The conjunction between coordination and subordination in missionary grammars of Aymara and Quechua

Abstract Although coordination is a basic and universal syntactic construction, the conjunction is a grammatical category or part of speech that has often been neglected in the history of linguistics. The cause can be traced to the lack of correspondence between the morphosyntactic features and the functional meanings of this category, which should rather be placed on a grammatical continuum between coordination and subordination. The difficulty of an unambiguous definition is already evident in the reflections of ancient grammarians. The case of missionary grammarians at the beginning of the modern era represents a turning point, given the difficulty of adapting the classifications of the European tradition to indigenous languages characterized by a completely different morphosyntactic system. The aim of this paper is to analyze the first grammars of Aymara and Quechua written by missionary grammarians working at the school of Juli, which has been described as a true ‘linguistic laboratory’ of the Society of Jesus. Given that the notions of subordination and dependent sentence are commonly attributed to the Port-Royal grammarians (1660), and thus an explicit distinction between subordinating and coordinating conjunctions had not yet been formalized at the time, I attempt to reconstruct this distinction by analyzing the types of clauses that are explicitly defined as dependent and associated with specific conjunctions. The textual analysis suggests that, as early as the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, European grammarians were already aware of the distinction between coordination and subordination, thus challenging prevailing assumptions in the historiography of linguistic thought.