ConnectivesMARINA BONDI

Connectives (or connectors) (French connectif/connecteur, Italian connettivo/connettore, Spanish conector, German Konnektor/Konnektiv) are a key feature of language in use and have been studied from many different points of view—syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, and cognitive. Connectives can be preliminarily defi ned as language elements whose main function is to connect utterances or text units, linking prior and subsequent information. Realized pro-totypically by conjunctions (and, but, if ), they may be seen to cut across the whole spectrum of word combinations, including prepositional phrases (in addition), adverbials ( furthermore), and clauses (what’s more). Connectives can thus be studied both as functional sentence elements and as elements of a textual or discourse grammar. At sentence level, they con-nect words, phrases, or clauses. On the level of text and discourse, they may be seen to express or establish semantic or pragmatic relations between textual or discourse units.

Different approaches to connectives direct attention to different aspects, ranging from meaning relations to interactional aspects and cognitive features, argumentational value, language change, and cross-cultural elements.

The word connective owes much to the related notion of “logical” or “truth-functional” connectives (or operators) in logic and formal languages. Logical connectives are a set of expressions acting as truth functions. Examples would be: and (expressing conjunction), or (inclusive or exclusive disjunction), implies (implication), if . . . then (implication), if and only if (equivalence), and so forth. In formal languages, they can be represented by unam-biguous symbols: conjunction (∧ or &), disjunction (∨), material implication (→), and biconditional (↔, ≡, or =). In natural language, the relations they represent are not limited to connecting propositions and are typically realized by a wide range of expressions.

In applied language studies, the interest in this wide class of units originates from the development of textual grammars and discourse analytic approaches in the 1970s and 1980s. With the notions of text and discourse, attention is brought to those very language elements—such as connectives or pronouns—that cannot be explained simply within the boundaries of the sentence. The study of textual cohesion and coherence looks at elements that reach beyond traditional grammar units like the clause or the sentence (Halliday & Hasan, 1976; van Dijk, 1977; Ducrot, 1980; Roulet, Auchlin, Moeschler, Rubattel, & Schelling, 1985). Halliday and Hasan’s study on cohesion (1976), in particular, has been very infl u-ential in establishing an interest in connectives as giving “texture,” or unity, to texts. An extensive section is devoted to conjunction, where a set of disparate grammatical categories are identifi ed as “connectors,” that is, expressions that link clauses or sentences to each other in discourse.

Pointing to a text-functional semantics, Halliday and Hasan’s defi nition of cohesion concerns discourse relations above grammatical structure, thus excluding coordination and subordination. Conjunction is classifi ed according to the semantic relations established by connectors into four main types, related to four main notions: addition (including additive and alternative relations, as well as exemplifi cation and comparison), contrast (ranging from adversative “proper” to contrast, correction, and dismissal), causality (including cause, means, purpose, condition, and respective relations), and temporality (including successive and simultaneous relations) (Halliday & Hasan, 1976, pp. 238–66).

The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics, Edited by Carol A. Chapelle.© 2013 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Published 2013 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd.DOI: 10.1002/9781405198431.wbeal0188

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Later developments of systemic functional linguistics confi rm a view of cohesion as discourse semantics, that is, meaning beyond the clause. The basic relations are still described as “four kinds of logic” or “logical relations” in recent models of analysis (e.g., Martin & Rose, 2003, pp. 110–12). Some degree of consistency in spelling out the types of relations expressed may also be found in other approaches.

Approaches such as rhetorical structure theory have also paid great attention to the relations established between discourse units and produced systematic mappings of dis-course relations. Their interest, however, lies more in the relations themselves than in the lexicogrammatical signals.

The wide array of formal realizations of the elements that are used in actual discourse to connect textual units makes it impossible to say they meet certain syntactic criteria. Most approaches recognize at least three sources: conjunction, adverbs, and prepositional phrases (e.g., Fraser, 1999, p. 943). The reason for choosing a connective is obviously semantic—the relation that needs to be expressed (e.g., “cause”)—but the choice of a grammatical structure is also important from a textual point of view: a subordinate clause will help treat the two units (e.g., cause and effect) as a single idea, whereas coordination will present the two units as equally important. Separate sentences might also be linked by sentence adverbs or other connectors. The order of elements can be the determining factor in explaining the choice of one form or another, especially in as far as word order contributes to information (given new) structures.

It should be noticed, however, that connectors are multifunctional and a single connec-tive can express different kinds of meanings. A conjunction like and, for example, can be used to indicate addition (“American historian-autobiographers have usually been unaware of each other’s publications, and they do not refer to any common theoretical framework”), cause/condition (“Subscribe and get 4 issues free”), and time sequence (“When a massive star runs out of fuel at the end of its life, it collapses and explodes”).

When considering the “linking system” as a whole, it is important also to consider implicit connections, that is, links that are not marked explicitly. We can think of a zero-realization or nonrealization of connectives (see also Lenker & Meurman-Solin, 2007). In “Subscribe. Get 4 issues free” the conditional meaning would be still inferable from the context.

The category of connectives, on the whole, seems to blur the distinction between gram-matical words like and or but and lexical patterns like in addition to that or what’s more. It is possible to say with Aijmer (2002, pp. 16–19) that even when they originate in complex lexical patterns, connectives—like most pragmatic markers—can be treated as distinct from most lexical items: they are somewhat “grammaticalized” (Hopper & Traugott, 1993) through time—they become more constrained morphosyntactically and function as indi-visible units. The process can be illustrated diachronically through the change from clause-internal adverbial to sentence adverbial and discourse marker, as shown, for example, by Schwenter and Traugott (2000) in the case of in deed becoming indeed, epistemic sentence adverb and marker of elaboration or clarifi cation.

Connectives are seen as relational and organizational units from a textual and pragmatic point of view, acting as instructions for the reader/hearer in many cognitive or semantic approaches. The nature and scope of the relations, as well as the multifunctionality of connectors in general, are not clearly agreed upon in the literature. The class itself is more often defi ned in terms of a core and periphery (Pons Bordería, 2008) rather than in terms of necessary and suffi cient conditions. Items assume different degrees of connectivity and can be shown to have many other functions.

The textual perspectives developed by text linguistics and discourse analysis have also inspired studies on discourse production and comprehension. One of the most interesting areas in focus has been that of metadiscourse, discourse about the evolving discourse.

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Connectives are presented as one of the main categories of metadiscourse already in Vande Kopple’s classifi cation system (1985), where they are clearly identifi ed as part of textual metadiscourse, showing the connection between parts of a text, whereas in Crismore, Markkanen, and Steffensen (1993) “logical connectives” are limited to coordination of main clauses. Later models (e.g., Hyland, 2005) show increasing awareness of the multifunctional nature of connectives, while also clarifying that the status of connective does not in itself guarantee metadiscursive status (Ädel, 2006, p. 22).

Terminological Debate

The debate on connectives is complicated by terminological instability and by the complexity of the relations of these elements of textual grammar with the rapidly developing fi elds of semantics and pragmatics. The terminological debate is clearly related to the centrality of connectives in text organization, production, and comprehension, as well as to their inextricable link with different approaches to grammar, semantics, pragmatics, and cognition.

Problems arise soon in differentiating “connectors” (Halliday & Hasan, 1976), “discourse connectives” (Blakemore, 1987), and “discourse markers” (Schiffrin, 1987), and later also “pragmatic markers” (Aijmer, 2002), “discourse particles” (Fischer, 2006) or—in the German tradition—“pragmatic particles.” Discourse markers are sometimes almost identifi ed with connectives as defi ned above. Fraser, for example, calls discourse markers those elements that signal “a sequential relationship between the current basic message and the previous discourse” (Fraser, 1990, p. 383), or that “function like a two-place relation” (Fraser, 1999, p. 938), while excluding other pragmatic markers such as commentary markers, focus particles, and so forth. The relations expressed can refer to discourse units, as well as topics, and their basic meanings recall other defi nitions of connective relations (elaboration, contrast, inference, or temporality). Other linguists refer to discourse markers as a hyper-onymic class of elements including connectives, modal particles, interactive markers, and so forth (e.g., Pons Bordería, 2008). Some look at connectives and discourse markers as a complementary class of markers, expressing respectively relations between units and modal relationships between the speaker and the message.

In general, when a distinction is made, or when the word “connective” is used to indicate the fi eld in focus, the interest is on the connecting, coherence-establishing function of elements. Connectives are found in both written and spoken utterances; they tend, however, to be variously integrated into the discourse and to involve different “conversational” aspects such as topics or activities (Fischer, 2006, pp. 8–11). This will normally mean that there is the need to provide a picture of connectives that should be consistent with both the general fi eld of discourse or pragmatic markers and long-standing grammatical analyses of conjunc-tion within and between sentences. The need to integrate syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic analysis seems to be central to many different theoretical frameworks (Celle, 2007).

Semantics and Pragmatics: Multifunctionality of Connectives

Studies of connectives have often highlighted the problems of distinguishing semantic from pragmatic meaning in their use (Halliday & Hasan, 1976; Schiffrin, 1987; Fraser, 1990, 1999). Given the range of elements included and the complexity of semantic and pragmatic functions, attempts to arrive at a functional typology or to provide an account of meaning relationships have been accompanied by an awareness that categories may be overlapping and that many connective elements may have different functions at the same time.

One of the fi rst issues of debate raised in the study of connectives is the nature of the relation expressed on the semantic and pragmatic levels. The distinction between external

4 connectives

and internal conjunction, introduced by Halliday and Hasan (1976), is particularly clear in some areas of meaning. Temporal conjunction, for example, may easily distinguish relations between events talked about, as expressed by time adverbials in a narrative (then, previously, meanwhile), and relations between parts of a text, as in enumeration ( fi rstly, secondly, fi nally). Additional relations, on the other hand, can be very fuzzy from this point of view and signal a relation that works both at the level of the experience represented in discourse and in the development of discourse, as in the following statement supported by two arguments “These editions are valuable, but they have their limitations. . . . They cover only parliaments, not conventions of estates. And they contain errors and omissions.” Most approaches to connectives, however, tend to distinguish the two functions—organizing the experience represented in a discourse sequence and organizing discourse as such.

Ducrot (1980, p. 16) adds an “enunciative” perspective, while looking at two different types of mais (‘but’), those expressing a contrastive meaning that derives from “facts,” and those contrasting speech acts. Ducrot’s work introduces two elements that will have fruit-ful developments in semantics: an instructional view of meaning and a study of implicit meanings. Connectors are seen as linking language units and giving readers/hearers instruc-tions on how to interpret the relation between the semantic units connected.

Schiffrin (1987) studies the relationship signaled by but in terms of both ideational (referential, derived from “facts”) and interactional content and establishes a model that looks at three types of structure: ideational content, verbal action, and exchange structure. Her study of but, for example, distinguishes its use for referential contrast, functional contrast, and contrastive actions, that is, “speakers’ efforts to make a point in reaction to interruptions, distractions, challenges, and disagreements” (Schiffrin, 1987, p. 177). She concludes that the semantic meaning of but is contrastiveness and the pragmatic meaning is speaker-return, which has an expressive function of point making, but she also admits that the connector can mark all of three types of contrast simultaneously.

In relevance theory (and related cognitive approaches) connectives are defi ned in a strict sense, as elements that constrain the inferences that can be derived between two proposi-tions (Blakemore, 1987). Attention is thus paid to the reader/hearer’s perspective, rather than to the text itself. Debate originates from the distinction between conceptual elements (words encoding a concept, information about the conceptual representations to be derived from a proposition) and procedural elements (instructions regarding how to process a concept) (Wilson & Sperber, 1993, p. 2). Connectives are identifi ed as procedural elements, encoding procedural constraints on the inferential phase of comprehension (Blakemore, 1987; Wilson & Sperber, 1993, pp. 19–21).

The distinction between procedural and conceptual has recently been presented as gradable, with connectors expressing different degrees of strength of conceptual and pro-cedural coding (Moeschler, 2002, p. 277), while maintaining the function of linking mental representations of experience, sequencing them, and making explicit the relation between them.

Pragmatic interest in different degrees of explicitness/implicitness in utterances is refl ected in many approaches. Fraser (1990, 1999), for example, while focusing more expli-citly on a grammatical-pragmatic perspective and looking at discourse markers as signals of the relations between the utterance preceded and followed by the signal, also shifts the emphasis from the speaker to the hearer’s interpretative activity. The hearer has to fi nd whether the relation expressed is with the direct message of the previous textual segment or with any of the implicit meanings realized, whether implicit assumptions, logical impli-cations, or conversational implicature.

Studies of individual connectives have also often debated the issue of their “core meaning,” variously emphasizing the functional role of connectives, to be seen as instructions for interpretation (Aijmer, 2002), or their invariant semantic properties (Rossari, 2000).

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The picture of multifunctional units is further complicated when attention is paid to the multifarious nature of the units related by connectives. What exactly do connectives connect? On the one hand they may be seen to designate the relationship between proposi-tional units or mental representations of experience. On the other hand, they may connect a wide range of elements in discourse (Schiffrin, 1987). Rehbein, Hohenstein, and Pietsch (2007, p. 4) identify a long list of “dimensions” that can become either the starting point or the target point of a connective: the constellation (speech situation), the utterance act, the illocutionary act, the propositional act, knowledge, other mental processes (e.g., evaluation, planning, etc.), and cooperation (interaction-management).

A Range of Perspectives

In a discourse perspective, Roulet et al. (1985) use “connecteurs” to refer to markers of the structure of discourse and group them according to their argumentative functions: argu-mentative, counter-argumentative, consecutive, and reevaluative. The study of connectors proves to be an interesting area of convergence of discourse analysis and argumentation studies. L’argumentation dans la langue (Argumentation in language) (Anscombre & Ducrot, 1983), in particular, has a special interest in the topic and aims at discovering argumenta-tive instructions in connectors. The approach shows for example that some contrastive relations can best be explained with reference to the argumentative dimension of some common or shared knowledge called topos, which is part of our stereotyped encyclopedic knowledge and is shared by speakers of a language, as well as those sharing the same culture or way of thinking.

More recently, a growing body of studies has been based on the analysis of corpora, that is, principled collections of authentic instances of language in use. Corpus work has introduced further descriptive possibilities and interest in both diachronic (see, for example, Lenker & Meurman-Solin, 2007, for a range of approaches) and synchronic perspectives (Aijmer, 2002). Corpus-based analyses can complement more intensive studies of particular texts, and vice versa. Text and discourse studies can be built upon when closer analysis of particular instances of communicative events is integrated with quantitative data from wider textual bases. These provide the necessary background and support to textual inter-pretation, for example, by analyzing co-occurrence patterns that characterize specifi c genres or texts, or diachronic interpretation, for example, tracing the path to grammaticalization.

Distributional patterns across registers are analyzed, for example, in Biber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad, and Finegan (1999), under the headings of linking adverbials, coordinators, and subordinators. Quantitative analysis shows, for example, that linking adverbials are “considerably more common in conversation and academic prose than in fi ction and news” (p. 880). Information is also offered on the semantic categories that characterize different registers or genres, showing, for instance, that academic prose is distinguished by intensive use of enumerative/additive/summative adverbials, while news presents the lowest level of contrastive/concessive adverbials.

Diachronic studies, on the other hand, look at connectives from the point of view of language change. Descriptive work focuses on the development of individual connectives or types of connectives, such as relative pronouns, time adverbials, or concessive connec-tives in general (Lenker & Meurman-Solin, 2007).

Crosslinguistic analysis is also becoming prominent in the fi eld. It is concerned with establishing correspondences across languages, while often aiming at tackling typological questions and fi nding discourse universals. Connectives may operate at several linguistic levels, often showing that the same function is expressed lexically in one language and grammatically in another. Complete equivalence, however, is not the rule. The study of

6 connectives

parallel translation corpora can contribute to giving a picture of the multifunctionality of connectors, as well as to establishing a network of semantic relations between them in terms of their closeness to or remoteness from each other in the semantic space (Dyvik, 1998). The integration of functional and formal perspectives in the study of a wider semantic fi eld is often regarded as more reliable and more rewarding than research based on a single language (Aijmer & Simon-Vandenbergen, 2004).

The empirical study of non-native-speaker language is adding a further perspective to applied studies on connectors (see Granger & Tyson, 1996, for an early example). Muller (2005) reviews the relation of a range of applied interests to the study of connectors: sec-ond language acquisition, communicative competence, interlanguage pragmatics, and the study of learner corpora. These can be shown to have great potential interest in studies on how connectors are acquired by non-native speakers and the respective role of overuse, underuse, and misuse.

SEE ALSO: Corpus Linguistics: Overview; Discourse Markers; Halliday, M. A. K.; Hasan, Ruqaiya; Inference and Implicature; Learner Corpora; Metadiscourse; Pragmatic Markers; Pragmatics in the Analysis of Discourse and Interaction

References

Ädel, A. (2006). Metadiscourse in L1 and L2 English. Amsterdam, Netherlands: John Benjamins.Aijmer, K. (2002). English discourse particles: Evidence from a corpus. Amsterdam, Netherlands:

John Benjamins.Aijmer, K., & Simon-Vandenbergen, A.-M. (2004). A model and a methodology for the study

of pragmatic markers: The semantic fi eld of expectation. Journal of Pragmatics, 36, 1781–805.Anscombre, J.-C., & Ducrot, O. (1983). L’argumentation dans la langue. Brussels, Belgium: Mardaga.Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S., Finegan, E. (1999). Longman grammar of spoken

and written English. Harlow, England: Pearson.Blakemore, D. (1987). Semantic constraints on relevance. Oxford, England: Blackwell.Celle, A. (Ed.). (2007). Connectives as landmarks. Amsterdam, Netherlands: John Benjamins.Crismore, A., Markkanen, R., & Steffensen, M. (1993). Metadiscourse in persuasive writing: A

study of texts written by American and Finnish university students. Written Communication, 10(1), 39–71.

Ducrot, O. (Ed.). (1980). Les mots du discours. Paris, France: Editions de Minuit.Dyvik, H. (1998). A translational basis for semantics. In S. Johansson & S. Oksefjell (Eds.), Corpora

and cross-linguistic research: Theory, method and case studies (pp. 51–86). Amsterdam, Netherlands: Rodopi.

Fischer, K. (2006). Approaches to discourse particles. Oxford, England: Elsevier.Fraser, B. (1990). An approach to discourse markers. Journal of Pragmatics, 3, 383–95.Fraser, B. (1999). What are discourse markers? Journal of Pragmatics, 31, 931–52.Granger, S., & Tyson, S. (1996). Connector usage in the English essay writing of native and

non-native EFL speakers of English. World Englishes, 15(1), 17–27.Halliday, M. A. K., & Hasan, R. (1976). Cohesion in English. London, England: Longman.Hopper, P., & Traugott, E. C. (1993). Grammaticalization. Cambridge, England: Cambridge

University Press.Hyland, K. (2005). Metadiscourse. London, England: Continuum.Lenker, U., & Meurman-Solin, A. (2007). Connectives in the history of English. Amsterdam,

Netherlands: John Benjamins.Martin, J., & Rose, D. (2003). Working with discourse: Meaning beyond the clause. London, England:

Continuum.Moeschler, J. (2002). Connecteurs, encodage conceptuel et encodage procédural. Cahiers de

linguistique française, 24, 265–92.

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Muller, S. (2005). Discourse markers in native and non-native English discourse. Amsterdam, Netherlands: John Benjamins.

Pons Bordería, S. (2008). Do discourse markers exist? On the treatment of discourse markers in relevance theory. Journal of Pragmatics, 40, 1411–34.

Rehbein, J., Hohenstein, C., & Pietsch, L. (Eds.). (2007). Connectivity as an object of linguistic research in multilingualism. Amsterdam, Netherlands: John Benjamins.

Rossari, C. (2000). Connecteurs et relations de discours: Des liens entre cognition et signifi cation. Nancy, France: Presses Universitaires de Nancy.

Roulet, E., Auchlin, A., Moeschler, J., Rubattel, C., & Schelling, M. (Eds.). (1985). L’articulation du discours en français contemporain. Bern, Switzerland: Peter Lang.

Schiffrin, D. (1987). Discourse markers. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press.Schwenter, S. A., & Traugott, E. C. (2000). Invoking scalarity: The development of in fact. Journal

of Historical Pragmatics, 1(1), 7–25.Vande Kopple, W. J. (1985). Some exploratory discourse on metadiscourse. College Composition

and Communication, 26, 82–93.van Dijk, T. A. (1977). Connectives in text grammar and text logic. In J. Petöfi & T. A. van Dijk

(Eds.), Grammars and descriptions (pp. 11–63). Berlin, Germany: De Gruyter.Wilson, D., & Sperber, D. (1993). Linguistic form and relevance. Lingua, 90, 1–25.

Suggested Readings

Aijmer, K., & Simon-Vandenbergen, A.-M. (Eds.). (2006). Pragmatic markers in contrast. Oxford, England: Elsevier.

Bazzanella, C. (1995). I segnali discorsivi. In L. Renzi, G. Salvi, & A. Cardinaletti (Eds.), Grande grammatica italiana di consultazione (Vol. 3, pp. 225–57). Bologna, Italy: Il Mulino.

Blakemore, D. (2002). Relevance and linguistic meaning: The semantics and pragmatics of discourse markers. Cambridge, England. Cambridge University Press.

Jucker, A., & Ziv, Y. (Eds.). (1998). Discourse markers: Description and theory. Amsterdam, Netherlands: John Benjamins.

Pasch, R., Brauße, U., Breindl, E., & Waßner, U. H. (2003). Handbuch der deutschen Konnektoren. Berlin, Germany: De Gruyter.

Pons Bordería, S. (1998). Conexión y conectores: Estudio de su relación en el registro informal de la lengua. Valencia, Spain: Cuadernos de Filología, Universitat de Valencia.

Taboada, M. (2006). Discourse markers as signals (or not) of rhetorical relations. Journal of Pragmatics, 38(4), 567–92.