Elsevier

Journal of Pragmatics

Volume 130, June 2018, Pages 16-32
Journal of Pragmatics

Primary and secondary discourse connectives: Constraints and preferences

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pragma.2018.03.013Get rights and content
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Highlights

  • The paper analyses linguistic factors influencing the author’s choice of discourse connectives in written texts.

  • It focuses on the competition of primary connectives (e.g. therefore) and secondary connectives (e.g. for this reason).

  • It presents a corpus analysis of connectives in the Prague Discourse Treebank 2.0.

  • Kinds of constraints on connective selection: syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, stylistic, and long distance (salience).

  • Factors influencing connective use: grammar; the principle of least effort; the effort to avoid misunderstandings.

Abstract

In this paper, we explore the linguistic factors that influence an author's choice of discourse connectives in the production of a coherent text. We focus on the competition between so-called primary connectives (grammaticalized and mostly one-word expressions such as therefore) and secondary connectives (not yet fully grammaticalized compositional discourse phrases such as for this reason). We attempt to describe the linguistic constraints on and preferences in connective selection. The analysis is based on manually annotated data from the Prague Discourse Treebank 2.0 (PDiT), which contains almost 50000 sentences from Czech newspaper texts. We demonstrate that discourse connectives are used in accordance with the economy principle in language, i.e. authors aim to achieve the maximal result with minimal effort. They most frequently choose short and semantically more generalized primary connectives. However, in cases where the discourse relations can be misunderstood, authors prefer more complex and specific structures.

Keywords

Discourse connectives
Primary connectives
Secondary connectives
Free connecting phrases
Prague Discourse Treebank
Czech

Cited by (0)

PhDr. Magdaléna Rysová, Ph.D. works as a senior research associate at the Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics, Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, Charles University, Prague. Her main research interest is discourse analysis with orientation on discourse connectives and their annotation in large corpora. She focuses especially on secondary discourse connectives and their inclusion in discourse lexicons. She is the main author of the Prague Discourse Treebank 2.0.

PhDr. Kateřina Rysová, Ph.D. is a senior research associate at the Institute of Formal and Applied Linguistics (Charles University, Prague). Her research topics are discourse analysis, sentence information structure / topic-focus articulation, word order, dependency syntax and corpus linguistics. She got the Bolzano Prize (2013) for the best Ph.D. thesis at the Charles University in Prague in the category of social science. She is the author of the book On Word Order from the Communicative Point of View. She is the leader of a research team developing the software application EVALD (Evaluator of Discourse) on automatic evaluation of text coherence in Czech.