A Feature-Based Account of the Relations Signalled by Sentence and Clause Connectives

This paper describes a three-stage methodology for investigating the semantics and pragmatics of sentence and clause connective phrases. The first step in the methodology is to assemble a large corpus of connectives. The second step is to organize this corpus into a hierarchical taxonomy of synonyms and hyponyms, using a pre-theoretical substitution test. The final step, upon which we concentrate in this paper, is to impose a theoretical interpretation on the taxonomy. The taxonomy lends itself to an analysis of intersentential / interclausal relations in terms of a number of orthogonal multivalued features; connectives are then seen as signaling the values of one or more of these features.