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.