Journal articles: 'Discourse connectives'

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Zufferey, Sandrine. "Discourse connectives across languages." Languages in Contrast 16, no. 2 (September 16, 2016): 264–79. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/lic.16.2.05zuf.

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Coherence relations linking discourse segments can be communicated explicitly by the use of connectives but also implicitly through juxtaposition. Some discourse relations appear, however, to be more coherent than others when conveyed implicitly. This difference is explained in the literature by the existence of default expectations guiding discourse interpretation. In this paper, we assess the factors influencing implicitation by comparing the number of implicit and explicit translations of three polysemous French connectives in translated texts across three target languages: German, English and Spanish. Each connective can convey two discourse relations: one that can easily be conveyed implicitly and one that cannot be easily conveyed implicitly in monolingual data. Results indicate that relations that can easily be conveyed implicitly are also those that are most often left implicit in translation in all target languages. We discuss these results in view of the cognitive factors influencing the explicit or implicit communication of discourse relations.

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Cevasco, Jazmín. "The Role of Connectives in the Comprehension of Spontaneous Spoken Discourse." Spanish journal of psychology 12, no. 1 (May 2009): 56–65. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1138741600001475.

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The role of connectives in the comprehension of spontaneous spoken discourse has been investigated by testing the effect of the connective ‘but’ in the realization of causal inferences and the integration of adjacent statements. The role of this connective in the realization of causal inferences has been tested through a judgment task. The role of ‘but’ in the integration of the adjacent statements has been tested through a word monitoring task. The presence of the connective resulted in shorter reaction times for the realization of causal inferences in the judgment task, but it did not result in shorter reaction times for the integration of adjacent statements, as measured by the word monitoring task. These results suggest that listeners are able to make use of connectives to help them create and decide on the existence of causal connections, but not to process and recognize the surface form of the second statement of the pair.

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SCHNIEDER, BENJAMIN. "A LOGIC FOR ‘BECAUSE’." Review of Symbolic Logic 4, no. 3 (September 2011): 445–65. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1755020311000104.

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In spite of its significance for everyday and philosophical discourse, the explanatory connective ‘because’ has not received much treatment in the philosophy of logic. The present paper develops a logic for ‘because’ based on systematic connections between ‘because’ and the truth-functional connectives.

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Köhne-Fuetterer, Judith, Heiner Drenhaus, Francesca Delogu, and Vera Demberg. "The online processing of causal and concessive discourse connectives." Linguistics 59, no. 2 (March 1, 2021): 417–48. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/ling-2021-0011.

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Abstract While there is a substantial amount of evidence for language processing being a highly incremental and predictive process, we still know relatively little about how top-down discourse based expectations are combined with bottom-up information such as discourse connectives. The present article reports on three experiments investigating this question using different methodologies (visual world paradigm and ERPs) in two languages (German and English). We find support for highly incremental processing of causal and concessive discourse connectives, causing anticipation of upcoming material. Our visual world study shows that anticipatory looks depend on the discourse connective; furthermore, the German ERP study revealed an N400 effect on a gender-marked adjective preceding the target noun, when the target noun was inconsistent with the expectations elicited by the combination of context and discourse connective. Moreover, our experiments reveal that the facilitation of downstream material based on earlier connectives comes at the cost of reversing original expectations, as evidenced by a P600 effect on the concessive relative to the causal connective.

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Mírovský, Jiří, Pavlína Synková, Magdaléna Rysová, and Lucie Poláková. "CzeDLex – A Lexicon of Czech Discourse Connectives." Prague Bulletin of Mathematical Linguistics 109, no. 1 (October 1, 2017): 61–91. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/pralin-2017-0039.

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Abstract CzeDLex is a new electronic lexicon of Czech discourse connectives, planned for publication by the end of this year. Its data format and structure are based on a study of similar existing resources, and adjusted to comply with the Czech syntactic tradition and specifics and with the Prague approach to the annotation of semantic discourse relations in text. In the article, we first put the lexicon in context of related resources and discuss theoretical aspects of building the lexicon – we present arguments for our choice of the data structure and for selecting features of the lexicon entries, while special attention is paid to a consistent and (as far as possible) uniform encoding of both primary (such as in English because, therefore) and secondary connectives (e.g. for this reason, this is the reason why). The main principle adopted for nesting entries in the lexicon is – apart from the lexical form of the connective – a discoursesemantic type (sense) expressed by the given connective, which enables us to deal with a broad formal variability of connectives and is convenient for interlinking CzeDLex with lexicons in other languages. Second, we introduce the chosen technical solution based on the Prague Markup Language, which allows for an efficient incorporation of the lexicon into the family of Prague treebanks – it can be directly opened and edited in the tree editor TrEd, processed from the command line in btred, interlinked with its source corpus and queried in the PML Tree Query engine. Third, we describe the process of getting data for the lexicon by exploiting a large corpus manually annotated with discourse relations – the Prague Discourse Treebank 2.0: we elaborate on the automatic extraction part, post-extraction checks and manual addition of supplementary linguistic information.

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Zufferey, Sandrine, and Bruno Cartoni. "A multifactorial analysis of explicitation in translation." Target. International Journal of Translation Studies 26, no. 3 (September 22, 2014): 361–84. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/target.26.3.02zuf.

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The search for translation universals has been an important topic in translation studies over the past decades. In this paper, we focus on the notion of explicitation through a multifaceted study of causal connectives, integrating four different variables: the role of the source and the target languages, the influence of specific connectives and the role of the discourse relation they convey. Our results indicate that while source and target languages do not globally influence explicitation, specific connectives have a significant impact on this phenomenon. We also show that in English and French, the most frequently used connectives for explicitation share a similar semantic profile. Finally, we demonstrate that explicitation also varies across different discourse relations, even when they are conveyed by a single connective.

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Marinho, Janice Helena Chaves, and Gustavo Ximenes Cunha. "INVESTIGATING THE ROLE OF PRAGMATIC CONNECTIVES IN JOURNALISTIC TEXTUAL GENRES." Linguagem em (Dis)curso 18, no. 3 (December 2018): 545–63. http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/1982-4017-180306-12717.

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Abstract This paper examines the use of pragmatic connectives in journalistic texts, aiming at understanding issues involved in discourse articulation. The data we are working on is composed by opinion texts and news (written in Brazilian Portuguese) produced by proficient writers and published in a diary newspaper. Based on the Modular Approach to Discourse Analysis, we assume that the study of pragmatic connectives must be integrated in a global model of the complexity of the discourse organization. Thus, we present the description of the relational organization form of these texts, since this organization form deals with discursive relations as well as with the contributions of pragmatic connectives to their interpretation. Then, through the description of the relational organization of these texts, we discuss the observable differences between the genres through the use of pragmatic connective

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Unger, Christoph. "The scope of discourse connectives: implications for discourse organization." Journal of Linguistics 32, no. 2 (September 1996): 403–38. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0022226700015942.

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The main aim of this paper is to discuss the claim that discourse connectives are best treated as indicators of coherence relations between hierarchically organized discourse units. It will be argued that coherence relations cannot be seen as cognitively real entities. Furthermore, there is no evidence for hierarchical organization in discourse. The intuitions underlying the notion of hierarchical discourse structure are instead explained in terms of consequences of processing a text in the search for optimal relevance. This account draws attention to a hitherto not widely discussed set of data.

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Zufferey, Sandrine, and Liesbeth Degand. "Annotating the meaning of discourse connectives in multilingual corpora." Corpus Linguistics and Linguistic Theory 13, no. 2 (September 26, 2017): 399–422. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/cllt-2013-0022.

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AbstractDiscourse connectives are lexical items indicating coherence relations between discourse segments. Even though many languages possess a whole range of connectives, important divergences exist cross-linguistically in the number of connectives that are used to express a given relation. For this reason, connectives are not easily paired with a univocal translation equivalent across languages. This paper is a first attempt to design a reliable method to annotate the meaning of discourse connectives cross-linguistically using corpus data. We present the methodological choices made to reach this aim and report three annotation experiments using the framework of the Penn Discourse Tree Bank.

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Lu, Yuan. "L2 distribution of Chinese connectives: Towards a comprehensive understanding of a discourse grammar." Second Language Research 35, no. 4 (August 13, 2018): 557–86. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0267658318791662.

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This study investigated second language distribution of Chinese connectives by tallying responses on a mini-discourse completion test taken by English-speaking learners with different language learning backgrounds and at different proficiency levels. The results showed that an underuse pattern underlay practically all Chinese connectives as a result of learners’ attention distributed among the three layers of language (i.e. semantic-lexical, syntactic-structural, and discourse-textual layers). The underuse of Chinese connectives, especially for obligatorily paired ones, was moderated by learners’ heritage language background and increased proficiency. Even though Chinese connectives’ syntactic position/obligatoriness effect was not evinced, learners demonstrated sensitivity to the cognitive complexity of semantic relationships marked by connectives, producing more connectives to signal more cognitively complex relationships in general. Meanwhile, the cognitive complexity of connectives seemed to have a threshold effect that beyond a certain level, the excessive cognitive load imposed on learners diminished their use of connectives. This study sheds light on the understanding of Chinese connectives as a multifaceted discourse grammar in second language acquisition.

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Kalokerinos, Alexis. "The justifying connection, mostly in Greek." Journal of Greek Linguistics 5, no. 1 (2004): 27–80. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/jgl.5.04kal.

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AbstractI examine in this article the discourse function of the Greek connectives jati, epiδi, and afu. After tracing a general theoretical framework for discourse connectives, I focus on the discourse function of jati and epiδi in comparison with English because. On the basis of that examination, I then study the function of afu. My aim in this article is to expose the instructions that the aformentioned connectives carry for the articulation of discourse. This is a matter of how these small words contribute to the making of complex discourse units, offering a conceptual core with particular procedural meanings and communicating cognition in particular linguistic ways.

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Lewis, Diana M. "Discourse patterns in the development of discourse markers in English." Discourse linguistics: Theory and practice 21, no. 1 (April 7, 2014): 95–118. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/fol.21.1.06lew.

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The role of discourse frequency in the development of two English connectives is explored, in the context of recent work emphasizing the role of syntagmatic relations in language change and suggesting that it is constructions, rather than lexical items, which grammaticalize. The development of sub-constructions with in fact and at least are traced in a quantitative study based on corpora of formal and informal historical English. Each case involves an adverbial undergoing functional split as the clausal structure in which it is used becomes aligned with different discourse (sub-)constructions. In fact becomes both contrastive and elaborative; at least becomes evaluative and reformulative. It is shown how the adverbial expression in each case becomes compressed and more abstract, so that its informational weight is reduced, and how the English principle of end focus pushes it increasingly towards clause-initial position, resulting in alignment with the connective construction.

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Hall, Alison. "Do discourse connectives encode concepts or procedures?" Lingua 117, no. 1 (January 2007): 149–74. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2005.10.003.

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Inglese, Guglielmo. "Connectives and discourse markers in Ancient Greek." Journal of Greek Linguistics 18, no. 1 (May 25, 2018): 93–123. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/15699846-01801003.

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Abstract The Ancient Greek particle atár has been described as a connective device that encodes either an adversative or a progressive relation between sentences. The purpose of this paper is to revise the description of this particle by framing its analysis within a consistent and theoretically up-to-date model of clause linkage and discourse structure. Starting from previous findings on the function of atár in Homer, I undertake a corpus analysis of atár in Euripides and Aristophanes. This analysis reveals differences in usage at different stages of the language that have been previously neglected. Whereas in Homer, atár largely behaves as a connective and encodes a semantic relation of oppositive contrast between sentences, in later texts it rather behaves as a discourse marker and contributes to the management of both thematic continuity and interactional practices. These differences point to a specific diachronic path of grammaticalization that accounts for the changes undergone by atár.

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Meyer, Thomas, Najeh Hajlaoui, and Andrei Popescu-Belis. "Disambiguating Discourse Connectives for Statistical Machine Translation." IEEE/ACM Transactions on Audio, Speech, and Language Processing 23, no. 7 (July 2015): 1184–97. http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/taslp.2015.2422576.

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Wetzel, Mathis, Sandrine Zufferey, and Pascal Gygax. "Second Language Acquisition and the Mastery of Discourse Connectives: Assessing the Factors That Hinder L2-Learners from Mastering French Connectives." Languages 5, no. 3 (September 17, 2020): 35. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/languages5030035.

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Even though the mastery of discourse connectives represents an important step toward reaching high language proficiency, it remains highly difficult for L2-learners to master them. We conducted an experiment in which we tested the mastery of 12 monofunctional French connectives conveying six different coherence relations by 151 German-speaking learners of French, as well as a control group of 63 native French speakers. Our results show that the cognitive complexity of the coherence relation and connectives’ frequency, both found to be important factors for native speakers’ connective mastery, play a minor role for the mastery by non-native speakers. Instead, we argue that two specific factors, namely the connectives’ register and meaning transparency, seem to be more predictive variables. In addition, we found that a higher exposure to print in L1, correlates with a better mastery of the connectives in L2. We discuss the implications of our findings in the context of second language acquisition.

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Danlos, Laurence. "Connecteurs de discours adverbiaux." Adverbes et compléments adverbiaux / Adverbs and adverbial complements 36, no. 2 (December 31, 2013): 261–75. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/li.36.2.05dan.

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This article focuses on the following question: does the only syntactic argument of an adverbial discourse connective correspond to its second semantic argument? We will see that this is not always the case, which is a problem for the syntax-semantics interface. This interface brings us to distinguish two classes of adverbial connectives we sketch the study of.

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G. Nasir, Kamal, and Shouq A. Afrawi. "Pragmatic Functions of English and Arabic Connectives in Selected Novels." International Journal of Linguistics 12, no. 2 (March 16, 2020): 98. http://dx.doi.org/10.5296/ijl.v12i2.16681.

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This paper contains a contrastive study that reveals connectives from syntactic, semantic, pragmatic and discourse analytic perspectives to cover the whole levels and to provide a good deal of information about them. The study then confines to the analysis of the pragmatic functions of these connectives in two novels; an English one by John Steinbeck (East of Eden) and an Arabic one by Naguib Mahfouz (Palace of Desire) [qaṣr ãl shawq].The study focuses on connectives, their classifications and functions and sheds light on the notion of connectives from four different levels; syntactic, semantic, pragmatic and discourse analytic in English and Arabic. Data is analyzed according to Dijk’s (1979) 'pragmatic connectives' as a model.The study proves the following: (1) English and Arabic connectives differ from one level to another except for the syntactic and discourse analytic levels. (2) Connectives in English and Arabic have pragmatic functions, not just semantic lexical meanings. (3) The English and Arabic novels show similarities in the use of ‘and’ where its pragmatic functions are found excessively in both novels. (4) There are certain dissimilarities in the use of connectives in English and Arabic novels, as far as their pragmatic functions are concerned.

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Speyer, Augustin, and Anita Fetzer. "“Well would you believe it, I have failed the exam again”." Anglo-German Discourse Crossings and Contrasts 9, no. 1 (March 26, 2018): 26–51. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/ps.16024.spe.

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Abstract This paper compares the linguistic realization of coordinating and subordinating discourse relations in English and German short personal narratives, paying particular attention to the context-dependence of (1) their overt marking with discourse connectives, and (2) their adjacent and non-adjacent positioning. The analysis is based on 20 written texts collected from university students. The use of discourse connectives with adjacently and non-adjacently positioned discourse relations is more frequent in the English data. Considering the sentence as the unit of investigation, the coordinating relations of Contrast and Result and the subordinating relation of Explanation are marked overtly throughout the English data, while coordinating Narration and Background, and subordinating Elaboration and Comment relations are marked overtly less frequently. The picture is roughly similar with clauses as units of investigation. In the German data, the use of discourse connectives is also more frequent irrespective of adjacently or non-adjacently positioned discourse relations.

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de Leeuw, Saskia, Pim Mak, and Ted Sanders. "Effects of the Dutch Causal Connectives 'Dus' and 'Daardoor' on Discourse Processing." Toegepaste Taalwetenschap in Artikelen 79 (January 1, 2008): 53–63. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/ttwia.79.06lee.

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Linguists have distinguished between various types of causal relations. For instance, Pander Maat & Sanders (2000; 2001) distinguish between different kinds of causal relations: objective and subjective causal relations. A connective provides explicit processing instructions on how the first segment should be related to the next segment. An eye tracking experiment on the online and offline effects of the subjective connective dus and the objective connective daardoor, shows that there are online differences between these connectives. Objective relations with daardoor cause a speeding up effect of the sentence after the connective in comparison to objective relations without daardoor. There were no differences in reading speed found between subjective relations with and without dus. The online differences between dus and daardoor can be partly explained in terms of their differences in subjectivity. However, there are clues that subjectivity can not explain everything and that the specificity of the connective also might have played a role.

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Kitis, Eliza. "Connectives and frame theory." Pragmatics and Cognition 8, no. 2 (December 31, 2000): 357–409. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/pc.8.2.04kit.

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In this study I examine some uses of connectives, and in particular co-ordinate conjunction, from a critical discourse perspective; these uses, in my view, cannot find a satisfactory explanation within current frameworks. It is suggested that we need to identify a conceptual level at which connectives function as hypo-textual signals, activating systematic law-like conditional statements (IF-THEN), which form default specifications of consistent structured knowledge frames. I argue that an account of connectives at the conceptual level of their function that does not take into consideration such tightly structured background schemata, representing both general knowledge and ideologies, cannot afford any generality. As a result, ‘deviant’ or ‘subversive’ uses of these connectives can neither be identified as such nor find an adequately general explication within existing accounts, whereas in the proposed framework such uses find a ready explanation of sufficient generality. This framework lies at the intersection of disciplines: Linguistic pragmatics (empirical pragmatics, critical discourse analysis), on the one hand, and cognitive science, on the other. Consequently, this proposal, too, can be regarded as a plea for crossing boundaries and joining forces.

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Polakova, Lucie, Jiří Mírovský, Šárka Zikánová, and Eva Hajičová. "Discourse Relations and Connectives in Higher Text Structure." Dialogue & Discourse 12, no. 2 (July 12, 2021): 1–37. http://dx.doi.org/10.5210/dad.2021.201.

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The present article investigates possibilities and limits of local (shallow) analysis of discourse coherence with respect to the phenomena of global coherence and higher composition of texts. We study corpora annotated with local discourse relations in Czech and partly in English to try and find clues in the local annotation indicating a higher discourse structure. First, we classify patterns of subsequent or overlapping pairs of local relations, and hierarchies formed by nested local relations. Special attention is then given to relations crossing paragraph boundaries and their semantic types, and to paragraph-initial discourse connectives. In the third part, we examine situations in which annotators incline to marking a large argument (larger than one sentence) of a discourse relation even with a minimality principle annotation rule in place. Our analyses bring (i) new linguistic insights regarding coherence signals in local and higher contexts, e.g. detection and description of hierarchies of local discourse relations up to 5 levels in Czech and English, description of distribution differences in semantic types in cross-paragraph and other settings, identification of Czech connectives only typical for higher structures, or the detection of prevalence of large left-sided arguments in locally annotated data; (ii) as another type of contribution, some new reflections on methodologies of the approaches under scrutiny.

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Sanders, Ted, and Ninke Stukker. "Causal connectives in discourse: A cross-linguistic perspective." Journal of Pragmatics 44, no. 2 (January 2012): 131–37. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2011.12.007.

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Rysová, Magdaléna, and Kateřina Rysová. "Primary and secondary discourse connectives: Constraints and preferences." Journal of Pragmatics 130 (June 2018): 16–32. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2018.03.013.

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Danlos, Laurence, Katerina Rysova, Magdalena Rysova, and Manfred Stede. "Primary and secondary discourse connectives: definitions and lexicons." Dialogue & Discourse 9, no. 1 (June 8, 2018): 50–78. http://dx.doi.org/10.5087/dad.2018.102.

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Starting from the perspective that discourse structure arises from the presence of coherence relations, we provide a map of linguistic discourse structuring devices (DRDs), and focus on those for written text. We propose to structure these items by differentiating between primary and secondary connectives on the one hand, and free connecting phrases on the other. For the former, we propose that their behavior can be described by lexicons, and we show one concrete proposal that by now has been applied to three languages, with others being added in ongoing work. The lexical representations can be useful both for humans (theoretical investigations, transfer to other languages) and for machines (automatic discourse parsing and generation).

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Cotter, Colleen. "Prescription and practice." Media and Language Change 4, no. 1 (January 31, 2003): 45–74. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/jhp.4.1.04cot.

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The use of sentence-initial connectives (and, but) in written discourse historically has been disfavored, including by newspaper copy editors who delete them. This article describes changes in the frequency and use of sentence-initial connectives in news stories over the course of the twentieth century, from their relative absence to a semi-conventionalized frequency of use. Connectives have both referential (or semantic) meaning and functional (or pragmatic) meaning, the latter especially associated with spoken discourse. Using data from one community, I show how connectives in sentence-initial position have come to be used by reporters to meet profession-specific communicative functions that override other prescriptive considerations. These functions are mostly pragmatic, rather than semantic, and include goals that are both interactional (managing the interlocutorial distance between reporter and reader, by invoking spoken discourse norms) and structural (delimiting text categories or genres of journalism, and creating coherence in news narratives).

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Degand, Liesbeth, Nathalie Lefèvre, and Yves Bestgen. "The impact of connectives and anaphoric expressions on expository discourse comprehension." Document Design 1, no. 1 (November 5, 1999): 39–51. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/dd.1.1.06deg.

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This study focuses on the impact of linguistic markers of coherence on the comprehension of expository discourse. The impact of such markers on comprehension (i.e., off-line) is a highly controversial topic in current studies, especially for connectives for which a facilitating as well as an interfering role has been demonstrated. As a matter of fact, it seems that connectives facilitate the comprehension process in that they improve the reading process, but that they do not increase comprehension of the text. It might even be possible that they ease the reading task in such a way that they provide the reader with the 'impression' of having understood the text instead of a real understanding. The objective of the experiment was to test this far-reaching hypothesis for the use of connectives in expository texts. We wanted to determine the impact of causal connectives such as because ('parce que') and so ('donc') on comprehension and on the feeling of understanding, contrasting it with the impact of anaphoric expressions. Contrary to previous results, our experiment shows that the presence of connectives actually improved comprehension while it did not have an impact on the perception of understanding.

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Xiao, Hongling, Fang Li, Ted J. M. Sanders, and Wilbert P. M. S. Spooren. "How subjective are Mandarin reason connectives?" Language and Linguistics / 語言暨語言學 22, no. 1 (December 16, 2020): 166–211. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/lali.00080.xia.

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Abstract Studies in several languages find that causal connectives differ from one another in their prototypical meaning and use, which provides insight into language users’ cognitive categorization of causal relations in discourse. Subjectivity plays a vital role in this process. Using an integrated subjectivity approach, this study aims to give a comprehensive picture of the semantic-pragmatic distinctions between Mandarin reason connectives jìrán ‘since’, yīnwèi and yóuyú ‘because’. The data come from spontaneous conversation, microblog, and newspaper discourse, while most previous studies have focused only on written data. The results show that, despite the contextual differences in discourse from each corpus, the connectives display distinctive and robust profiles. Jìrán is subjective. It prototypically expresses speech act and epistemic causalities featuring speech act and judgment in the consequent. Speaker SoC (subject of consciousness) is actively involved yet remains implicit in the utterances. Yóuyú, by contrast, is objective. It typically expresses volitional and non-volitional content causalities featuring the consequent of physical act and fact, which are usually independent of SoCs. Yīnwèi is neutral in general, with a slight preference to volitional content and epistemic relations, to the consequent of fact, and to speaker SoC. Only one interaction with discourse style is found: in relations introduced by yīnwèi, the linguistic realization of the SoC varies across corpora: significantly more implicit yet few explicit cases in microblogs, yet the opposite is true in conversations. The specific profile of yīnwèi, depending on the ordering of the antecedent and the consequent, is robust across corpora. Furthermore, the relative importance of the associated subjectivity features is determined. In conclusion, the study contributes to our understanding of causal coherence and extends the empirical database that supports the claims of a cognitive account of causal coherence relations.

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Rubattel, Christian. "Actes De Langage, Semi-Actes Et Typologie Des Connecteurs Pragmatiques." Lingvisticæ Investigationes. International Journal of Linguistics and Language Resources 11, no. 2 (January 1, 1987): 379–404. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/li.11.2.07rub.

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This article deals with the syntactic properties of pragmatic connectives and with the relationship between their distributional and argumentative properties. Recent discourse models based on speech act theory assume that pragmatic connectives link sentences (or larger units). However, certain phrasal categories too can function as discourse units, and the set of pragmatic connectives therefore includes not only markers linking sentences provided with an illocutionary force (speech acts), but also phrases lacking an asserted illocutionary force (semi-speech acts). Moreover, many connectives either belong to the two subsets or are in complementary distribution, depending on the syntactic environment. Except for coordination, all these connectives are members of only two grammatical categories: Universal subordinators (including complementizers, subordinating conjunctions and prepositions), and modifying adverbs. Coordinate conjunctions are briefly reconsidered, and some arguments are given for restricting this class to et, ou and ni, both on pragmatic and on syntactic grounds.

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Santana, Andrea, Wilbert Spooren, Dorien Nieuwenhuijsen, and Ted Sanders. "Subjectivity in Spanish Discourse: Explicit and Implicit Causal Relations in Different Text Types." Dialogue & Discourse 9, no. 1 (September 14, 2018): 163–91. http://dx.doi.org/10.5087/dad.2018.106.

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Corpus-based studies in various languages have demonstrated that some connectives are used preferentially to express subjective versus objective meanings, for example, omdat vs. want in Dutch. However, Spanish connectives have been understudied from this perspective. Moreover, most of the studies of subjectivity have focused on explicit relations and little is known about the subjectivity of implicit coherence relations. In addition, the role that text type plays in the meaning and use of causal relations and their connectives is still under discussion. This study aims to analyze the local contexts of Spanish causal explicit and implicit relations in different text types by carrying out manual analyses of subjectivity. 360 relations marked by three prototypical causal connectives and 120 implicit relations were extracted from academic and journalistic texts. The analytical model applied is based on an integrative approach to subjectivity. Statistical analyses indicate a particular behavior of Spanish connectives and implicit relations and a three-way interaction between subjectivity, text type, and linguistic marking in journalistic texts. Therefore, this study reveals new insights into subjectivity in Spanish discourse.

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Yasmin, Tayyabba, Aniqa Rashid, and Samina Ali Asghar. "Efficacy of Explicit Instruction of Discourse Connectives for Verbal Communication." Review of Education, Administration & LAW 4, no. 3 (September 10, 2021): 609–15. http://dx.doi.org/10.47067/real.v4i3.178.

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Discourse connectives are fundamental components of verbal communication due to their significant role in the creation of coherence, expression of emotive and mental states, and in the navigation of turn-taking (Villegas, 2019). This research study was conducted to explore the effect of explicit instruction of discourse connectives on the communication skills of English language learners. The sample of 40 students was taken and divided into two groups i.e. control and experimental group. Pretest and posttest were conducted to evaluate the proficiency level of students. IELTS interactive test was employed as an instrument to analyze the scores of pretest and posttest. The experimental group was taught with the help of an explicit method of instruction for thirty days whereas no explicit instruction of discourse markers was received by the control group. The findings of the research revealed that the explicit instruction of teaching was considered more effective for teaching discourse markers as compared with the traditional mode of teaching. The findings of the present study call for the reinforcement of discourse connectives employing explicit teaching strategies for improving the verbal communication of ESL learners.

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Forbes-Riley, K. "Computing Discourse Semantics: The Predicate-Argument Semantics of Discourse Connectives in D-LTAG." Journal of Semantics 23, no. 1 (June 20, 2005): 55–106. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/jos/ffh032.

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Sheeja Saraswathy, Kumari, and Sobha Lalitha Devi. "Enhancement of Sentiment Analysis Using Clause and Discourse Connectives." Computers, Materials & Continua 68, no. 2 (2021): 1983–99. http://dx.doi.org/10.32604/cmc.2021.015661.

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Al-Ghazalli, Mehdi Falih. "Translation Assessment of Temporal Succession of Events in Narrative Discourse from Arabic into English." Studies in English Language Teaching 2, no. 4 (December 10, 2014): 367. http://dx.doi.org/10.22158/selt.v2n4p367.

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<em>The present paper aims at investigating the lexical and grammatical means by which events in written texts are temporally sequenced in standard Arabic and Standard English. Temporal succession refers to the chronological order of events which is signalled typically by conjunctions, tense, aspect, synonyms, antonyms, time adverbials and prepositions. The researcher built his study on two hypotheses: firstly, both languages tend to use the same lexico-grammatical devices to achieve the succession concerned. Secondly, translating Arabic temporal connectives, found in narrative texts, into English seems to pose rendition difficulties which can be attributed to grammatical and discoursal differences between the two languages. The results of the contrastive analysis conducted by the researcher have proved that the two languages partially employ the same lexico-grammatical connectives to maintain the temporal sequence of actions and events. However, unlike English, Arabic employs some coordinators as time connectives. As for the translation assessment, it has been found out that in Arabic literary texts, time connectives have not been accurately translated. This has been particularly in evidence as far as Arabic coordinators (as time connectives) are concerned.</em>

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Webber, Bonnie, Matthew Stone, Aravind Joshi, and Alistair Knott. "Anaphora and Discourse Structure." Computational Linguistics 29, no. 4 (December 2003): 545–87. http://dx.doi.org/10.1162/089120103322753347.

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We argue in this article that many common adverbial phrases generally taken to signal a discourse relation between syntactically connected units within discourse structure instead work anaphorically to contribute relational meaning, with only indirect dependence on discourse structure. This allows a simpler discourse structure to provide scaffolding for compositional semantics and reveals multiple ways in which the relational meaning conveyed by adverbial connectives can interact with that associated with discourse structure. We conclude by sketching out a lexicalized grammar for discourse that facilitates discourse interpretation as a product of compositional rules, anaphor resolution, and inference.

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Zufferey, Sandrine, Willem Mak, Liesbeth Degand, and Ted Sanders. "Advanced learners’ comprehension of discourse connectives: The role of L1 transfer across on-line and off-line tasks." Second Language Research 31, no. 3 (February 25, 2015): 389–411. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0267658315573349.

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Discourse connectives are important indicators of textual coherence, and mastering them is an essential part of acquiring a language. In this article, we compare advanced learners’ sensitivity to the meaning conveyed by connectives in an off-line grammaticality judgment task and an on-line reading experiment using eye-tracking. We also assess the influence of first language (L1) transfer by comparing learners’ comprehension of two non-native-like semantic uses of connectives in English, often produced by learners due to transfer from French and Dutch. Our results indicate that in an off-line task transfer is an important factor accounting for French- and Dutch-speaking learners’ non-native-like comprehension of connectives. During on-line processing, however, learners are as sensitive as native speakers to the meaning conveyed by connectives. These results raise intriguing questions regarding explicit vs. implicit knowledge in language learners.

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VIEU, LAURE, MYRIAM BRAS, NICHOLAS ASHER, and MICHEL AURNAGUE. "Locating adverbials in discourse." Journal of French Language Studies 15, no. 2 (July 2005): 173–93. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0959269505002073.

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This article analyses Locating Adverbials (LAs) such as un peu plus tard, ce matin, deux kilomètres plus loin (‘a little later’, ‘this morning’, ‘two kilometers further’) when they are dislocated to the left of the sentence (IP Adjuncts cases). Although not discourse connectives, in such a position, they seem to play an important part in structuring discourse. It is this contribution of LAs to discourse that we tackle, providing a descriptive analysis and a formal account grounded on Segmented Discourse Representation Theory. In particular, we deal with the frame introducer role of the LAs and with spatio-temporal interpretations of these markers occurring in trajectory descriptions.

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Yasmin, Tayyaba. "Efficacy of Explicit Instruction of Discourse Connectives for Verbal Communication." Pakistan Social Sciences Review 5, no. I (March 31, 2021): 1191–98. http://dx.doi.org/10.35484/pssr.2021(5-i)90.

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Hoek, Jet, Sandrine Zufferey, Jacqueline Evers-Vermeul, and Ted J. M. Sanders. "The linguistic marking of coherence relations." Pragmatics and Cognition 25, no. 2 (December 31, 2018): 276–309. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/pc.18016.hoe.

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Abstract Connectives and cue phrases are the most prototypical linguistic elements that signal coherence relations, but by limiting our attention to connectives, we are likely missing out on important other cues readers and listeners use when establishing coherence relations. However, defining the role of other types of linguistic elements in the signaling of coherence relations is not straightforward, and it is also not obvious why and how non-connective elements function as signals for coherence relations. In this paper, we aim to develop a systematic way of categorizing segment-internal elements as signals of coherence relations on the basis of a literature review and evidence from parallel corpora. We propose a three-way distinction between division of labor, agreement, and general collocation to categorize the different ways in which elements inside discourse segments interact with connectives in the marking of coherence relations. In each type of interaction, segment-internal elements can function as signals for coherence relations, but the mechanism behind it is slightly different for each type.

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Cartoni, Bruno, Sandrine Zufferey, and Thomas Meyer. "Annotating the meaning of discourse connectives by looking at their translation: The translation-spotting technique." Dialogue & Discourse 4, no. 2 (April 19, 2013): 65–86. http://dx.doi.org/10.5087/dad.2013.204.

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The various meanings of discourse connectives like while and however are difficult to identify and annotate, even for trained human annotators. This problem is all the more important that connectives are salient textual markers of cohesion and need to be correctly interpreted for many NLP applications. In this paper, we suggest an alternative route to reach a reliable annotation of connectives, by making use of the information provided by their translation in large parallel corpora. This method thus replaces the difficult explicit reasoning involved in traditional sense annotation by an empirical clustering of the senses emerging from the translations. We argue that this method has the advantage of providing more reliable reference data than traditional sense annotation. In addition, its simplicity allows for the rapid constitution of large annotated datasets.

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Fetzer, Anita, and Marjut Johansson. "Cognitive verbs in context." International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 15, no. 2 (May 21, 2010): 240–66. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/ijcl.15.2.05fet.

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This paper examines the frequency, distribution and function of 1st person self-references with the cognitive verbs think and believe, and penser and croire in British English and French argumentative discourse comprising 29 British political interviews (178,712 words) and 26 French political interviews (118,825 words). It employs quantity-based methodology supplemented by insights from a context-dependent qualitative analysis, considering explicitly the co-occurrence of these cognitive verbs with discourse connectives. It argues for these 1st person self-references to be assigned not only a subjectivising function, but also one of expressing intersubjectivity. In the two sets of data, the parenthetical constructions signify that the status of a particular piece of information encoded in a proposition is open for negotiation. Depending on their co-occurrences with discourse connectives they may boost or attenuate the pragmatic force of the contribution which they qualify.

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Zufferey, Sandrine, and Bruno Cartoni. "English and French causal connectives in contrast." Languages in Contrast 12, no. 2 (October 29, 2012): 232–50. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/lic.12.2.06zuf.

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Discourse connectives are often said to be language specific, and therefore not easily paired with a translation equivalent in a target language. However, few studies have assessed the magnitude and the causes of these divergences. In this paper, we provide an overview of the similarities and discrepancies between causal connectives in two typologically related languages: English and French. We first discuss two criteria used in the literature to account for these differences: the notion of domains of use and the information status of the cause segment. We then test the validity of these criteria through an empirical contrastive study of causal connectives in English and French, performed on a bidirectional corpus. Our results indicate that French and English connectives have only partially overlapping profiles and that translation equivalents are adequately predicted by these two criteria.

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Moeschler, Jacques. "Where is procedural meaning located? Evidence from discourse connectives and tenses." Lingua 175-176 (May 2016): 122–38. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.lingua.2015.11.006.

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Xiao, Hongling, Fang Li, Ted J. M. Sanders, and Wilbert P. M. S. Spooren. "Suǒyǐ ‘so’, they are different: an integrated subjectivity account of Mandarin RESULT connectives in conversation, microblog and newspaper discourse." Linguistics 59, no. 4 (June 21, 2021): 1103–42. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/ling-2021-0118.

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Abstract In this study, we analyze the meaning and use of Mandarin causal connectives kějiàn ‘therefore/it can be seen that’, suǒyǐ ‘so’, yīncǐ ‘for this reason’, and yúshì ‘thereupon/as a result’ in terms of causality and subjectivity. We adopt an integrated approach to subjectivity and analyze the subjectivity profile of a causal construction in terms of three features: the propositional attitude of the consequent, the identity of the subject of consciousness (SoC), and the linguistic realization of the SoC. The investigation is based on natural discourse produced in fundamentally distinctive channels, namely, spontaneous conversation, microblogging, and formal writing. Compared to previous studies, the empirical foundation is therefore enlarged and more varied. The results show that these connectives differ systematically from each other with regard to the above three features, and that the differences remain robust across the three discourse types. The relative importance of each feature in characterizing the connectives is also determined. The propositional attitude appears to be the most important subjectivity feature, followed by the linguistic realization of the SoC and the identity of the SoC.

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Sotirova, Violeta. "Connectives in Free Indirect Style: Continuity or Shift?" Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics 13, no. 3 (August 2004): 216–34. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0963947004044872.

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This article re-examines the role of connectives in free indirect style. Connectives in sentence-initial position have been singled out as a marker of the style because of their frequency in spoken discourse (Fludernik, 1993). They have also been analysed as continuative devices which help the reader to sustain an already established interpretation of perspective across sentences of free indirect style (Ehrlich, 1990). My concern here is with a newly exemplified role of connectives to shift perspective and I have selected passages from D. H. Lawrence which have elicited critical comment in relation to point of view (Adamson, 1995; Baron, 1998). I turn to the contribution of conversation analysis and correlate the uses of connectives turn-initially with their use at points of perspectival shifts. My main conclusion is that connectives also relate viewpoints to each other much in the way that they relate utterances in conversation. Finally, this correlation between the interactive role of connectives and their shifting role in point of view presentation bears on the theories of free indirect style more generally. It strongly supports Bakhtin’s dialogical model.

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Ikeo, Reiko. "Connectives ‘but’ and ‘for’ in viewpoint shifting in Woolf’s To the Lighthouse." Language and Literature: International Journal of Stylistics 23, no. 4 (November 2014): 331–46. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0963947014534125.

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The narrative world of Woolf’s To the Lighthouse (1992 [1927]) is primarily composed of its characters’ thought and speech presentation. One character’s flow of thoughts is connected with another character’s thoughts, and viewpoint shifts occur very quickly and frequently. This article analyses how the two connectives ‘but’ and ‘for’ contribute to viewpoint shifting by comparing their stylistic, pragmatic functions in contexts where similar types of viewpoint shifting occur. Adopting a corpus-assisted approach, sentences and clauses before and after ‘but’ and ‘for’ are compared when these sentences and clauses are identified as being in similar discourse presentation categories such as free direct thought and direct speech. ‘But’ emphasizes the distinction between the narration and a character’s discourse or between two characters’ discourse, whereas ‘for’ helps viewpoint shifting to take place more implicitly, as a result of which the boundary between the different voices tends to be blurred.

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Wei, Yipu, Dirk Speelman, and Jacqueline Evers-Vermeul. "Applying Collocation Analysis to Chinese Discourse: A Case Study of Causal Connectives." Lingua sinica 6, no. 1 (January 1, 2020): 1–24. http://dx.doi.org/10.2478/linguasinica-2020-0004.

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Abstract Collocation analysis can be used to extract meaningful linguistic information from large-scale corpus data. This paper reviews the methodological issues one may encounter when performing collocation analysis for discourse studies on Chinese. We propose four crucial aspects to consider in such analyses: (i) the definition of collocates according to various parameters; (ii) the choice of analysis and association measures; (iii) the definition of the search span; and (iv) the selection of corpora for analysis. To illustrate how these aspects can be addressed when applying a Chinese collocation analysis, we conducted a case study of two Chinese causal connectives: yushi ‘that is why’ and yin’er ‘as a result’. The distinctive collocation analysis shows how these two connectives differ in volitionality, an important dimension of discourse relations. The study also demonstrates that collocation analysis, as an explorative approach based on large-scale data, can provide valuable converging evidence for corpus-based studies that have been conducted with laborious manual analysis on limited datasets.

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LIN, ZIHENG, HWEE TOU NG, and MIN-YEN KAN. "A PDTB-styled end-to-end discourse parser." Natural Language Engineering 20, no. 2 (November 6, 2012): 151–84. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1351324912000307.

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AbstractSince the release of the large discourse-level annotation of the Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB), research work has been carried out on certain subtasks of this annotation, such as disambiguating discourse connectives and classifying Explicit or Implicit relations. We see a need to construct a full parser on top of these subtasks and propose a way to evaluate the parser. In this work, we have designed and developed an end-to-end discourse parser-to-parse free texts in the PDTB style in a fully data-driven approach. The parser consists of multiple components joined in a sequential pipeline architecture, which includes a connective classifier, argument labeler, explicit classifier, non-explicit classifier, and attribution span labeler. Our trained parser first identifies all discourse and non-discourse relations, locates and labels their arguments, and then classifies the sense of the relation between each pair of arguments. For the identified relations, the parser also determines the attribution spans, if any, associated with them. We introduce novel approaches to locate and label arguments, and to identify attribution spans. We also significantly improve on the current state-of-the-art connective classifier. We propose and present a comprehensive evaluation from both component-wise and error-cascading perspectives, in which we illustrate how each component performs in isolation, as well as how the pipeline performs with errors propagated forward. The parser gives an overall system F1 score of 46.80 percent for partial matching utilizing gold standard parses, and 38.18 percent with full automation.

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Kleijn, Suzanne, Pim Mak, and Ted Sanders. "Daardoor Dus! Effecten van Specificiteit en Subjectiviteit op de Verwerking van Connectieven." Toegepaste Taalwetenschap in Artikelen 84-85 (January 1, 2010): 103–12. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/ttwia.84-85.11kle.

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The connectives daardoor (as a result) and dus (so) can both mark forward causality in Dutch. However, they differ in specificity and subjectivity. Daardoor gives the reader a very specific instruction, since it can only mark objective cause/effect relations. Dus can not only mark subjective argument/claim relations, but also summaries and paraphrases. The specificity hypothesis predicts that relations marked with specific connectives will be processed faster than relations marked with less specific connectives. The subjectivity hypothesis predicts that subjective relations will be processed slower than objective relations, but that this difference will disappear when the subjectivity is marked in advance. Results of an eye tracking experiment were in line with the specificity hypothesis: reading times were longer for dus than for daardoor, even when the subjectivity was marked in advance. The results give an insight in how the characteristics of connectives affect discourse processing.

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Mejdell, G. "HELENE KAMMENSJO, Discourse Connectives in Arabic Lecturing Monologue (Orientalia Africana Gothoburgensia 19)." Journal of Semitic Studies 54, no. 2 (July 15, 2009): 614–17. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/jss/fgp032.

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Journal articles on the topic 'Discourse connectives'

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