6.1 Introduction
With this chapter, we will turn to the grammar of discourse. We will start with the most direct interface of the sentence and the discourse, which is the expression of connections between sentences. This means that grammatical aspects of the discourse itself will now become part of our discussion. Although we are still dealing with elements of grammar, we will explore how they connect to form units beyond the level of the sentence. The discussion will therefore center no longer just on sentence analysis, but will turn to concepts and ideas closer to the field of discourse analysis (see our note on this subfield of linguistics in Chapter 2).
While there are two ways of expanding a sentence, subordination and coordination, discourse proceeds through the sequence, that is, the coordination, of sentences (or non-clausal units). Within the sentence, the elements that can be coordinated are phrases or clauses: Example (1) illustrates the coordination of two noun phrases and (2) the coordination of two clauses. Coordinating conjunctions, such as and, but, and or, also commonly referred to as “coordinators,” are the lexical category for elements that signal phrasal or clausal coordination.
(1) Jimmy likes apples and pears.
(2) Jimmy likes apples and Jimmy likes pears.
Coordinators connect elements of equal syntactic status. None of the constituents in (1) or (2) is a dependent element, which is why coordinate structures within the sentence are also described as “non-headed” constructions (Reference Huddleston and PullumHuddleston & Pullum 2002: 1275).
It is only a small step from a non-headed structure, that is, from coordination within the sentence, to the coordination of utterances in discourse. Coordinators also connect units of discourse, although, in writing, we often feel a little uncomfortable about using an item like and or but at the beginning of a new sentence. However, in speech, initiating a new turn using one of these coordinators is common, even when the next turn is uttered by a different speaker. This is shown in Example (3), where speaker b adds an utterance (And Jimmy likes pears) to the one made by speaker a (Jimmy likes apples).
(3)
a: Jimmy likes apples. b: And Jimmy likes pears.
The overt expression of the coordination of utterances is something very common in natural discourse, starting already in early childhood speech. In Example (4), which is from the CHILDES corpus, a large database of child interaction with their caretakers, the clause beginning with and easily connects two utterances across the turns of two different speakers (there will be more on connectives in language acquisition in Section 6.2).
(4)
child: Nina has dolly sleeping. adult: The doll is sleeping too? child: And the man’s sleeping on the big bed. [Nina; 2 years, 2 months] (example from Reference DiesselDiessel 2004: 159)
The early and natural use of a coordinator for expressing connections in discourse, that is, without constructing a proper coordinate sentence, shows that the discourse-related function of coordinators, that is, their use as connectives, is part of their grammatical function.
Leaving the domain of grammar in discourse and turning to the grammar of discourse also means that the elements we will be looking at are more loosely connected to the core clause. For example, one could argue that, in a sequence like (3) or (4), and does not establish a syntactic connection at all, but works as a discourse marker (a category to be discussed in more detail in Chapter 8). Think of sentence connectives not so much as a way of expanding the core clause, but of adding a new one. This means you are adopting a discourse-oriented view: The function of a coordinator as a discourse connective is more to initiate than to truly connect (Biber et al. 2021: 87). Still, and, for example, does not carry all properties of a real extra-clausal element (these properties will be discussed in detail in Chapter 8). For instance, sentence-initial and, as in (3) and (4), is not mobile in position, unlike a connective adverb like however, and is not usually set off by intonation or punctuation from the rest of the clause (Jimmy, *and/however, likes pears).
Using a term from discourse analysis here, the relationship between sentences as units of discourse is called conjunction. Note that this term has no plural here because it refers to an area of the grammar of discourse and not to the part-of-speech class of conjunctions. Conjunction in this new sense covers all words and expressions that connect sentences or sections in a text. In discourse analysis, conjunction constitutes one crucial area of discourse cohesion, which is the cover term for all sorts of linguistic ties in a text, including lexical ties, substituting expressions, or the phenomenon of ellipsis. Conjunction is a grammatical type of cohesion, referring to the grammatical ties that express the semantic and pragmatic relationships in a text. To put it most simply, conjunction expresses how what is to follow in a text is connected to what has come before.
We will start this chapter with a discussion of what is at first sight the most basic semantic type of conjunction: additive conjunction. This choice might surprise you, since the idea of “addition” seems to mean rarely more than just continuity in a text or discourse. Which raises the question: Why express addition in discourse at all? There is no obvious answer to this question, which is exactly why we want to ask why, in the case of a simple additive relation, the next sentence in a discourse does not always open without a connective. This option is what we call a “zero” coordination. The contrast to the coordination with and is illustrated in Examples (5) and (6).
(5) Jimmy likes apples. And Jimmy likes pears. (sentence coordination with and)
(6) Jimmy likes apples. Jimmy likes pears. (“zero” coordination)
In this chapter, we will explore this opposition of sentence coordination by and or zero more closely, using both the variationist and the text-linguistic approach. We will then proceed by discussing other semantic types of conjunction and see how their usage varies within and across texts.
Go to Exercise 1 to apply the distinction between the coordination of clauses and of sentences.
After reading this chapter, you will be able to:
distinguish coordination within the sentence from the use of grammatical elements as discourse connectives;
recognize and classify different elements that function as connectives;
identify the four semantic types of conjunction and their different forms of expression;
investigate characteristic patterns of the expression of conjunction in different types of discourse.
Concepts, Constructions, and Keywords
additive relation, adversative connectives, causative connectives, clausal coordination vs. sentence coordination, conjunction, connective adjuncts, coordinators, narrative mode, temporal connectives, “zero” expression of sentence coordination
6.2 Additive Conjunction from a Variationist Perspective: Overt Marking vs. “Zero”
Additive conjunction expresses a relation of “addition” in the discourse. The connective element can be one of the additive coordinators, that is, and or or, or it can be an adjunct with additive meaning. Additive adjuncts include the adverbs moreover or furthermore, and prepositional phrases such as in addition or in the same way. Using a syntactic coordinator, most notably using sentence-initial and, is therefore only one out of several syntactic options to initiate a new sentence and to connect it to the preceding discourse.
An additive relation can also apply if there is no overt discourse connective (as in (6) above: Jimmy likes apples. Jimmy likes pears.). There is no real semantic difference between (5) and (6): Additive conjunction constitutes a proper case of variation in the area of discourse syntax. The choice of marking or zero must therefore be one governed by the discourse. Which contribution to the discourse does and as a connective make at all, in the light of this semantic equivalence? Does it make a difference whether a speaker or writer uses initial and or not? Discourse analysts have shown that, within a sequence of utterances, a change from zero connections to sentence- or turn-initial and signals some kind of “turn” within the discourse (Reference SchiffrinSchiffrin 1987). By analogy, a change from and to zero can have a similar effect. This means, if there is a preference in a given context to use and, or no and, this is exactly what leaves the speaker with the possibility for a switch in order to express some kind of contrast.
Let us turn to an example. You are probably aware that many style manuals do not consider and at the beginning of a sentence in written text to be a good choice. In contrast to speech, where we often continue by using and, a written text, like a novel, will mostly contain zero connections between sentences. Still, we sometimes find individual occurrences of sentence-initial and in such texts, for example, when and signals the end of an episode, which is what you see in Example (7).
(7) Deep down here by the dark water lived old Gollum, a small slimy creature. I don’t know where he came from, nor who or what he was. He was a Gollum – as dark as darkness, except for two big round pale eyes in his thin face. He had a little boat, and he rowed about quite quietly on the lake.
Gollum got into his boat and shot off from the island, while Bilbo was sitting on the brink altogether flummoxed and at the end of his way and wits. Suddenly up came Gollum and whispered and hissed:
“Bless us and splash us, my precioussss! It guess it’s a choice feast; at least a tasty morsel it’d make us, Gollum!”
And when he said Gollum he made a horrible swallowing noise in his throat. That is how he got his name, though he always called himself “my precious.”
In Example (7), the function of the connective and in the penultimate sentence of the passage results from the contrast to the regularity of zero connections, as explained above. With the use of and at the beginning of the last paragraph in (7), the episode ends and Gollum is now readily introduced into the discourse. This function is similar to the one of the formula And they lived happily ever after, which we know from many fairy tale endings.
In contrast to written texts, in which sentence-initial and is used scarcely overall, the overt expression of additive conjunction is common in spoken discourse. The reason is that, in natural speech, and easily supports the mere continuity of the discourse, for example, as a filler item or a marker of progression. We all know oral storytelling that proceeds by the typical and then-connections, associated, in particular, with early childhood speech (see Figure 6.1).
Figure 6.1 And then-connections in early childhood storytelling
In early childhood speech, children do not yet connect their utterances by way of a coordinator. Conjunction comes to be expressed approximately around their second birthday (Reference Bloom, Hafitz and LifterBloom et al. 1980), the first coordinator, in fact, being and. Based on data from the CHILDES corpus, we know that and is used as a discourse connective before it is used as a syntactic coordinator, that is, it connects turns or discourse units before connecting clauses within the sentence (Reference DiesselDiessel 2004). The evidence for this finding is intonation, in that the uses of and connecting sentences in discourse, and not constituent clauses, are preceded by an intonation pattern and/or a pause indicating the end of that utterance. Children tend to use independent utterances beginning with and especially after a speaker change (Reference DiesselDiessel 2004: 159), like in (8):
(8)
child: Piggy went to market. adult: Yes. child: And piggy had none. [Naomi; 2 years, 7 months] (example from Reference DiesselDiessel 2004)
In (8), which was produced by a child aged two years and seven months, and occurs as a marker of speech continuity. This function of and is similar to a pattern we also see in adult speech, from which the children obviously learn this.
Another reason why and is common in speech is that it can connect elements on all levels of discourse organization. These elements can be units of content or information, as in Example (8), or different verbal acts. This means that sentence-initial coordinators have a semantic or a pragmatic function. In that respect, they differ from many other discourse connectives. Take, for example, the dialog in (9), where a nutritionist is discussing Halloween snacks. Some of the uses of and relate to the content of the talk, for instance, the different Halloween giveaways (gum, pretzels, tattoos). Other links in the text connect different verbal acts, such as explaining (And kids like gum) and, later, recommending (and actually, the kids will have these a lot longer).
(9)
It is a characteristic of and as a discourse connective that it can establish both semantic and pragmatic links among the units of a discourse. By contrast, some connective adverbs and phrases, like in addition, provide semantic links only, that is, they connect ideas (as in Sugarless gum. […] In addition, there are pretzels), but less easily different verbal acts (?In addition, the kids will have these a lot longer.)
To summarize, we have seen that the basic function of an additive connective in discourse is to signal continuation and that this is ultimately the most basic way of turning utterances into discourse. If and is used, the additive link can support a semantic and/or a pragmatic relation between utterances. In spoken discourse we find the expression of additive meaning to be much more common than in written discourse, where it is subject to a prescriptive attitude (see our Good to Know box on prescriptive grammar below). Another reason is that a written text, like an essay or a blog entry, already possesses a material continuity through the medium or genre, making the support of mere continuation less obvious.
We have also seen how the discourse function of and as a connective arises from the contrast to zero, that is, we have so far looked at the connective using the variationist approach (as introduced in Chapter 2). Turning to the text-linguistic approach in Section 6.3, we will explore how the use of sentence- and turn-initial and varies across different types of discourse.
Good to Know: Prescriptive Grammar and Sentence-Initial CoordinatorsThe interest in grammar in discourse is something that linguists share with language instructors. Perhaps you have experienced yourself a rather negative attitude against the use of coordinators at sentence beginnings. School teachers often express a critical attitude toward sentence-initial and when they supervise and grade young children’s writing (Reference CrystalCrystal 1995). Nowadays, grammar checkers also play a role: By putting a wavy line under any sentence-initial coordinator, they also impose a rule against them. Other sources adopt a more descriptive attitude. The American Heritage Dictionary notes the existence of a prescriptive grammar rule that judges sentence-initial and as “incorrect,” but goes on to state that “this stricture has been ignored by writers from Shakespeare to Joyce Carol Oates” (www.ahdictionary.com). A usage-based reference grammar, such as the GSWE (Reference Biber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad and FineganBiber et al. 2021), comments on the existence of the proscription, but takes an interest in it only as far as the attitude helps to explain register variation. For example, the proscription of sentence-initial and is influential for the expression of conjunction in academic prose, but much less so in informal texts. Overall, while prescriptive sources have an impact on patterns of language use, they do not necessarily have an impact on grammar development. We return to this distinction in the account of textual variation that follows in Section 6.3.
6.3 Text-Linguistic Variation: Additive Conjunction in Different Types of Discourse
So far, we have seen that additive conjunction is the most obvious relation of continuity in discourse and, in that, competes with the zero expression of sentence coordination. Following this discussion based on the variationist approach, we now turn to the text-linguistic perspective. Note that this perspective means that we will look just at the occurrence of and at the beginning of sentences and no longer compare zero beginnings and uses of and. Following our explanation given in Chapter 2, a text-linguistic approach here means that the object of investigation is the pattern of occurrence of additive conjunction in different types of texts.
Let us first turn to written discourse, where we can expect a strong influence of the prescriptive attitude against sentence-initial and. For example, the GSWE describes the prescription as being “most influential in academic prose,” whereas the use of and as a connective is higher in fiction and news texts, mostly because these also contain embedded dialog (Reference Biber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad and FineganBiber et al. 2021: 87). Interestingly, there is also corpus data from academic discourse in which the connective and does not turn out to be all that infrequent. One study found that sentence-initial and, compared to other additive connectives (e.g., moreover, furthermore, or in addition), was “the most frequently occurring additive marker in academic writing” (Reference BellBell 2007: 184). Figure 6.2 illustrates the occurrence of sentence-initial and in the corpus of that study (average rates per 100,000 words as the dependent variable on the y-axis), showing the results here for five different academic journals (the predictor variable on the x-axis).
Figure 6.2 Initial and in five academic journals Per ~100,000 words.
As we can see in Figure 6.2, sentence-initial and is used in academic texts, but particularly in journals from disciplines in the humanities (history, philosophy, anthropology). By contrast, the use of initial and seems to be much lower within disciplines from the natural sciences (psycholinguistics, chemistry). We can explain this finding if we come back to one aspect of the use of and that we discussed in Section 6.2. We saw there that it can help structuring the discourse by switching from zero to the use of and in order to signal a certain turn in the discourse. Similar to the shift from zero to and in Example (7), where the sentence with and concluded a chain of actions, and in humanities discourse was also found to conclude “argument chaining” (Reference BellBell 2007: 194). As an illustration, check out Example (10):
(10) Gilligan’s reporting also relied solely on a single Downing Street source, Minister of Defense employee and former UN weapons inspector David Kelly. Kelly claimed that […]. In the end, this series of events, one of many narratives surrounding the Iraq war and the intelligence that enabled the war, would lead to the August 2003 Hutton Inquiry in Britain, an attempt to explore Kelly’s death that also engaged prewar intelligence and the reporting of the BBC. And it is with the Hutton inquiry that dramatic historiographies of the nascent Iraq War began to make their way to the British stage, […]. (COCA, Academic, 2007)
The text excerpt in (10) contains and at the beginning of the last sentence, which is also the end of the author’s chain of argument. By using and, the writer is able to mark a contrast: Since one form of connection, namely zero, has been the norm so far, deviating from that norm of connection is apt to signal that something different is coming. In (10), for example, when using and, the author turns from the listing of facts to a generalization and thereby concludes the line of argument.
Turning to spoken discourse, for the reasons we discussed in Section 6.2, we can expect that sentence- or turn-initial and is considerably more frequent. In contrast to the results for written discourse shown by Figure 6.2, in which all rates per 100,000 words are below 50, a simple search for initial and in different sections of COCA (described in the toolbox of this chapter) enables us to confirm this assumption. For example, when we did this search, there was a rate of occurrence of almost 1,000 per 100,000 words in spoken news (9,629 per 1 million words in Fox, details in the toolbox). The toolbox also demonstrates again (see also Chapter 2) how to calculate the rates of occurrence for different sections, and Exercise 5 (Level 2) asks you to discuss more data on the use of and in some written sections of COCA.
Studying Rates of Occurrence of Connectives in a CorpusWhen we want to retrieve sentence-initial and in an electronic corpus, we can use the corresponding part-of-speech (POS) tag for the word class of conjunctions and add a full stop plus capitalize and. For example, having applied this search to four sections in the COCA corpus, we received the following number of hits (note that, if you are using a corpus such as COCA, to which text samples are constantly being added, the exact frequencies increase from year to year): 1,719 tokens in academic writing (field of education), 4,375 in academic writing (humanities), 60,662 in spoken news (Fox) and 131,478 in spoken news (NPR). These numbers confirm our understanding that sentence-initial and is much more typical of spoken discourse, but they also seem to offer a challenge in that the number in one type of speech is twice as large as in the other.
We therefore need to take into account that the four sub-corpora in COCA are different in size. When we did the search in 2019, the Fox news section had 6.3 million words, while the National Public Radio (NPR) corpus had 17.4 million words. In the academic sub-corpus, the sub-corpus for education had 9.4 million words and the humanities one had 11.9 million words. As a next step, we therefore need to calculate normalized rates of occurrence, as described in Chapter 2, which will provide us with averaged values for the occurrence of sentence-initial and for each corpus section.
Using the formula given in Chapter 2 (which is: (raw count ÷ total word count) × reference size in number of words), the rates of occurrence per million words look like this:
These numbers clearly confirm that written and spoken discourse differ considerably in the use of and at sentence beginnings. Both academic disciplines have much lower rates than the spoken news. By contrast, the difference within the discourse type of spoken news now appears to be less distinct. What looked like a noticeable difference when dealing with absolute frequencies (131,478 on NPR being more than twice of the 60,662 occurrences in Fox) has turned out to be one due mainly to corpus size. However, the finding that some academic texts contain considerably more occurrences of and at sentence beginnings than others has remained robust.
A final aspect of our discussion of the use of connective and in different types of discourse will concern the mode of discourse (see Figure 2.2 in Chapter 2). Next to the opposition of speech and writing, which we have dealt with so far, we want to show that it is the presence of the rhetorical mode of narration that is also more closely associated with the expression of additive conjunction than other modes of discourse. To understand why the discourse we refer to here is more about mode, rather than genre, note that narration not only means telling personal stories and anecdotes, or writing fiction, but is a term that also captures the way information is presented in the discourse of news, politics, or science. Narration is described as a “basic” mode of structuring a text, one that applies to many genres (Reference VirtanenVirtanen 1992). Note that speakers also narrate extensively in conversations, which is why the analysis of oral storytelling is an important issue in conversation analysis.
Why is a narrative mode relevant to the phenomenon of additive conjunction? The defining property of narration is that the discourse verbalizes experience, which is why narrative discourse typically deals with past events that happened in a sequence. Discourse in which the sequence of two, or more, sentences corresponds to the sequence of events has been described as possessing a “narrative syntax” (Reference LabovLabov 2013). To cite a famous example by E. M. Reference ForsterForster (1927), the sequence The king died. And then the queen died. has narrative syntax, even though it does not necessarily have a plot, which would suggest some kind of causal relationship (as in The king died. And then the queen died of grief.) A narrative mode of discourse therefore means that the text has a structure that is based on experience and chronology.
The connective and, the basic form of expression for continuity, is highly suitable for this mode of discourse and for the narrative syntax (also compare Figure 6.1), which is supported by observations based on spoken discourse. For example, in a study based on the Fisher corpus, a corpus of American telephone conversations, by far the most typical pairwise combination of connective elements in sentence-initial position was and in combination with then (Reference Lohmann, Koops, Kaltenböck, Keizer and LohmannLohmann & Koops 2016). The score for and then was about three times as high as the next combination with and in the hierarchy (which was and so). Without going into the exact measure of how the difference was calculated (if you are interested, you could consult the reference), this finding reflects a close association of the occurrence of connective and with narrative syntax and temporal continuity in a text. Interestingly, the reversed sequences also occurred at distinctly different frequencies: so and, but not then and, was also observed (see Reference Lohmann, Koops, Kaltenböck, Keizer and LohmannLohmann & Koops 2016: 442 and Section 8.4 on discourse marker sequences).
Let us also turn to written discourse, which will highlight that, despite the close association with oral storytelling, the use of sentence-initial and in narration is not necessarily a matter of an oral or colloquial style. The excerpt in (11) is from a historical academic text, taken from Robert Hooke’s Micrographia, which is a famous scientific text of the seventeenth century. We know that, in those early days of science, scientists often reported, that is, narrated, their scientific activities, rather than presenting a proper argument (Reference OhDorgeloh 2005).
(11) About eight years since, upon casually reading the Explication of this odd Phænomenon, by the most Ingenious Des Cartes, I had a great desire to be satisfied, what that Substance was that gave such a shining and bright Light: And to that end I spread a sheet of white Paper, and on it, observing the place where several of these Sparks seemed to vanish, I found certain very small, black, but glittering Spots of a movable Substance. […]
The passage illustrates what we have just described as a “narrative” syntax: The sequence of the clauses and sentences corresponds to the sequence of the steps in the experiment. Using and to initiate a new sentence (And to that end I spread …) or clause (and on it … I found) reflects the narrative mode of this discourse, which was common in those early scientific texts.
In sum, we have seen that, from the text-linguistic perspective, and is a discourse connective that turns out to be associated with spoken and with narrative discourse. In addition to this text-linguistic pattern, we have seen that and in written discourse is not altogether uncommon and enables the writer to mark an argumentative shift.
Go to Exercise 2, which is about the association of the connective and with the narrative mode of discourse, and to Exercises 6 and 7 (Level 2) for interpreting data on sentence-initial and in written discourse. Find out more about the use of and in spoken discourse in Exercise 3.
6.4 Connective Adjuncts
So far, we have dealt with one semantic type of conjunction, the expression of additive conjunction. We concentrated our discussion on the discourse connective and, which belongs to the lexical class of coordinators but also functions as a discourse connective. We now turn to other connective elements, which differ from and syntactically (they are adjuncts rather than syntactic coordinators) as well as semantically (by expressing a relation beyond mere addition).
As we discussed in Section 6.2, a connective adjunct can be an adverb or a phrase. There are simple adverbs, such as so or then, which just express the relation in discourse, while more complex adverbs and connective phrases combine the meaning of a discourse relation with an element referring back to something in the previous discourse. These different items could be ordered in a cline of increasing complexity, in which the meaning of the discourse connection, expressed either by the adverb or by the preposition, is enriched by more and more material. An example of such a cline (for temporal connectives) is shown in Figure 6.3.
Figure 6.3 Cline of temporal connectives
The categorical distinction corresponding to the beginning and end of the cline in Figure 6.3 is the one between “pure” and “impure” connective adjuncts (Reference Huddleston and PullumHuddleston & Pullum 2002: 777). For example, then is a pure connective, as it just expresses a temporal succession in discourse. By contrast, phrases with a temporal preposition (after that/the N) do not just connect, but also specify the temporal domain within which the clause applies, which is why they are impure connectives. Whereas impure connectives also add content, pure connective adjuncts are just functional elements within the grammar of discourse.
We can equally apply this distinction to the other types of conjunction: For example, a connective adjunct for expressing a result or reason can come from the lexical class of adverbs, like so or consequently, but it can also be a phrase, such as as a result or for this reason. These phrases do not just connect, but combine the connective element with a way of pointing backward: As a result (of this) or for this reason, for example, establish a causal relation and refer backward to this or this reason. Similarly, under these circumstances is an additive connective, but at the same time functions as a clausal modifier, carrying abstract locative meaning.
Impure connective adjuncts belong more closely to the core clause and are not only a phenomenon of the grammar of discourse. The borderline status between sentence adjunct and discourse connective can be made obvious by checking whether the adjunct can be the focused element in an it-cleft construction (see Chapter 5 for more on cleft constructions). See, for example, the contrast between (12a) and (13a), where only the impure connective adjunct in (13a) can be foregrounded by a cleft construction, as in (13b):
a. Jimmy likes fruit. Consequently, he likes apples.
b. Jimmy likes fruit. *It is consequently that he likes apples.
a. Jimmy likes fruit. For this reason, he likes apples.
b. Jimmy likes fruit. It is for this reason that he likes apples.
Still, the distinction between pure connective elements and clausal modifiers as impure connectives remains a little fuzzy. For this reason, when turning to the semantic types of connective adjuncts in Section 6.5, we use pure connectives as examples wherever possible. Just bear in mind that there are many more items that can be used within each category.
Consult Exercise 3 for an opportunity to retrieve the different syntactic categories that function as connectives in a text.
Turning now to the semantic types of links that different connectives provide within discourse, we use an established semantic classification. According to this classification, there are four main types of discourse relations, which are listed in Table 6.1.
Table 6.1 Semantic types of conjunction and their syntactic realizations
| Examples of … | … additive adverbs | … additive prepositional phrases |
|---|---|---|
| Additive | also, alternatively, besides, moreover, similarly | in addition, for instance |
| Adversative | however, yet, conversely, instead | despite this, by contrast |
| Causative | so, hence, consequently | as a result, for this reason, because of this |
| Temporal | first(ly), then, finally, previously | after that, at the same time, in the end, next time |
Next to additive conjunction, discussed at length in Section 6.3, you see in Table 6.1 that there are three other core semantic types. Let us look at each of these below by variation on a single example. You will see two instances for each semantic type, because we also want to distinguish between semantic and pragmatic uses of these relations in discourse. As discussed above when looking at the discourse function of and, this distinction relates to the question of whether the link is one based on the content of the discourse or on what the speaker/writer is doing (the verbal act).
Adversative: The adversative relation is similar to the additive relation but adds something to the discourse in a contrastive sense.
(14) In this class, you do not have to submit a paper. Instead, you are required to write at least a paragraph for every session. (adversative, semantic)
(15) In this class, you do not have to submit a paper. Instead, let me tell you how I would like you to work here. (adversative, pragmatic)
Causative: The semantic type of causative (also sometimes referred to as “causal”) connectives expresses relations such as result, purpose, and reason.
(16) In this class, you do not have to submit a paper. Consequently, there will be more time for reading. (causative, semantic)
(17) In this class, you do not have to submit a paper. So what do you have to do instead? (causative, pragmatic)
Temporal/sequential: Temporal relations express a proper temporal progression, or they relate to the internal relations of ordering or structuring the discourse.
(18) In this class, you do not have to submit a paper. Next time, this will be different. (temporal, semantic)
(19) In this class, you do not have to submit a paper. Now, what are the reading assignments? (temporal, pragmatic)
When looking at examples (14) through (19), you may have noticed that some connective adjuncts, like instead, express a semantic or a pragmatic connection in discourse. Others, notably so, now and then, characteristically express a pragmatic relation. As you will learn in Chapter 8, this latter type of adverbs is likely to become a real extra-clausal element, that is, a discourse marker. Classifying them as discourse markers means that one emphasizes their function as a bracketing device within the discourse, while dealing with them as connectives here means we focus on the connections that they express.
Turning to the role of discourse in the use of connectives, we will take a closer look at academic texts in Section 6.5. Choosing these texts is not random, since connectives are often used to support scientific argumentation. Before turning to this discourse type, you should go to Exercise 4 to identify the four semantic types that we have discussed in this section.
6.5 Connectives in Academic Discourse
To conclude our discussion of connectives, we will look at the usage of connectives in academic English. The findings that we discuss here are mainly about research articles and textbooks, but we will also turn to some differences between professional academic and student writing.
For a first look at some findings, the obvious question to ask is whether all semantic types discussed in Section 6.4 are used in academic writing to roughly the same extent. For example, since doing science usually means presenting evidence in order to develop or contradict a position, it is plausible to assume that expressions of causative and adversative relations are more likely in academic texts than temporal or additive connectives. This means that we expect causative and adversative connectives to be more pervasive in academic texts than expressions of the other two relations.
Table 6.2 gives us a first idea whether this assumption is borne out by corpus-based results. The data was collected for a study of connective adjuncts in English (and Chinese) academic writing (Reference GaoGao 2016). The table shows the results for English academic articles, based on a corpus of research articles from four different disciplines.
Table 6.2 Normalized frequency of connective adjuncts in academic articles
| Semantic type of connective adjunct | Rate of occurrence (per 10,000 words) |
|---|---|
| Additive | 1.14 |
| Adversative | 0.73 |
| Causative | 0.58 |
| Temporal/sequential | 0.43 |
| Total | 2.88 |
The results in Table 6.2 are normalized rates of occurrence, which show that, counter to our initial expectation, additive conjunction is the most pervasive semantic type expressed by connectives in academic texts: Its frequency is about twice as high as the frequency of causative or temporal connectives. More in line with what we predicted, the adversative type is also quite common in academic texts. With regard to our initial assumption, causative conjunction occurs to a lower extent than expected.
Remember that, since we are using the text-linguistic approach here, this data documents a pattern as characteristic of a discourse type. Academic discourse is dense in both information and argumentation, which is what the presence of additive and adversative connectives plausibly reflects. Other work dealing with academic registers has found similar proportions in related discourse types. For instance, in academic textbooks the most frequent connective adjuncts are however, thus, for example, and therefore (Reference BiberBiber 2006).
It is interesting to compare this pattern of professional academic discourse to the academic texts produced by students. A data set that allows for this comparison is shown in Table 6.3, based on writings from the field of literary studies (Reference Shaw, Charles, Pecorari and HunstonShaw 2009). The table gives the results (rates of occurrence) for five connective adjuncts, and not for all adjuncts used in the text, which is why the numbers do not reflect the overall use of connective items. However, the total of connectives is given in the final row.
Table 6.3 Frequency of five connective adjuncts in academic writing
| student corpus literary writing | professional corpus literary writing | professional corpus adjusted for density | |
|---|---|---|---|
| however | 122.6 | 61.9 | 93.3 |
| yet | 104.0 | 57.5 | 86.7 |
| thus | 80.5 | 55.2 | 83.2 |
| therefore | 86.7 | 16.7 | 25.2 |
| for example | 50.8 | 22.0 | 33.2 |
| all connectives | 844 | 560 | – |
The table shows the frequency per 100,000 words of five specific connectives and the overall number of connectives in different types of academic writing.
By looking at the first three columns of Table 6.3, we may be surprised to see that the frequency of the five connectives is higher in the texts written by students than in professional academic writing. We could speculate on whether or not this difference is due to a lack of experience, resulting in an overuse, but one could also argue that it can be due to a difference in genre. After all, student essays are not (yet) exactly the same type of writing as published research articles.
Apart from this difficulty of comparison, the results in Table 6.3 pose another challenge, which is dealt with by the numbers in the fourth column. Since it turned out in the data that there is an overall higher frequency of connectives in the student corpus, the results for the professional corpus had to be adjusted for their density. This adjustment was necessary because, ultimately, the author of that study wanted to know how frequent each of the five connective elements was in comparison. For example, how frequent would however have been if both groups of writers had used connectives to the same extent? To this end, the frequency of each adjunct had to be adjusted for density. An adjusted frequency results from multiplying each individual rate of occurrence by the ratio of the total frequencies, that is, here by 844/560. For example, however has an adjusted frequency of 93.3 (844 ÷ 560 × 61.9). This value would be its rate of occurrence in professional literary writing if this discourse had overall the same rate of occurrence for connectives. In this way, the adjusted numbers in the fourth column of Table 6.3 inform us about the frequency that each item would have if the overall density of connectives were the same in both corpora.
Resulting from this adjustment, Figure 6.4, based on Table 6.3 (columns two and four), with normalized rates of occurrence as the dependent variable on the y-axis, enables us to compare the two types of discourse for their pattern of use of the five connective elements.
Figure 6.4 Five adjuncts in student and professional literary criticism
Figure 6.4 highlights two outcomes. On the one hand, it shows that the texts produced by students by and large have a similar pattern of occurrence for these five connectives as the professional discourse. For example, both groups of writers use however and yet most frequently. On the other hand, there are also differences, for example, in that four out of the five connectives show higher rates of occurrence in the writing by students. One might conclude that students overuse these connective expressions, but we also have to bear in mind the limitations of the data set (with just five lexical items). It would equally make sense to assume that the professional writers used a wider range of connectives, including and or but. Exercise 8 (Level 2) will return to this question.
In sum, the occurrence of connectives in academic texts has indicated that the different semantic types and expressions of conjunction do not vary randomly, but with the discourse type. It has also become obvious that the overt expression of conjunction is to some extent dependent on the experience of the writers and on the genre. In the literature, many other patterns of genre variation are discussed (for some, see our notes for Further Reading at the end of this chapter). For example, there is a well-known preference for temporal connectives in narrative and instructive texts and for the expression of additive conjunction in descriptive and informative texts. It can also be quite interesting to look at your own academic writing, which is what we suggest in Exercise 9.
6.6 Summary
In this chapter, we have introduced you to one area of the grammar of discourse, looking at the various syntactic elements that function as discourse connectives. We started with one semantic type of conjunction, the additive relation, and explored the use of and as one possible connective for expressing this relation. We discussed the close association of the use of sentence- or turn-initial and with spoken and narrative discourse, as reflected in corpora by higher rates of occurrence in the corresponding discourse types. We also saw that, in discourse where additive relations are less commonly expressed, switching to and at the beginning of a sentence enables the writer to signal the end of a chain or some kind of turn.
We then turned to the different semantic classes of conjunction and looked at their syntactic realizations as well as at their occurrence in academic texts. We learned that there is a characteristic usage of the four types of conjunction within the academic register, but that their use also depends on the writer. For example, we saw that students tend to use more connectives, but show less variation, compared to the texts written by more experienced academics.
We also touched on the procedures for dealing with the frequencies of connectives as gathered from large-size corpora. For corpus sections of a different size, we saw how to deal with normalized rates rather than absolute frequencies. For interpreting rates of occurrence against the background of a different density of the overall category, you learned how to adjust frequencies of individual items for their density.
6.7 Exercises
Level 1: Classification and Application
1. Identify all cases of clausal coordination within the sentence and of the use of a coordinator as sentence connective in excerpt A. What are the criteria that you go by? Looking at the occurrences that you find, and considering that this is a children’s book, is there a pattern you expected to see?
A. Once upon a time there was a deep and wide river, and in this river lived a crocodile. I do not know whether you have ever seen a crocodile; but if you did see one, I am sure you would be frightened. They are very long, twice as long as your bed; and they are covered with hard green or yellow scales; and they have a wide flat snout, and a huge jaw with hundreds of sharp teeth, so big that it could hold you all at once inside it. This crocodile used to lie all day in the mud, half under water, basking in the sun, and never moving; but if any little animal came near, he would jump up, and open his big jaws, and snap it up as a dog snaps up a fly. And if you had gone near him, he would have snapped you up too, just as easily. (Reference RouseRouse, The Crocodile and the Monkey, 2019)
2. Discuss whether the occurrence of and as a discourse connective in excerpt B is from the context of a narrative or a non-narrative mode in the discourse. What are the linguistic signals that indicate the presence of narration? Why do you think and is used, in contrast to the sentences beginning with zero-connections?
B. Wim Wenders’ “Alice in the Cities” is about a disinterested togetherness between a German journalist (with a heart of a poet) in the middle of a creative block and a pre-adolescent girl who unexpectedly found herself in his care. It is also about a unique psychological atmosphere which is created by these two protagonists and which becomes the very style of the film – relaxed, tender, warm, more than just life. Thirdly, the film is about creative process when the object of creative effort is life itself. And, finally, it is about the geography of two cultures, American pre-globalist (and impulsively entrepreneurial) and European post-fascist (knowingly existential). (CORE, mixed register, 2009)
3. Underline all connective adjuncts in passages C and D. Indicate whether they are formally adverbs or prepositional phrases. Which ones are pure connectives (in that they do not add content, but only structure the discourse, as explained in Section 6.4)?
C. In a nutshell, can you explain the process? First we break down the shot to determine the number of layers that will be needed based on the subject matter, shot length and camera movement. Then the individual elements are rotoscoped out so that they can be manipulated independently. Next we apply depth and roundness to the individual elements using proprietary software and then we need to paint in the occlusions that were created by offsetting those objects as part of the depth process. Basically we round the objects and then shift them left and right to create the offset that would appear if you were in the position of the camera. Then we clean it up so that the viewer doesn’t know it’s been manipulated. (CORE, Interview, undated)
D. Incredibly, you can design three identical websites using exactly the same design and wording but with only the colours changed between them and elicit entirely different responses from visitors to each of the sites. For this reason alone, colour should be your main consideration when looking at the design of your website or even your company’s corporate colours. (CORE, Advice, 2012)
4. Classify all sentence connectives (in italics) in the following examples by the four semantic types of conjunction (additive, temporal, adversative, causative).
(20) […] when I returned from the bedroom, Thomas Jefferson and his toolbox were gone. I went outside to look for him and saw that his bright yellow van was still parked out front. I waited a few moments, not knowing what to do. Finally I approached the van and saw that Thomas Jefferson was sitting inside, holding his face in his hands. (COCA, Fiction, 2012)
(21) The volume highlights three particular assumptions that are inherent to and embedded within current trauma discourse. First, this discourse operates on the basis of a strongly individualist approach to human life, with a marked emphasis on the disengaged self and on intrapsychic conflicts. However, this notion of the self may not be valid in many non-western cultures, which are predicated on alternative notions of the self and its relationship to others. Secondly, it is assumed that the forms of mental disorder that are described by western psychiatry map unproblematically onto those found elsewhere. However, in non-western contexts, it is likely that the idioms of distress vary considerably; the emergence of a particular symptom does not necessarily mean that it has the same meaning or significance across different cultures. Finally, the emergence of a professionalized trauma discourse has tended towards the handing over of memory to experts to pronounce on its meaning and significance. (COCA, Academic, 2008)
(22) Adolescent relationships often take unexpected twists and turns. Therefore, it is important to regularly reflect on the process and outcomes associated with peer network interventions. (COCA, Academic, 2013)
(23) An experimental randomized design would allow for an evaluation of whether implementation of the SCS model itself, rather than other potential variables (e.g., school policies, other programs), cause observed outcomes. Therefore, the current study was implemented to utilize a randomized design within a large urban school district with more than 80,000 students. (COCA, Academic, 2013)
Level 2: Interpretation and Research Design
5. Table 6.4 contains the results from a search in COCA for occurrences of and at sentence beginnings. Why are the results difficult to compare, and what could you do about this? Which news sections are similar in their use of and, and can you try to explain why?
6. Collect your own set of data about the usage of sentence-initial and in two different genres from a corpus (use, for instance, sub-sections of magazine and newspaper texts in COCA). Set up a table with absolute as well as normalized rates of occurrence. Choose a diagram that is suitable to illustrate your results.
7. In Section 6.2. we argued that and at the beginning of a sentence is much more likely to occur in speech than in writing. In a study of differences across types of professional spoken discourse, Reference Iyeiri, Yaguchi, Baba, Askedal, Roberts and MatsushitaIyeiri et al. (2010) found the following rates of occurrence for the use of turn-initial and:
Range of rates of occurrence in three speech files (per 10,000 words) Speech at press conferences 0.6 – 1.3 Speech at meetings on reading tests 11.9 – 23.2
In the light of what you have learned in this chapter about the discourse functions of initial and, discuss possible reasons for the difference.
8. It has been suggested that a possible reason for the higher frequency of connective adjuncts in student writing is that professional writers hesitate less to use and and but, instead of connective adjuncts like furthermore or however. Look at the frequencies (taken from Reference Shaw, Charles, Pecorari and HunstonShaw 2009) as given in Table 6.5. Do they confirm this assumption? Write a short text to discuss your observations. As background of your discussion, take into account what we noted in Section 6.2 about the negative attitude that many adult speakers have toward the use of sentence-initial coordinators in written discourse.
9. Analyze a sample of your own academic writing for the expression of conjunction. Which connectives do you commonly use? Imagine an editor criticizing your language use for containing sentence-initial coordinators (and or but) or connective adverbs (like so, now, and then). If you had a conversation with this editor, what would you say from a linguistic perspective?
Table 6.4 Frequency of connective and for three written sections of COCA
| NEWS (Local) | NEWS (National) | NEWS (Sports) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| sentence-initial and | 3,013 | 4,709 | 9,523 |
| size of section (words in million) | 6.0 | 6.6 | 14.0 |
The table shows the absolute frequency of connective and and the corpus size for three written sections of COCA.
Table 6.5 Occurrence per 100,000 words of four types of connectives
| student corpus literary writing | professional corpus adjusted for density | |
|---|---|---|
| however | 122.6 | 98.3 |
| furthermore | 6.2 | 13.8 |
| and | 6.2 | 48.0 |
| but | 27.2 | 57.0 |
Further Reading
One classic reference work for the grammar of discourse, or cohesion, in English, on which this chapter also builds, is Reference Halliday and HasanHalliday & Hasan (1976). Its basic classification scheme for cohesion, as also used in this chapter, is covered by most textbooks on discourse analysis or discourse studies; see, for example, Reference Renkema and SchubertRenkema & Schubert (2018: ch. 6).
Reference SandersSanders (1997) introduces the distinction of semantic and pragmatic relations in discourse. See Reference Spooren and SandersSpooren & Sanders (2008) on the acquisition of discourse relations and Reference van Silfhout, Evers-Vermeul and Sandersvan Silfhout et al. (2015) on experimental work that documents how readers benefit from connectives as processing signals in texts.
For connectives in academic writing, see, for example, Reference BellBell (2007) and Reference GaoGao (2016). The acquisition of sentence coordination in early childhood is described in Reference DiesselDiessel (2004: ch. 7). Reference Kalajahi, Seyed, Neufeld and AbdullahRezvani et al. (2017) document the frequency of connectives in different sections of the BNC and COCA. Reference DupontDupont (2021) describes the occurrence of adversative connectives (contrasted with French) based on large corpora of editorials and research writing.
