6 - Connectives

Summary

Chapter 6 of Discourse Syntax (Connectives) deals with connectives as one aspect of grammatical cohesion and the grammar of discourse. It introduces the various syntactic elements that function as discourse connectives (coordinators, connective adjuncts), contrasts the overt and the covert expression of additive conjunction, and then turns to other semantic and pragmatic types of discourse relations (causative, adversative, temporal). The discussion of the occurrence of sentence-initial “and” as it is used to connect sentences in texts focuses on spoken discourse and narration. Turning to the other semantic classes of conjunction, the chapter describes characteristic uses of connectives within the academic register. The chapter also explains how to deal with frequencies of occurrence gathered from large-size corpora, elaborating on the need for normalized rates of occurrence rather than absolute frequencies and on how to adjust individual frequencies for their density.