Primary And Secondary Discourse

In the paper, we study discourse connectives and other discourse phenomena in Czech based on corpus data. We focus on the delimitation of connectives primarily from the functional point of view and we present their further classification into primary and secondary connectives based especially on their degree of grammaticalization. Special attention is paid to the variability of secondary connectives occurring in several lexical realizations and grammatical variants. We also present the frequency of the individual connectives in written texts and we analyze their syntactic behavior. We then discuss the relation of connectives to reference (a special group consists of the anaphoric and cataphoric connectives), connectives occurring next to each other in the text, and the possibilities of modification of connectives. Our analysis is based especially on the language data of the Prague Discourse Treebank 2.0. The aim of the paper is to present a detailed study of discourse connectives in written Czech and to present connectives as an open class covering both grammaticalized expressions and looser lexical phrases.