First-- Thanks for your responses to my earlier question about a grammar text for a writing course. Here's a question about subordinating conjunctions. I agree that "because" is one, but it is commonly used as a coordinating conjunction by my students. For example: 1. He never should have gone, BECAUSE if he hadn't the whole fiasco could have been avoided. "When" is another example: 2. "He had stopped in my room to check his email, WHEN I asked if I could question him on his opinions of medical marijuana." (student sentence) This is my question: what do we say about "because" here? Is it being used as a coordinating conjunction? Or is it a subordinating conjunction that is being used in a nonrestrictive clause rather than a restrictive one, hence the comma, as in the second sentence below? 3. We went for a swim BECAUSE it was hot. 4. We won the battle, ALTHOUGH we lost the war. One subordinating conjunction, while, has (according to Fowler) three functions: one temporal, one concessive, and one contrastive. In 5. Wait WHILE I run up stairs. "while" is temporal; in 6. My brother lives in Manchester, WHILE my sister lives in Glasgow. (Fowler, 4th ed.) "while" is one of the others--both, really. We mark the difference with the comma. So: are there two or more kinds of subordinating conjunctions, as 5. and 6. suggest to me? Or is it rather that subordinating conjunctions operate similarly in different kinds of clauses, as in 3. and 4.? Or are there subordinationg conjunctions that are sometimes coordinating ones, as in 1. and 2.? Fowler, 2nd ed.., thinks so: "_while_ (or less commonly _whilst_) is a conjunction of the kind called strong or subordinating, i.e. one that attaches a clause to a word or a sentence, not a weak or coordinating conjunction that joins two things of equal grammatical value; it is comparable, that is, with _if_ and _although_, not with _and_ and _or_." Fowler outlines "the stages of degradation of _while_ from a strong conjunction to a weak one." He gives the example, "White outfought Richie in every round, and the latter bled profusely, while both his eyes were nearly closed at the end." This sort of sentence Fowler calls "the flabbier kind of journalese." (706) What do we say about these? Paul