The Centre and Periphery of Discourse Connectives

PACLIC 28 !452 The Centre and Periphery of Discourse Connectives Magdaléna Rysová Kateřina Rysová Charles University in Prague Charles University in Prague Faculty of Arts Faculty of Mathematics and Physics magdalena.rysova@post.cz rysova@ufal.mff.cuni.cz Abstract The paper tries to contribute to the general definition of discourse connectives. It examines connectives in broader sense, i.e. all language expressions that have an ability to express discourse relations within a text (e.g. both conjunctions like but, and, or and expressions like the condition for this is, due to this situation etc.). The paper tries to classify connectives from different perspectives and to divide them into several groups to specify their similarities and differences. We try to discuss a various attributes an expression must have to be connective. We understand discourse connectives as a set of expressions with a center and periphery and we focus here mainly on the periphery – i.e. on description of the secondary connectives (like the reason is simple, this means that... etc.) because it is not much investigated but a very current theme of discourse analysis. 1 Introduction Discourse connectives are generally understood as explicit indicators of discourse relations within a text. However, there is not any shared and generally accepted definition of them. Therefore, various authors dealing with discourse studies try to give a list of connectives for the given language and to describe their common features. In this paper, we want to contribute to this general discussion (as well as to the terminology issue) and to bring new perspectives from which we may look at discourse connectives. We also want to present general principles according to which we may draw boundaries among such a wide and heterogeneous group of expressions. Our general observations are made on the basis of the large corpus study enabled by the annotated corpus Prague Dependency Treebank. Our research is carried out on Czech newspaper texts but we believe that our general principles may be used also for other languages. 2 Discourse Connectives – General Discussion As said above, discourse connectives are hardly definable expressions, which is seen already in the fact that there are many different terms used for these expressions – cf. discourse connectives (Blakemore, 2002), discourse operators (Redeker, 1991), discourse markers (Schiffrin, 1987), pragmatic connectives (van Dijk, 1979) etc. We use the term discourse connectives following the Czech traditional terminology. The variability in terminology points at the fact that discourse connectives are studied from different perspectives – e.g. from the syntactical, lexical, phonetic or pragmatic point of view. Since there is a chaos in terminology as well as in the definition of discourse connectives, we want to bring some new observations of this theme based on a large corpus study. 3 Discourse Connectives in the Prague Dependency Treebank Our research on discourse connectives in Czech was carried out on the data of the Prague Dependency Treebank (PDT) – a manually annotated corpus of about 50 thousand sentences from newspaper texts containing, among others, annotation of discourse relations. 3.1 The First Annotation of …

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