This chapter provides an overview of studies that call on the syntactic features of connectives as a means to disambiguate their function and meaning. These syntactic features cover the morphosyntactic nature of discourse connectives as well as their syntagmatic distribution. On the basis of existing lexicons of discourse connectives, we first give an overview of the morphosyntactic distribution of discourse connectives in several European and non-European languages. We then address a number of studies that focus on the (semi-automatic) identification and annotation of discourse connectives in context. This is of particular interest in the field of natural language processing, but also in the field of contrastive linguistics, where it has been shown that syntactic categories, including those underlying the description of discourse connective uses, are not always cross-linguistically valid. The final section is devoted to the relationship between the syntagmatic position of discourse connectives and their meaning, which has given rise to numerous studies at the grammar-discourse interface highlighting the fuzzy boundary between discourse connectives and discourse markers.

This chapter considers how the Romance languages can contribute to our understanding of the encoding of discourse-oriented meaning, both structurally, at the level of the sentence, and, interpretatively, at the level of the utterance; more precisely, it focuses on the discourse-oriented meaning that interfaces between the wider extra-sentential discourse context on the one hand, and the propositional core of the utterance and the sentence-internal discourse context on the other. We present an overview of the contribution of Romance languages to a number of the key issues associated with theories of discourse at the level of the sentence/utterance, such as the grammatical expression of clause type, the codification of illocutionary force, and the mapping between form and function in the realization of speech acts, which are the communicative actions effected through the production of an utterance; in particular, we distinguish the morphosyntactic notion of clause type, meant as the formal or grammatical structure of a sentence codified through the lexicalization of dedicated functional slots within the left periphery of the clause, from that of illocutionary force, a pragmatic notion which refers to the communicative function attached to that expression.