are also commonly secondaries and on occasion tertiaries.
- Pronouns – defined so widely as to encompass words such as this – are typically either primaries or secondaries ; they can also be tertiaries.
- Adjectives are typically secondaries; however, in the impossible, the poor, etc, they are primaries; they can also be tertiaries.
- Verbs: "Finite forms of verbs can only stand as secondary words, never either as primaries or as tertiaries". But infinitives can be primaries, adjuncts and subjuncts.
- Adverbs can be primaries, and in some contexts secondaries; but commonly they are tertiaries, modifying adjectives or verbs.
- Word groups: With Albert Sechehaye, Jespersen was an innovator in assigning word groups a status independent from that of sentences and predicative structures. Many of these word groups would now be called phrases. Word groups can be primaries, secondaries or tertiaries.
- Clauses can be primaries ; secondaries ; and tertiaries.
Specialization
n the whole substantives are more special than adjectives, they are applicable to fewer objects than adjectives. . . . The adjective indicates and singles out one quality, one distinguishing mark, but each substantive suggests, to whoever understands it, many distinguishing features by which he recognizes the person or thing in question.
Other factors are its rank, and its function within a clause :
The subject is always a primary, though not necessarily the only primary in the sentence; this amounts to saying that the subject is comparatively definite and special, while the predicate is less definite, and thus applicable to a greater number of things.
This is a simply demonstrated for sentences such as "My father is old" ; more problematic with the pair "Miss Castlewood was the prettiest girl at the ball" and "The prettiest girl at the ball was Miss Castlewood". As for a clause such as "there were many people present", the generalization about subjects relies on Jespersen's stance that the subject is not there but instead many people.
Specialization is aided by secondaries. The most important class of adjuncts, writes Jespersen, is of "restrictive or qualifying adjuncts", which limit the reference of the primary, and thus "specialize or define it". An adjunct is less specific than the primary, but no matter:
t is really most natural that a less special term is used in order further to specialize what is already to some extent special: the method of attaining a high degree of specialization is analogous to that of reaching the roof of a building by means of ladders: if one ladder will not do, you first take the tallest ladder you have and tie the second tallest to the top of it, and if that is not enough, you tie on the next in length, etc.
A genitive too can be used as a restrictive adjunct.
Jespersen's treatment of articles and the like is not entirely clear. He regards them as pronouns; and says that "the so-called definite article the. . . would be better called the defining or determining article", used as "the least special of adjuncts and yet specializes more than most other words". He illustrates this: "In the rose, rose is restricted to that one definite rose which is at this very moment in my thought and must be in yours, too, because we have just mentioned it, or because everything in the situation points towards that particular rose." He writes that "the dog is a primary not only when it is the subject, as in the dog barks, but also when it is the object of a verb, as in I see the dog, or of a preposition, as in he runs after the dog" ; but continues "we may, of course, have two or more coordinate adjuncts to the same primary: thus, in a nice young lady the words a, nice, and young equally define lady", seemingly implying that the article is the entirety of an adjunct.
Proper names too can have adjuncts, and Jespersen distinguishes between the restrictive adjunct in "young Burns" and the non-restrictive adjuncts in "my dear little Ann", which do not specify and "may be termed ornamental. . . or. . . parenthetical adjuncts". The two kinds can be mixed: "In this extremely sagacious little man', this alone defines, the other adjuncts merely describe parenthetically" but Jespersen notes that there can be ambiguity: "The industrious Japanese will conquer in the long run: does this mean that the as a nation will conquer, because they are industrious, or that the industrious among the Japanese nation will conquer?"
Nexus
Jespersen compares a furiously barking dog and the dog barks furiously:The tertiary element furiously is the same in both combinations, and may therefore here be left out of account. The relation between the dog barks and a barking dog is evidently the same as that between the rose is red and a red rose. In the dog barks and the rose is red we have complete meanings, complete sentences, in which it is usual to speak of the dog and the rose as the subject, and of barks and is red as the predicate, while the combination is spoken of as predication. But what is the difference between these and the other combinations?
For Jespersen, the two expressions do differ: whereas the dog barks furiously "is rounded off as a complete piece of communication", the furiously barking dog "lacks that peculiar finish and makes us ask: What about that dog?". Jespersen concedes that the difference is often attributed to the presence or absence of what is called a verb, but he rejects this as the criterion. Instead, for the constructions exemplified by a furiously barking dog and the dog barks furiously, Jespersen uses junction and nexus respectively.
It will be "useful", Jespersen says, to use adjunct and adnex for a secondary word in a junction and a nexus respectively; and to use subjunct for a tertiary word in either.
Jespersen confessed to difficulty in describing the fundamental difference between junction and nexus, and employed imagery for the purpose. The version in The Philosophy of Grammar is:
A nexus. . . always contains two ideas which must necessarily remain separate: the secondary term adds something new to what has already been named. Whereas the junction is more stiff or rigid, the nexus is more pliable; it is, as it were, animate or articulated. Comparisons, of course, are always to some extent inadequate, still as these things are very hard to express in a completely logical or scientific way, we may be allowed to say that the way in which the adjunct is joined to its primary is like the way in which the nose and the ears are fixed on the head, while an adnex rests on its primary as the head on the trunk or a door on a wall. A junction is like a picture, a nexus like a process or a drama. The distinction between a composite name for one idea and the connexion of one concept with another concept is most easily seen if we contrast two such sentences as the blue dress is the oldest and the oldest dress is blue; the fresh information imparted about the dress is, in the first sentence that it is the oldest, and in the second that it is blue; cf. also a dancing woman charms and a charming woman dances.
In Analytic Syntax, Jespersen revises his comparisons, and concludes:
we get nearer the simple truth by saying that a junction serves to make what we are talking about more definite or precise, while a nexus tells us something by placing two definite ideas in relation to one another.