Jar Conjunctions from the View Points of Syntacticians And Allameh Behbahani

Allameh Seyed Ali Behbahani (1303-1395 A.H) is one of the great Shiite scholars in Fiqh (jurisprudence), Usul (principles) and linguistics. He was familiar with Allâmeh Sheikh Hadi Tehrani’s ideas through some of Sheikh’s students like Ayatollah Sayyed Mohsen Kooh Kamarei and this familiarity influenced most of his ideas. He has novel ideas and valuable works which rejected most of the current ideas in scientific circles and paying attention to those ideas can lead to fundamental changes in those sciences. This article tries to compare his ideas on Jar conjunctions with other syntacticians.According to him, assigning meaning in conjunctions is different from nouns and verbs. Since conjunctions do not reflect any meaning, there is no need for nouns and verbs to reflect such meaning. Instead, they form some features in nouns and verbs needed at the moment of usage and without them or without derivative forms like verbal forms or compounding forms like the form of topic-comment (which are similar to conjunctions), the nouns and verbs cannot be used and the discourse is not realized. Conjunctions act like tools and create a feature or form which is needed in objects (like a saw which creates the required form in the wood). But, according to syntacticians, assignment of meaning in conjunctions is similar to nouns and verbs and all of them reflect meaning. The only difference is that meaning in conjunctions is not independent, as opposed to the other two, and they do not have an advantage over nouns and verbs.Also, according to Allameh, there is no reason to consider a verbal dependant or something which has verbal meaning for Jar conjunctions and if they depend on a verb such dependence is on its conjunctive meaning derived from verbal form not on nominal meaning derived from verbal stem. In his view, each conjunction creates a special meaning and no conjunction is the same as another one or, as syntacticians think, of the same meaning.