Primary and secondary discourse connectives: Definitions and lexicons

Abstract

Starting from the perspective that discourse structure arises from the presence of coherence relations, we provide a map of linguistic discourse structuring devices (DRDs), and then focus on those found in written text: connectives. To subdivide this class further, we follow the recent idea of structuring the set of connectives by differentiating between primary and secondary connectives, on the one hand, and free connecting phrases, on the other. Considering examples from Czech, English, French and German, we develop definitions of these groups, with attention to certain cross-linguistic differences. For primary and secondary connectives, we propose that their behavior can be described to a large extent by declarative lexicons, and we demonstrate a concrete proposal which has been applied to five languages, with others currently being added in ongoing work. The lexical representations can be useful both for humans (theoretical investigations, transfer to other languages) and for machines (automatic discourse parsing and generation).