In this chapter, we first introduce the questions of when and how children start using connectives and discourse relations during their first years of life. We will see more specifically that mastering the complex form-function mappings involved in the understanding of many connectives is a complex task for young children. In addition, we will present research investigating school-age children’s comprehension of connectives, and show that it is only around the end of their primary school years that they fully understand frequent connectives. We will explore the causes of these difficulties, and discuss the differences between various connectives and discourse relations. We will then move on to other studies analyzing the way older children understand connectives, and see that their acquisition is not fully in place after primary school years, as teenagers keep developing their competence with connectives. Finally, we will briefly discuss the acquisition of connectives and discourse relations by children suffering from linguistic or cognitive impairments such as SLI and autism.

In this chapter, we discuss the way people read, remember and understand discourse, depending on the type of relations that link discourse segments together. We also illustrate the role of connectives and other discourse signals as elements guiding readers’ interpretation. Throughout the chapter, we review empirical evidence from experiments that involve various methodologies such as offline comprehension tasks, self-paced reading, eye-tracking and event related potentials. One of the major findings is that not all relations are processed and remembered in the same way. It seems that causal relations play a special role for creating coherence in discourse, as they are processed more quickly and remembered better. Conversely, because they are highly expected, causal relations benefit less from the presence of connectives compared to discontinuous relations like concession and confirmation. Finally, research shows that in their native language, speakers are able to take advantage of all sorts of connectives for discourse processing, even those restricted to the written mode, and those that are ambiguous.

In this chapter, we first present the extent of cross-linguistic differences in the uses of discourse connectives and relations, and discuss their implications for theories of discourse. We make a distinction between discourse relations, that seem to exist in all languages and their mapping onto specific connectives that is most of the time language-specific. We also present the kind of data that can be used to perform contrastive studies, emphasizing their advantages and limitations. Connectives are also used quite differently across different genres within the same language. These differences are particularly evident between spoken and written genres. We present the variations linked to genres in this chapter, and underline the necessity to develop more cross-linguistic studies that are also varied in terms of genres. Results from corpus studies comparing languages or genres have increasingly been used as input for experimental research. We discuss in particular how observations about connective usage across genres has been important for studies analyzing discourse processing, as well as first and second language acquisition

The take-away message from this book is quite simple: studying connectives and discourse relations matters because they represent cornerstone elements of discourse coherence. Throughout the book, our aim has been to illustrate the wide variety of research produced over the past decades on these two central notions. We have seen that although both concepts are intrinsically related, they cannot be entirely merged. Discourse relations can be conveyed in the absence of connectives through simple juxtaposition, and connectives can in many cases be used to convey more than one discourse relation depending on context.

In this chapter, we start by defining and illustrating the notions of discourse relations and connectives. We will see that even though the role of discourse connectives is to make discourse relations explicit in discourse, their use is not necessary for a discourse relation to be communicated. Conversely, connectives are not always associated with a specific discourse relation: many of them can convey various relations depending on the context. Another goal of this chapter is to situate discourse relations and connectives within the more general concepts of discourse cohesion and coherence. We will see that connectives represent one type of cohesive tie and that discourse relations are crucial elements ensuring local coherence within a discourse. In the last part of the chapter, we present some important underlying methodological and theoretical choices that were made when selecting the topics covered in the book and the data presented in each chapter. We also emphasize that the study of discourse connectives and relations has many interfaces with other domains of linguistic analysis such as semantics, pragmatics and syntax.

This chapter first considers the functional and semantic overlap between discourse connectives and discourse markers, where the latter is presented as including the former. Since the two categories share most protypical features, the fuzzy boundaries between the two categories are explained in terms of partial overlap.

We then show that the description of connectives’ meanings and functions can proceed following an onomasiological as well as a semasiological approach. The latter has given rise to numerous case studies in a variety of languages aiming to come to a fine-grained semantic description of specific connectives. Strenghts and weaknesses of such studies are presented. Onomasiological approaches focus on a set connectives that are categorized together on the basis of shared semantic properties, trying to disentangle their similarities and differences, within and across languages. In the final section, we turn to one of the most described features of discourse connectives namely its polysemy and polyfunctionality, and how contextual cues may help solve this ambiguity, and how polysemy is a key explaining factor in the (frequency) distribution of connectives.

In this chapter, our main objective is to provide a succinct description of four leading models of discourse: Rhetorical Structure Theory, Segmented Discourse Representation Theory, the Penn Discourse Treebank project, and the Cognitive approach to Coherence Relations. We present the main goals of each model, and discuss their advantages and limitations. We also list their specificities compared to other models, and analyze the main differences between them. We focus more specifically on the aspects of these models that have to do with the description of discourse relations. For each model, we present the type of research to which it has been applied, and the data that have been produced in the form of annotated corpora. As we will see, all these models have been used to annotate large corpora with discourse relations. An important issue is therefore to establish mappings between the relations annotated in each of them, in order to compare data from one corpus to the others. At the end the chapter, we discuss various options for comparing annotations across models.

In this chapter, we present an overview of current knowledge about learners’ use and understanding of connectives. In the first part of the chapter, we will see that connectives are notoriously difficult to master for second language learners, because they require an array of complex competences. Learners must know how to use them appropriately in various genres and registers, have a fine-grained understanding of the meaning differences between connectives used to convey similar coherence relations, and also automatize this knowledge so that it is activated automatically during discourse processing, and not only when they consciously elicit usage rules. In the second part of the chapter, we review the important body of studies that have empirically assessed the causes for learners’ difficulties with connectives, and conclude with some recommendations for teaching. We conclude that research on the second language acquisition of connectives contributes to answering important questions, such as what makes connectives difficult to master, and how they are they used across languages.

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.

In this chapter, we first sketch a number of assumptions underlying diachronic research in order to understand how researchers sketch the emergence of discourse connectives (and discourse markers) in language. We then review the discussion about the theoretical framework underlying the diachronic evolution of discourse connectives, that is, in which conceptual terms this linguistic process is best accounted for, grammaticalization or pragmaticalization. We then turn to a general description of the evolution from clause combining strategies to coordinating and subordinating connectives. Different case studies are presented in order to illustrate typical and less typical cases of language change in the area of connectives: the semantic evolution from temporal meaning to concessive meaning of French cependant (‘yet’), the peculiar semantic evolution from cause to contrast of Italian però (‘but’) (5.3.2), and a diachronic account of the synchronic polysemy of French alors.