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4 - Connectives between Syntax and Discourse

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  22 February 2024

Sandrine Zufferey
Affiliation:
University of Bern, Switzerland
Liesbeth Degand
Affiliation:
UCLouvain, Belgium
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Summary

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.

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Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2024

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