KONEKTORI U SPONTANOME GOVORENOM JEZIKU.

Linking utterances in suprasentential units is fruitful subject in contemporary linguistics. Greater emphasis has been placed on examining connectives and (or) discourse markers in spoken language since recent studies have shown that these language units are more common to spoken language modality (e.g. O'Keeffe, McCarthy and Carter 2007). However, most research in Croatian language focused on examining cohesive ties in written discourse, while the suprasyntax of spoken discourse has not been studied (e.g. Velčić 1987, Glovacki-Bernardi 2004). Furthermore, research in other languages showed that certain linguistic elements fulfilling a connective function are more restricted to spoken genres and they do not appear in written ones (Biber 2006). The aim of this paper was to investigate connectives, considered as formal grammatical devices, in spontaneous spoken language of Croatian native speakers. In the present study, connectives are perceived as a subgroup of discourse markers and they encompass linguistic elements of surface structure whose primary function is cohesive. For the purpose of this research, the language samples of 30 participants were extracted from the Croatian Adult Spoken Language Corpus (Kuvač Kraljević and Hržica 2016; HrAL). The corpus was analysed by using a pre-established list of 143 connectives elicited from various written sources (scientific papers, grammars). Confirming the results from other studies, merely a small number of connectives from written sources appear in Croatian spoken language. Moreover, considering the formal linguistic variations between written and spoken discourse the connectives that are not annotated in linguistic sources were detected. However, contrary to our hypothesis about the high frequency of connectives in spoken language, their distribution in Croatian language sample was lower than expected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]