The Semantic Role of Sentence Connectors in Extra-Sentence Logical Relationships

Sentence connectors-words or phrases like HOWEVER, ON THE OTHER HAND, TO BE SURE-deserve much more study than they have previously been given, especially by those of us interested in teaching written English. For one thing, these expressions occur frequently in writing. From a word count made by Ernest Horn some years back, I calculate that roughly 50 of the 1000 most commonly used words in written English are sentence connectors. And this count includes single words only, excluding common idioms like OF COURSE, IN ADDITION, and AS A MATTER OF FACT which may well have as high a frequency as OTHERWISE, THUS, or THEREFORE. Just the fact that such words occur frequently makes them worth studying. More important, however, is the fact that sentence connectors serve a significant semantic function in written English, a function which has been misinterpreted and thus underestimated by the few grammarians who have attempted to describe it. In all of the grammar books I have seen which make an attempt to deal with the semantics of such words and phrases as HOWEVER, ON THE OTHER HAND, or FOR EXAMPLE, the underlying assumption has been that the two sentences which are to be connected by these words already have one particular logical relationship by virtue of occurring next to one another-"concessive," "contrastive," "illustrative," or whatever-which it is the writer's task to recognize so that he can insert an "appropriate" expression between the two sentences in order to emphasize or clarify this relationship. In other words, sentence connectors have been viewed as having no meaning of their own, their usage predetermined by the two sentences they are to connect. But such is not usually the case. As a matter of fact, the opposite is more often true: sentence connectors frequently determine what the logical relationship between two sentences will be; while one connector may create one set of suppositions about the truth or nature of the two sentences it connects, another connector will create quite a different set of suppositions about the same two sentences. This means, then, that two sentences will have different semantic interpretations according to the sentence connector used to connect them.