Verbs of Saying with a Textual Connecting Function in the Prague Discourse Treebank

Abstract

The paper tries to contribute to the general discussion on discourse connectives, concretely to the question whether it is meaningful to distinguish two separate groups of connectives ― i.e. "classical" connectives limited to few predefined classes like conjunctions or adverbs (e.g. "but") vs. alternative lexicalizations of connectives (i.e. unrestricted expressions and phrases like "the reason is", "he added", "the condition was" etc.). In this respect, the paper focuses on one group of these broader connectives in Czech ― the selected verbs of saying "doplnit/doplňovat" ("to complement"), "upřesnit/upřesňovat" ("to specify"), "dodat/dodávat" ("to add"), "pokračovat" ("to continue") ― and analyses their occurrence and function in texts from the Prague Discourse Treebank. The paper demonstrates that these verbs of saying have a special place within the other connectives, as they contain two items ― e.g. "he added" means "and he said" so the verb "to add" contains an information about the relation to the previous context ("and") plus the verb of saying ("to say"). This information led us to a more general observation, i.e. discourse connectives in broader sense do not necessarily connect two pieces of a text but some of them carry the second argument right in their semantics, which "classical" connectives can never do.

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