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Connectives are a central means for creating a coherent discourse. The relationships between specific connectives, coherence relations and syntactic relations are complex for children to acquire. In this paper, we systematically compare the use of clause-initial connectives in written narratives by German-speaking children in fourth grade (10-year-olds, N = 32) and adults (N = 52). The overall use of connectives, the types of syntactic relations and coherence relations expressed and the connective types used as well as the relationships between syntactic relations, coherence relations and connective types are analysed. The results show that the groups expressed coherence relations with connectives equally often. Additive relations were the most frequent in both groups, but the children expressed temporal relations more often than the adults, who showed a larger diversity in the types of coherence relations. There was no difference in the overall use of subordination and coordination, but the adults expressed temporal relations more frequently with subordination. The children used adverbs to a greater extent than the adults. The connective da 'then' played an important role in the children's expression of temporal relations, whereas the adults used a wider variety of different connectives to express different types of temporal relations. The results suggest that children in the fourth grade have not yet fully acquired an adultlike use of connectives in written narratives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article scrutinizes how speakers in multi-party conversations on visual art use the Swedish connective för att 'because' in conjunction with their embodied behavior to elaborate on their prior contributions that have not received sufficient uptake by their recipients. The present multimodal interactional analysis demonstrates that the general interactional motivations for the use of turn-expanding practices with för att are to manage not fully affiliating responses or a complete lack of uptake. The connective för att operates discursively and marks the upcoming talk as an explanation of some sort. The för att -prefaced contribution serves as a justification and a warrant for a first action, as well as elaborating on or merely reformulating it. The speakers also signal with embodied cues that they are prepared to elaborate on their first contribution. After having deployed depicting or pointing gestures during their first contribution, the speakers do not retract to a full embodied rest position, but halt in an intermediate body position alongside or directly after the syntactic completion of the first contribution. Thus, the speakers treat the transition space multimodally as optional slots for further talk, depending on the recipiency that the initial contribution accomplishes. • The Swedish connective för att 'because' can initiate a turn continuation. • The connective för att marks the upcoming talk as an explanation of some sort. • This för att -prefaced contribution secures sufficient uptake and sequence progression. • Speakers treat the transition space multimodally as optional for further talk. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As part of a cross-linguistic investigation of request for confirmation (RfC) sequences, this article provides an overview of distributional tendencies associated with Korean RfC sequences based on an examination of 200 tokens of RfC excerpted from audio- and video-recorded face-to-face ordinary conversations. Various grammatical and contextual features associated with RfCs are analyzed, e.g., as interactional resources for grounding RfCs in inferencing, rendering them modulated in action, or connecting them to prior talk/action. They include negative polarity markers, connective particles (e.g., -nuntey ‘circumstantial’), modal markers (e.g., -keyss ‘I suppose’), and sentence-ending suffixes (SESs) such as -na (‘dubitative), -ney (‘noticing’), and ‘pseudo-tags’ -ci/cianha, which are composed of -ci (‘committal’). Features of responses to RfCs are examined in terms of response type (e.g., confirmation, disconfirmation, or neither) with special reference to the form and distribution of response tokens, which include not only unmarked interjections such as ung/yey (‘yes’) and ani(-yo) (‘no’), but also kule-marked indexical forms (e.g., ku(leh)ci ‘certainly it is’). The findings shed light on the role of SESs, modal markers, and discourse particles as stance-marking resources that crucially shape the function of RfCs, and the compositional features of response turns that constitute or frame a responsive action to RfCs.

Epistemic modals have peculiar logical features that are challenging to account for in a broadly classical framework. For instance, while a sentence of the form p ∧ ◊ ¬ p ('p, but it might be that not p') appears to be a contradiction, ◊ ¬ p does not entail ¬ p , which would follow in classical logic. Likewise, the classical laws of distributivity and disjunctive syllogism fail for epistemic modals. Existing attempts to account for these facts generally either under- or over-correct. Some theories predict that p ∧ ◊ ¬ p , a so-called epistemic contradiction, is a contradiction only in an etiolated sense, under a notion of entailment that does not always allow us to replace p ∧ ◊ ¬ p with a contradiction; these theories underpredict the infelicity of embedded epistemic contradictions. Other theories savage classical logic, eliminating not just rules that intuitively fail, like distributivity and disjunctive syllogism, but also rules like non-contradiction, excluded middle, De Morgan's laws, and disjunction introduction, which intuitively remain valid for epistemic modals. In this paper, we aim for a middle ground, developing a semantics and logic for epistemic modals that makes epistemic contradictions genuine contradictions and that invalidates distributivity and disjunctive syllogism but that otherwise preserves classical laws that intuitively remain valid. We start with an algebraic semantics, based on ortholattices instead of Boolean algebras, and then propose a possibility semantics, based on partial possibilities related by compatibility. Both semantics yield the same consequence relation, which we axiomatize. We then show how to lift an arbitrary possible worlds model for a non-modal language to a possibility model for a language with epistemic modals. The goal throughout is to retain what is desirable about classical logic while accounting for the non-classicality of epistemic vocabulary. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Epistemic modals have peculiar logical features that are challenging to account for in a broadly classical framework. For instance, while a sentence of the form $p\wedge\Diamond\neg p$  ('$p$, but it might be that not~$p$') appears to be a contradiction, $\Diamond\neg p$ does not entail $\neg p$, which would follow in classical logic. Likewise, the classical laws of distributivity and disjunctive syllogism fail for  epistemic modals. Existing attempts to account for these facts generally either under- or over-correct. Some theories predict that $p\wedge\Diamond\neg p$, a so-called  epistemic contradiction, is a contradiction only in an etiolated sense, under a notion of entailment that does not always allow us to replace $p\wedge\Diamond\neg p$ with a contradiction; these theories underpredict the infelicity of embedded epistemic contradictions. Other theories savage classical logic, eliminating not just rules that intuitively fail, like distributivity and disjunctive syllogism,  but also rules like non-contradiction, excluded middle, De Morgan's laws, and disjunction introduction, which intuitively remain valid for epistemic modals. In this paper, we aim for a middle ground, developing a semantics and logic for epistemic modals that makes epistemic contradictions genuine contradictions and that invalidates distributivity and disjunctive syllogism but that otherwise preserves classical laws that intuitively remain valid. We start with an algebraic semantics, based on ortholattices instead of Boolean algebras, and then propose a possibility semantics, based on partial possibilities related by compatibility. Both semantics yield the same consequence relation, which we axiomatize. We then show how to lift an arbitrary possible worlds model for a non-modal language to a possibility model for a language with epistemic modals. Further, we  show that we can use this construction to lift standard possible worlds treatments of probabilities and conditionals into possibility semantics. The goal throughout is to retain what is desirable about classical logic while  accounting for the non-classicality of epistemic vocabulary.

This paper aims to highlight the prevalent challenges faced by Hong Kong Chinese students in utilizing connectives and ensuring coherence in their English academic writing. Research indicates that constructing fluent, effective, and cohesive English written texts that maintain logical flow poses a significant challenge for Chinese learners studying English as a foreign language (EFL). This difficulty is likely attributed to the substantial cultural differences between the English and Chinese languages, regardless of the learners’ grasp of English grammar and vocabulary usage. In order to raise awareness among EFL teachers regarding the struggles Chinese students encounter in mastering connectives and cohesion in English writing, this qualitative study analyses five sample English term papers written by Hong Kong university students majoring in English in 2023. The findings reveal that the Hong Kong EFL participants tend to present their arguments in an indirect and circular manner within their English essay assignments. Additionally, due to cultural norms and politeness, the true intent of their writing is often withheld, and the thesis statement is implicitly inferred towards the end of the essay rather than being explicitly stated at the beginning in the introduction. Furthermore, a focus group interview with the student participants conducted after the written analysis demonstrated that their English academic essays reflect the influence of Chinese social interaction norms on rhetorical patterns. The relevance of this study lies in its potential to inform EFL instruction, enabling educators to better support Hong Kong Chinese students in navigating the complexities of English academic writing and to adapt pedagogical approaches that bridge cultural and linguistic gaps.

This study focuses on connectives, linguistic devices that signal relations between ideas. Connective knowledge varies widely across grades and is known to support reading comprehension and school writing. Despite the important role that connective knowledge plays in reading and writing, few resources exist to support teachers in understanding which connectives to prioritize in Spanish literacy instruction. In this study we combined a secondary analysis of midadolescents' connective assessment data (810 students in grades 4–8) with a corpus linguistics frequency analysis of connectives in Chilean national science and social studies textbooks (1,079,593 total words), with the goal of generating a pedagogically relevant tool to support the instruction of connectives in Spanish literacy across content areas. To generate the Connective Frequency Bands Tool, we first examined the role of grade and connective type in midadolescents' connective knowledge. Secondly, we examined associations between students' knowledge and textual frequencies across content areas for each connective included in the assessment. Finally, informed by midadolescents' connective knowledge and by the corpus linguistics analysis of science and social studies textbooks from grades 1–8, we generated the Connective Frequency Bands Tool listing connectives frequencies by grade, connective type, and content area. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mid-adolescence has been identified as a period of considerable potential growth in the language skills and practices that support reading and writing at school, but little research has examined mid-adolescents' use of connectives in school-relevant persuasive writing. In this study, we define connectives as cohesive devices that signal to a reader logical relations between ideas or organizational relations in a text. Drawing from Halliday and Matthiesen (Halliday's introduction to functional grammar, Routledge, 2014) and Hyland (Metadiscourse: exploring interaction in writing, Continuum, 2005), we propose a comprehensive taxonomy of connectives that guided our examination of developmental trends and individual differences in the use of connectives in persuasive essays written by a socioeconomically and ethnically diverse cross-sectional sample of U.S. public-school mid-adolescents in grades 5 to 8 (N = 512). Our analysis revealed (1) developmental trends and individual differences at different grade levels and (2) identified students' connective use as a predictor of overall writing quality above and beyond students' receptive language skills and sociodemographic factors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Natural language does not express all connectives definable in classical logic as simple lexical items. Coordination in English is expressed by conjunction and, disjunction or, and negated disjunction nor. Other languages pattern similarly. Non-lexicalized connectives are typically expressed compositionally: in English, negated conjunction is typically expressed by combining negation and conjunction (not both). This is surprising: if ∧ and ∨ are duals, and the negation of the latter can be expressed lexically (nor), why not the negation of the former? I present a two-tiered model of the semantics of the binary connectives. The first tier captures the expressive power of the lexicon: it is a bilateral state-based semantics that, under a restriction, can express all and only the distinctions that can be expressed by the lexicon of natural language (and, or, nor). This first tier is characterized by rejection as non-assertion and a Neglect Zero assumption. The second tier is obtained by dropping the Neglect Zero assumption and enforcing a stronger notion of rejection, thereby recovering classical logic and thus definitions for all Boolean connectives. On the two-tiered model, we distinguish the limited expressive resources of the lexicon and the greater combinatorial expressive power of the language as a whole. This gives us a logic-based account of compositionality for the Boolean fragment of the language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of the study was to extend the knowledge about two different types of adversative relations. The study pertaining to the principles of the Connective Integration Model (Millis & Just, 1994) included two experiments to examine the effect of two types of but-sentences (type 1 and type 2) in connective and non-connective versions on reading comprehension and recall performance. Reading comprehension was measured by clause 2 reading times, response times to comprehension questions and answer accuracy, while recall performance was measured via probe recognition times and accuracy in probe answers. The results of Experiment 1 indicated that the connective versions led to faster clause 2 reading times, faster answer latencies and greater answer accuracy than did the non-connective versions. Experiment 1 also showed that the semantic constraints related to the two types of but-sentences had an impact on reading speed and comprehension, since it was found that type 1 but-sentences were associated with faster clause 2 reading times, answer latencies and higher answer accuracy than were type 2 but-sentences in the non-connective versions versus the connective versions, and that type 2 but-sentences were read faster than were type 1 but-sentences in the connective versions. The results of Experiment 2 only indicated greater accuracy in probe answers in the type 1 versus the type 2 but-sentences in the connective and non-connective versions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Russell derived many of his logical symbols from the pioneering notation of Giuseppe Peano. Principia Mathematica (1910-13) made these "Peanese" symbols (and others) famous. Here I focus on one of the more peculiar notational derivatives from Peano, namely, Principia's dual use of a squared dot or dots for both conjunction and scope. As Dirk Schlimm has noted, Peano always had circular dots and only used them to symbolize scope distinctions. In contrast, Principia has squared dots and conventions such that some dots mark scope distinctions while others symbolize conjunction. How did this come to pass? In this paper I trace a genealogy of Principia's square dots back to Russell's appropriation of Peano's use of circular dots. Russell never explicitly justifies appropriating Peano's notations to symbolize two distinct notions, but below I explain why Russell deployed Peano's dot notations in this manner. Further, I argue that it was Cambridge University Press who squared the circular dots. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We discuss a well-known puzzle about the lexicalization of logical operators in natural language, in particular connectives and quantifiers. Of the many logically possible operators, only few appear in the lexicon of natural languages: the connectives in English, for example, are conjunction and, disjunction or, and negated disjunction nor; the lexical quantifiers are all, some and no. The logically possible nand (negated conjunction) and Nall (negated universal) are not expressed by lexical entries in English, nor in any natural language. Moreover, the lexicalized operators are all upward or downward monotone, an observation known as the Monotonicity Universal. We propose a logical explanation of lexical gaps and of the Monotonicity Universal, based on the dynamic behaviour of connectives and quantifiers. We define update potentials for logical operators as procedures to modify the context, under the assumption that an update by ϕ depends on the logical form of ϕ and on the speech act performed: assertion or rejection. We conjecture that the adequacy of update potentials determines the limits of lexicalizability for logical operators in natural language. Finally, we show that on this framework the Monotonicity Universal follows from the logical properties of the updates that correspond to each operator. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using corpus research methods, this study aims to establish whether there are two-item and, more generally, multi-item distant co-occurrence patterns of connectives in written Japanese, and further, to clarify the role these patterns play in discourse. The study is based on a hybrid corpus of written Japanese including Humanities and social science papers, Science and technology papers, and general written language data. The co-occurrence threshold was set at co-occurrence frequency > 10, PMI value > 2, and Dice coefficient > 0.01. The distribution of the observed co-occurring pairs differed according to the genre. Visualization of the connectivity potential of co-occurring pairs as directed graphs showed that these co-occurring pairs constitute longer co-occurrence chains which can be interpreted as ready-made co-occurrence patterns. Two-item and multi-item co-occurrence patterns are considered a type of Bourdieu’s habitus and contribute to both discourse development and discourse prediction.

This study sets out to investigate the four main linguistic categories (i.e., syntactic pattern density, connectives, text easability, and readability) together with their related sub-categories and indices in first-year undergraduate university students' written argumentative essay responses as analysed by Coh-Metrix. Employing a mixed-methods approach, the study utilised these written essay responses (n = 14 text files in two equal sets) as its corpora. Four of the findings of this study are worth mentioning. Firstly, concerning syntactic pattern density, all text files exhibited a high incidence of noun phrase density and verb phrase density. Secondly, both sets of text files displayed a lower usage incidence of adversative and contrastive, expanded temporal, and temporal connectives. Thirdly, regarding text easability, most text files in the first set and all text files in the second set had a low narrativity incidence. Fourthly and lastly, both the Flesch-Kincaid Grade Level and Coh-Metrix L2 Readability scores were low for both data sets. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The counterargumentative connective tuttavia marks the disruption of a causal chain, as it introduces an unexpected conclusion that cancels the inferences obtained from the previous premise. Therefore, under normal conditions, tuttavia links two discourse members that are argumentatively clashing. On the contrary, if the discourse segments are cooriented, the premise is deemed insufficient from an argumentative point of view and it does not allow a counterargumentative reading. As a result, the utterance is considered incoherent. A self-paced reading experiment with eyetracking technology compared the processing costs generated by an utterance, in which tuttavia is inserted in a neuter argumentative schema. The utterance in which tuttavia was inserted forced the reader to process a countercausal relation between discourse segments that are argumentatively cooriented. As a result of the extremely high processing effort needed to understand the utterance, readers decided to abandon the processing, as they deemed it did not embed a pragmatically unacceptable assumption. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of International Chinese Teaching is the property of Beijing Language & Culture University Press Co. Ltd. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

An argumentative text should present evidence that prove the author’s claims, which implies logical organization of the text and expression of a cause-and-effect relationship. This paper explores the way of expressing causality in argumentative writing in Croatian as a mother tongue (L1), and a foreign language (L2). The study investigates Croatian L1 and L2 speakers’ use of causative connectives in various types of syntactic structures, based on the corpus of 110 argumentative essays (Croatian L1 N=55, Croatian L2 N=55). The results show that in order to express causality, L1 and L2 speakers use the same connectives, in the same syntactic types, but not at the same frequency. Croatian L1 speakers showed strong preference for using pa as a typical causal connective for coordinated and jer for subordinate compound sentences. In comparison to Croatian L1 speakers, L2 speakers showed two tendencies: to overuse some connectives (jer, zato što), and to underuse the others (pa).

The study focuses on the meaning of the four temporal adverbial connectives: zatem and potom in Russian, and their translational equivalents puis and ensuite in French. For the comparative semantic analysis we used Russian and French semantic dictionaries and 1200 bilingual pairs of contexts (so called equivalences) extracted from the bi-directional Russian – French parallel subcorpus of RNC. We compared the polisemy structure of the four items and found in the corpus data the evidence that Russian adverbs just as their French counterparts possess “local”, “enumerative” and “hierarhy” meanings, nоt attested in dictionaries. The cognitive explanation of such a semantic derivation was proposed. We paid special attention to illocutionary uses of the four items and found out difference in conceptualization of the connection between consecutive speech acts: in French discourse temporal conceptualization is favored, while In Russian discourse it is mereological (belonging to the same ordered set or additive). Knowing from previous reserch that the synonymy in both pairs of adverbs is not absolute, we found оut that semantically and syntactically zatem is closer to puis while potom is closer to ensuite, although the analogy is not full.

The study focuses on the connective meždu tem and is carried out using comparative and quantitative methods of analysis; applied to the bilingual annotations created in the Supracorpora Database of Connectives in the directions of translation Russian – French (219 annotations) and Russian – Italian (158 annotations). The author identifies four meanings for meždu tem and the connectives including meždu tem (meždu tem kak, i meždu tem, a meždu tem, no meždu tem): temporal (propositional and metalinguistic), oppositive, contrary to the expected and additive (illocutionary), and provides quantitative data showing the distribution of these logical-semantic relations. These data show that in meždu tem the temporal relation is dominant (56.3% of annotations), which makes it possible to correcting its treatment in the grammars and dictionaries that either do not register this meaning of meždu tem in modern Russian, or do not consider it a connective in this meaning. The author also provides data on syntactic structures that characterize the realization of each of the four logical-semantic relations, expressed by connectives with meždu tem.

Copyright of International Journal of Language Academy is the property of Rota Kariyer and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

There appears to be few, if any, limits on what sorts of logical connectives can be added to a given logic. One source of potential limitations is the motivating ideology associated with a logic. While extraneous to the logic, the motivating ideology is often important for the development of formal and philosophical work on that logic, as is the case with intuitionistic logic. One family of logics for which the philosophical ideology is important is the family of relevant logics. In this paper, I explore the limits of what a relevant connective is, showing how some basic criteria motivated by the ideology of relevant logicians provide robust limits on potential connectives. These criteria provide some plausible necessary conditions on being a relevant connective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Stemming from a wh-question, the Sicilian marker cusà (cu sa 'who knows') expresses several epistemic meanings, which can also reach the realm of conditionality. The paper explores the discourse profile of cusà as it emerges from the analysis of diachronic data (from the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries) and present-day informal Sicilian, namely spoken Sicilian and present-day informal Sicilian as written by speakers on the web. These data suggest a possible path of development leading from the wh-question to new functions. We propose that the origin of this development can be explained in the light of the strategy of the "impossible question", while the diverse functions of cusà emerged through concomitant processes of desemantization, reanalysis, and subjectification. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Coherence relations are expressed differently across languages, often leading to language learners misusing discourse connectives. We argue that the ability to detect these errors crucially depends on the coherence relation under scrutiny, as errors may remain unnoticed when the relation is clause-internal and marked with a highly optional connective. We focus, therefore, on specifications, a relation that German-speaking learners sometimes struggle to correctly indicate when writing in French. We assessed whether non-native readers detect this error and show preferences for either explicit or implicit marking of specifications. Findings show that non-native speakers were generally able to detect the error in a sentence-evaluation task but did not react to it in a self-paced-reading task, contrary to native speakers. They also judged implicit specifications as more correct than explicitly marked specifications. We conclude that non-native speakers do not always benefit from connectives during text processing, especially when they are highly optional. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Many connectives, such as therefore and however, are used very frequently in the written modality. Their acquisition thus represents an important milestone in developing written language competences. In this article, we assess the development of competence with such connectives by native French speakers in a sentence‐level insertion task (N = 307, aged 12 to 64) and a text‐level insertion task (N = 172, aged 13 to 71). Our results indicate that, despite a general progression in the level of competence with age, the academic level of participants is a strong predictor of competence within each age group, even during adulthood. In addition, from the age of 12, competence is related to the frequency of connectives in naturalistic data, with frequent connectives systematically mastered better than less frequent ones. Finally, in all age groups, the use and understanding of connectives is more challenging when sentences to complete are embedded within a richer context than when presented alone. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Appropriate use of cohesive devices is an important writing skill. Recently, there has been growing research on cohesiveness in ESL students' texts at university level. However, research into secondary school students' writing and learners' perceptions of cohesive devices has remained underexplored. This case study investigated the use of connectives, a particular type of cohesive device, by nine ESL secondary school learners. In this study, qualitative data were collected from classroom observations, students' compositions, and semi-structured group interviews. Techniques of corpus-assisted discourse analysis were applied using UAM CorpusTool. The findings show that the main problem faced by high-proficiency learners was the overuse of connectives, while average- and low-proficiency learners tended to overuse and misuse them. The findings also reveal that inadequate knowledge of connectives, low awareness of genre, and poor understanding of writing requirements were possible reasons for these problems. Based on the findings, practical implications for language teachers and suggestions for further research are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While corpus studies have shown that discourse connectives that convey the same coherence relation can display subtle differences, research on online discourse processing has only focused on a rather limited set of connectives. Yet, different connectives – for example, rare or polyfunctional ones – might elicit different reading patterns. In order to explore this assumption, we test the robustness of discourse processing for French native speakers by measuring the way they process causal and concessive sentences that are conveyed by either an appropriate or inappropriate connective. Throughout three experiments, we change important characteristics of the connectives: we first test frequently used connectives (Experiment 1), secondly less frequent ones (Experiment 2), and finally less frequent connectives that are polyfunctional and for which different functions clearly compete (Experiment 3). Our results show that the processing for incoherent items was affected for all connectives, however readers showed altered reading fluency when infrequent connectives were used. We conclude that discourse processing is quite robust and that readers are able to insert meaning conveyed by rare connectives while still showing the highest reading ease with frequent connectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An argumentative text should present evidence that prove the author's claims, which implies logical organization of the text and expression of a cause-and-effect relationship. This paper explores the way of expressing causality in argumentative writing in Croatian as a mother tongue (L1), and a foreign language (L2). The study investigates Croatian L1 and L2 speakers' use of causative connectives in various types of syntactic structures, based on the corpus of 110 argumentative essays (Croatian L1 N=55, Croatian L2 N=55). The results show that in order to express causality, L1 and L2 speakers use the same connectives, in the same syntactic types, but not at the same frequency. Croatian L1 speakers showed strong preference for using pa as a typical causal connective for coordinated and jer for subordinate compound sentences. In comparison to Croatian L1 speakers, L2 speakers showed two tendencies: to overuse some connectives (jer, zato što), and to underuse the others (pa). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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'Suiran danshi ('although but')' used on Chinese social media is a novel variant of 'suiran ('although')...danshi ('but')', a typical pairing of adversative connectives in Mandarin Chinese. This article hypothesizes that 'suiran danshi' is a memetic expression resulting from pragmatic ellipsis and repeated use for special functions in the context of online communication. To verify this hypothesis, the authors collected data from Weibo and WeChat, two most widely used social media platforms in China, and analyzed the use of 'suiran danshi' in context. It is argued that as an elliptical form, 'suiran danshi' complies with the requirements of the Economy Principle and the Politeness Principle. As a meme, the emergence and popularity of the variant are ascribable to its special functions of teasing and facilitating social bonding, as well as to the vagueness of language use and the richness and complexity of cyber-context afforded by the Internet. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As a knowledge dissemination and popularization strategy, intratextual reformulation plays a significant role in explaining, defining and describing concepts in informative and explicatory texts. In judicial rulings, however, intratextual reformulations may serve interpretative and argumentative functions, given that judges address legal professionals with whom they assume shared specialist knowledge. The purpose of this paper, therefore, is to concentrate on the interpretative and argumentative functions of intratextual reformulation, as realized in the judicial rulings, via conceptual refinement, definition and characterization of legal notions and legal objects. The main emphasis then lies on the one hand on the collection and analysis of reformulation connectives and, more particularly, on the mechanisms that prompt an interpretative and argumentative function of reformulation in the corpus.

The mental models theory rejects that sentences are linked to logical forms. From its perspective, their most relevant aspect refers to the semantic possibilities that correspond to them. In this way, the theory has analyzed in detail the real semantic role that the traditional connectives in logic can play in reasoning. However, given that logical forms are not important in its framework, in this paper, it is argued that those connectives are not the only operators that the mental models theory should review, and that there are other connectives present in most of the languages in general that can be interesting for it as well. That is the case of ‘but’ in English, which is addressed from the approach of the aforementioned theory here.

While corpus studies have shown that discourse connectives that convey the same coherence relation can display subtle differences, research on online discourse processing has only focused on a rather limited set of connectives. Yet, different connectives – for example, rare or polyfunctional ones – might elicit different reading patterns. In order to explore this assumption, we test the robustness of discourse processing for French native speakers by measuring the way they process causal and concessive sentences that are conveyed by either an appropriate or inappropriate connective. Throughout three experiments, we change important characteristics of the connectives: we first test frequently used connectives (Experiment 1), secondly less frequent ones (Experiment 2), and finally less frequent connectives that are polyfunctional and for which different functions clearly compete (Experiment 3). Our results show that the processing for incoherent items was affected for all connectives, however readers showed altered reading fluency when infrequent connectives were used. We conclude that discourse processing is quite robust and that readers are able to insert meaning conveyed by rare connectives while still showing the highest reading ease with frequent connectives.

The aims of the current project included to (a) describe the use of connectives in written language samples by fifth grade students, (b) examine differences in connective use between groups who differed in English proficiency and exceptionalities, and (c) examine the predictive relationship between connective measures and writing quality ratings. Investigators utilized written expository responses of 1,128 students in fifth grade who differed in English proficiency and language ability. The sample included 214 English learners and 144 students with language learning disabilities (LLD). Group differences were examined in the use of advanced connective words in academic writing. Regression analysis was used to examine connective measures as predictors of overall writing quality rating. Students with LLD used advanced connectives less frequently than their peers and demonstrated less variety in their connective word use. Two connective measures (total number of advanced connectives and the ratio of connectives) were significant predictors of writing quality. Findings support the need for additional efforts to improve the use of cohesive devices in academic writing for students with LLD to minimize achievement gaps. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to further test the cognitive claims of the so-called subjectivity account of causal events and their linguistic markers, causal connectives. We took Mandarin Chinese, a language that is typologically completely different from the usual western languages, as a case to provide evidence for this subjectivity account. Complementary to the commonly used corpora analyses, we employed crowdsourcing to tap native speakers' intuitions about causal coherence, focusing on four result connectives kějiàn 'therefore', suǒyǐ 'so', yīncǐ 'so/for this reason' and yúshì 'thereupon/as a result'. The analysis shows systematic differences regarding the use of connectives in relations that differ in terms of subjectivity, demonstrating that native speakers make use of subjectivity to encode and decode different types of causal relations in discourse. Moreover, our study evidences that a comprehensive model of subjectivity should include the epistemic dimension of certainty about the subjectivity scale that might be indicated by other linguistic elements. In-depth analyses of the test items revealed that the presence/absence of modality words in the result segments are related to different preferential patterns for the connectives. There is a trade-off between the epistemic dimension of certainty and the expression of subjectivity in the four connectives involved. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Given a consequence relation in many-valued logic, what connectives can be defined? For instance, does there always exist a conditional operator internalizing the consequence relation, and which form should it take? In this paper, we pose this question in a multi-premise multi-conclusion setting for the class of so-called intersective mixed consequence relations, which extends the class of Tarskian relations. Using computer-aided methods, we answer extensively for 3-valued and 4-valued logics, focusing not only on conditional operators, but also on what we call Gentzen-regular connectives (including negation, conjunction, and disjunction). For arbitrary N-valued logics, we state necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of such connectives in a multi-premise multi-conclusion setting. The results show that mixed consequence relations admit all classical connectives, and among them pure consequence relations are those that admit no other Gentzen-regular connectives. Conditionals can also be found for a broader class of intersective mixed consequence relations, but with the exclusion of order-theoretic consequence relations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this study was to compare: 1) the connective expressions (CEs) used to signal causal coherence relations in primary school textbooks from four different school subjects (variety); 2) patterns of use of these CEs in terms of the types and number of causal relations they signal across subjects (functionality); 3) patterns of use of these CEs regarding the causal relations they specialize in across subjects (specificity). 2216 causal coherence relations extracted from school textbooks of Language, Mathematics, Science, and History were analysed. To describe variety and functionality, a descriptive statistical approach was adopted, while to determine specificity, a logistic model was built, which allowed us to predict the co-occurrence of CEs and a specific type of causal relation. 76 linguistic devices were identified in the overall corpus, being Conjunctions the predominant category. Regarding functionality, in each subject the most frequent CEs signal from two to five different types of relations. Four CEs showed a profile of specificity in the overall corpus and only two were determined as specific in the across subject analysis. Results suggest that polyfunctionality is the main pattern of use of Spanish causal CEs. • 76 linguistic devices were identified in a corpus of Spanish causal relations, being Conjunctions the predominant category. • Polyfunctionality is the main pattern of use, the most frequent CEs signal from two to five different relations. • 4 CEs showed a profile of specificity in the overall corpus and only 2 were determined as specific in the subject analysis. • A logistic model was built, which allowed us to predict the co-occurrence of CEs and a specific causal relation accurately. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While the role of discourse connectives has long been acknowledged in argumentative frameworks, these approaches often take a coarse-grained approach to connectives, treating them as a unified group having similar effects on argumentation. Based on an empirical study of the straw man fallacy, we argue that a more fine-grained approach is needed to explain the role of each connective and illustrate their specificities. We first present an original corpus study detailing the main features of four causal connectives in French that speakers routinely use to attribute meaning to another speaker (puisque, étant donné que, vu que and comme), which is a key element of straw man fallacies. We then assess the influence of each of these connectives in a series of controlled experiments. Our results indicate each connective has different effects for the persuasiveness of straw man fallacies, and that these effects can be explained by differences in their semantic profile, as evidenced in our corpus study. Taken together, our results demonstrate that connectives are important for argumentation but should be analyzed individually, and that the study of fallacies should include a fine-grained analysis of the linguistic elements typically used in their formulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Discourse connectives are lexical items like “but” and “so” that are well-known to influence the online processing of the discourse relations they convey. Yet, discourse relations like causality or contrast can also be signaled by other means than connectives, such as syntactic structures. So far, the influence of these alternative signals for discourse processing has been comparatively under-researched. In particular, their processing in a second language remains entirely unexplored. In a series of three self-paced reading experiments, we compare the reading patterns of contrastive relations by native French-speakers and non-native speakers of French with English as a first language. We focus on the effect of syntactic parallelism and how it interacts with different types of connectives. We test whether native and non-native readers equally recruit parallelism to process contrast in combination with or without a connective (Experiment 1), with a frequent vs. infrequent connective (Experiment 2) and with an ambiguous vs. unambiguous connective (Experiment 3), thus varying the explicitness and ease of retrieval of the contrast relation. Our results indicate that parallelism plays an important role for both groups of readers, but that it is a more prominent cue for non-native speakers, while its effect is modulated by task difficulty for native participants.

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Discourse connectives are lexical items like "but" and "so" that are well-known to influence the online processing of the discourse relations they convey. Yet, discourse relations like causality or contrast can also be signaled by other means than connectives, such as syntactic structures. So far, the influence of these alternative signals for discourse processing has been comparatively under-researched. In particular, their processing in a second language remains entirely unexplored. In a series of three self-paced reading experiments, we compare the reading patterns of contrastive relations by native French-speakers and non-native speakers of French with English as a first language. We focus on the effect of syntactic parallelism and how it interacts with different types of connectives. We test whether native and non-native readers equally recruit parallelism to process contrast in combination with or without a connective (Experiment 1), with a frequent vs. infrequent connective (Experiment 2) and with an ambiguous vs. unambiguous connective (Experiment 3), thus varying the explicitness and ease of retrieval of the contrast relation. Our results indicate that parallelism plays an important role for both groups of readers, but that it is a more prominent cue for non-native speakers, while its effect is modulated by task difficulty for native participants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]