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This paper, entitled ‘On the categorisation of subordinating conjunctions: some characteristics of ‘dat’ compounds’, describes the syntactic and semantic characteristics of a group of subordinating conjunctions in Afrikaans, i.e. the compound conjunctions with ‘dat’ (‘that’). Most of these compounds contain a preposition as the leading element, e.g. ‘voordat’ (‘before’), ‘nadat’ (‘after’), ‘vandat’ (‘from’), ‘totdat’ (‘until’), ‘metdat’ (‘with’), ‘omdat’ (‘for’), ‘oordat’ (‘over’), ‘deurdat’ (‘through’), ‘indat’ (‘in’) and ‘opdat’ (‘on’). A few are formed with adverbs, i.e. ‘eerdat’ (‘ere’), ‘noudat’ (‘now’), ‘sodat’ (‘so’) and ‘hoedat’ (‘how’). In the framework of cognitive grammar, this work is corpus-based. The Internet provided 557 Afrikaans documents. A total of 9 177 uses of the conjunction ‘dat’ and 1 909 uses of the ‘dat’ compounds were found. Sixty-three examples from the corpus are cited. The subordinating conjunction ‘indat’ appears six times in the corpus, but has as yet not been included in the Afrikaans dictionaries, proving the class of subordinating conjuctions to be an open class where members may be added. The greatest similarity is that all compound subordinating conjunctions with ‘dat’ lead to the same sentential order. The ‘dat’ group is, however, heterogeneous with respect to the type of subordination. Hypotactic binding was observed in the case of all the ‘dat’ compounds, except ‘hoedat’, while incorporation as a participant in the main clause was only found with ‘hoedat’ and a few cases of ‘oordat’. A variety of meaning nuances can be expressed with these compounds. These range from a more or less literal meaning of the preposition or adverb through to causal relationships used for argumentation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]