Dear ATEG friends,

"Thus" clearly can be used as a conjunctive adverb, but "whereas" is almost
certainly a subordinating conjunction, having the same general meaning as
"although" and "since" when used to introduce a clause.

Most dictionaries see "whereas" this way.  One old grammar I consulted
(Pence and Emery's "A Grammar of Present-Day English" [2nd ed., 1963])
lists two uses for the word--sub. conj. as well as transitional adverb,
which is more or less what we are referring to as a conjunctive adverb.
But Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech, and Svartvik discuss it as a subordinating
conjunction only.

The appropriate punctuation, then, would be to include a comma before the
"whereas," since it introduces a contrastive adverb clause following the
main clause.

Does this seem right to the rest of you, too?

JVB


James Vanden Bosch              (616) 957-6592
Department of English           [log in to unmask]
Calvin College                  fax: (616) 957-8508
Grand Rapids, MI 49546          http://www.calvin.edu/~vand
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