Connectives

This article addresses the semantic evolution of a particular spatial meaning which derives from the motion verb ‘to go past/by’ and represents the common diachronic source for originally locative prepositions ‘past/near to’ in Slavic languages. The first part introduces some general issues on grammaticalization studies and contextualises the present study within the field. The second part outlines the main theoretical assumptions of the analysis, focusing on the mechanisms of linguistic coding and inferential enrichment involved in the process of semantic change. The diachronic development of the Polish mimo suggests that its concessive meaning derives from spatial relations through the concept of additivity in discursive sequences. The validity of this hypothesis is further investigated through the comparison of the synchronic meaning and use of the etymologically related forms mimo/мимо in modern Czech, Russian, Slovak and Slovenian. As a result of the examination, two parallel paths of meaning change have been proposed: (i) SPACE > EXCLUSION > OPPOSITION and (ii) SPACE > ADDITIVITY > CONCESSION

Keywords: grammaticalization, semantic change, linguistic coding, inferentional enrichment, connectors, space, contrast, Slavic languages.

Appeared also online: Mediazioni online Rivista Internazionale del Dipartimento SITLeCno. 13, pp. 28
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This article presents the history of the Latvian disjunctive conjunction jeb ‘or’ and analyzes its relationship with OLith. jeib ‘if’. Jeb as a disjunctive conjunction is a result of strictly Latvian development and originates from the concessive conditionals with two counterconditions in the protasis.

The present study deals with variation in discourse relations in different registers of English and German. Our previous analyses have been concerned with the systemic contrasts between English and German, cf. Kunz & Steiner (2013 a/b), Kunz & Lapshinova (to appear) and have addressed some cross-linguistic differences with regard to textual realizations of selected subtypes of cohesion. In our current work, our focus is on the empirical analysis of cross-linguistic variation between registers. In order to obtain a more comprehensive picture, we investigate three main types of cohesion in combination: co-reference, substitution and conjunction and their subtypes, cf. Halliday & Hasan (1976). We extract instantiations of cohesive devices from an English-German corpus of spoken and written registers. The data is analyzed with statistical procedures which show that subcorpora can be grouped along particular combinations of cohesive devices.

Zeyrek, D , Demirşahin, I., Sevdik-Çallı, A. B., Çakıcı, R. (2013). Turkish Discourse Bank: Porting a discourse annotation style to a morphologically rich language. Dialog & Discourse 4 (2) pp. 174-184.

This paper describes the current state of the Turkish Discourse Bank, the first publicly available annotated discourse resource for Turkish. It describes the annotation methods and the challenges posed by annotating Turkish, a free word order language with rich morphology. It shows the usefulness of the PDTB style annotation but points out the need to expand this annotation style with the needs of the target language.

There is a profound, but frequently ignored relationship between logical consequence (formal implication) and material implication. The first repeats the patterns of the latter, but with a wider modal reach. It is argued that this kinship between formal and material implication simply means that they express the same kind of implication, but differ in scope. Formal implication is unrestricted material implication. This apparently innocuous observation has some significant corollaries: (1) conditionals are not connectives, but arguments; (2) the traditional examples of valid argumentative forms are metalogical principles that express the properties of logical consequence; (3) formal logic is not a useful guide to detect valid arguments in the real world; (4) it is incoherent to propose alternatives to the material implication while accepting the classical properties of formal implication; (5) some of the counter-examples to classical argumentative forms and known conditional puzzles are unsound.

Promoting Literacy and Writing Proficiency through a Reading-Based Method


Nassira  Boudersa
Applied  Language  Studies
University  of  Constantine  01
Constantine, Algeria



Abstract
The  present  study  examines  the  writing  proficiency  of  Algerian  EFL  undergraduate  learners (Applied  Language  Studies)  at  the  university  of  Constantine  1,  Algeria.  As  a  very  important  language  skill,  the  ability  to  write  stretches  of  discourse  that  are  communicatively  successful  is  one  of  the  major  concerns  of  language  teachers.  The  main  aim  of  the  study  is  to  see  whether  there  is  a  positive  relationship  between  the  use  of  connective  expressions  in  the  argumentative  type  of  text  and  the  students’  overall  writing  quality,  reflected  by  the  teacher’s  assigned  marks  to  students’  essays.  Two  groups  of  students  were  tested  before  teaching  intervention  to  have  a  general  idea  about  their  level (pre-test) in  writing  and  the  use  of connectives.  The  two  groups  received  the  same  teaching  intervention  during  a  period  of  9  weeks(quasi-experimental  design),  then  they  have  been  given  a  post-test.  The  results  of  the  pretest  and  the  posttest  have  been  analyzed  using  the  correlation  coefficient  test.  The  results  have  shown  that  there  is  an  improvement  in  the  students’  proficiency  in  writing  after  the  teaching  intervention.  The  analysis  of  the  students’  essays  with  regard  to  the  use  of  connective  expressions  and  the  students’  overall  mark  has  shown  that  there  is  a  positive  relationship  between  the  students’  frequent  use  of  connective  expressions  and  their  marks (quality  of  texts The  hypothesis  upon  which  the  research  was  based  on  was,  hence,  confirmed.

Key words: Writing proficiency, connectives, argumentative writing, writing  quality

Some  previous  studies  have  examined  the  use  of connectors  by  second  language  writers  of
English, particularly studies comparing connector usage of L2  and  native English writers.  This
study  does  so  with  corpora  of written  essays,  comparing  the  frequency  of connector  usage
between  native  English  writers  from  the  U.S. and  U.K.,  and  English  essays  by  Korean  ESL
learners  in  the  US.  The  statistical  comparisons  used  here  also  offer  some  refinements  over
previous  corpus  studies.  The  Korean  writers  overused  and  underused  various  connectors
compared  to  the  native  writers,  specifically  in  their  use  of  contrastive  markers,  topic
transitionals, there is and there are, markers for enumerating sequences, and exemplifiers. They
also  certain  expressions  used  incorrectly  as  connectors  due  to  apparent  transfer  errors. These
data indicate a number of issues for ESL/EFL writing teachers to address, and some suggestions
for teaching are discussed below.

Demirşahin, I. (2008). Connective Position, Argument Order and Information Structure of Discourse Connectives in Written Turkish Texts. MSc Thesis, ODTÜ, Ankara.

A text is a linguistic structure that is more than a random collection of sentences. A text is cohesive (Halliday & Hasan, 1976) and  coherent (Mann & Thompson, 1987, 1988). Mainly ignored in the field of linguistics until recently, the text and the discourse structure have been inquired from various points of view (Asher, 1993; Asher & Lascarides, 1998; Grosz & Sidner, 1986; Mann & Thompson, 1987, 1988; Webber, 2004).
D-LTAG is a discourse grammar work that extends a lexicalized sentence level grammar LTAG (Joshi, 1987) to low-level discourse (Webber, 2004; Webber & Joshi, 1998). In this framework, discourse connectives such as coordinating conjunctions, subordinating conjunctions, parallel connectives and discourse adverbials are predicates of discourse structure that take text spans that can be interpreted as abstract objects (Asher, 1993). Turkish has a flexible word order in comparison to languages like English. In English, the discourse adverbials are noted for their ability to occupy positions unavailable to other discourse connectives. In Turkish, word order of other discourse connectives, coordinators and subordinators are not expected to be as restricted.
This thesis examines the connective position, argument order and the information structure of five Turkish discourse connectives in their eleven uses. The analyses show that the examined features of discourse connectives are related to the syntactic group the connective belongs to. Discourse connectives of the same syntactic groups exploit similar connective position and argument order possibilities, and they tend to be included in similar information units.

Zeyrek, D., Turan, Ü. D., Demirşahin, (2008). Structural and presuppositional connectives in Turkish. In Proceedings of the CID III, Constraints in Discourse 3.

This paper describes our preliminary observations of the characteristics of Turkish discourse connectives; in particular, how  we tease apart structural connectives from presuppositional connectives. The paper has emerged as a result of our attempts to extend the METU Turkish Corpus (MTC), an existing resource for Turkish, from sentence-level to discourse-level by annotating its connectives and their arguments. Turkish is a richly agglutinating, free-word order language and the characterisation of where and how it is sensitive to features surrounding the discourse is of theoretical interest. The annotation project we have undertaken will provide an empirical basis for the pursuit of this interest and support computational applications. This project is based on the same principles as the Penn Discourse Treebank (PDTB) (http://www.seas.upenn.edu/~pdtb), sharing its goals of annotating both subordinating and coordinating conjunctions (e.g., rağmen 'although' ya da 'or', etc.) and connectives such as yine de 'still', tersine 'on the contrary', yoksa ‘or else, otherwise’ as discourse connectives.

Marja van Soest heeft me er gedurende het hele project aan herinnerd dat ik nog een leven naast het proefschrift had. Gerda de Kruyff maakte dat leven mogelijk met semi-permanente kinderopvang. Van alle anderen die belangstelling hebben getoond voor het welslagen van het project wil ik met name noemen Frank Jansen, die mij een hart onder de riem stak toen ik hem vertelde over mijn eerste herschrijfervaringen: aha, de hersenspoeling is begonnen. Rijsenburg, juli 1998. Chapter 1 18 Similar examples and argumentation are found in Lagerwerf and Oversteegen (1994) and Oversteegen (1997).

Adversative connectives such as alternatively, conversely, besides, while, recurrently have lexical sources belonging to the spatial-temporal dimension. Nevertheless, they develop over time different contrastive values such as opposition, correction and counterexpectation. In this paper, I analyze the semantic change of two Italian adversative connectives anzi (‘or better/rather/on the contrary’) and invece (‘instead’) from their original temporal and spatial meanings, to their target meanings of oppositive, corrective and counterexpectative contrast. The main goal is to identify, focusing on these two case studies, tendencies in semantic change as well as possible links between the domain of space and time and the relation of contrast. In order to do so, the factors intervening in the development of the chosen connectives are examined, with particular attention to the inferential mechanisms at work from source to target meanings. The results of the analysis show that pragmatic context as well as lexical origins play a crucial role in the rise of different contrastive values.

RESUMEN En este trabajo analizamos las funciones discursivas de ahora en sus dos variantes: la forma simple ahora, característica de la lengua coloquial, suele aparecer en contextos de inmediatez comunicativa (Beinhauer 1958 [1973: 109]; Santos 2003, Fuentes 2009), mientras el conector ahora bien constituye un nexo del registro culto limitado casi exclusivamente a los textos de la distancia comunicativa (Montolío 2000, Domínguez 2007). Nuestro estudio rastrea en la historia del español el proceso de gramaticalización por medio del cual este adverbio temporal ha adquirido usos discursivos (Garachana 1998, Elvira 2009, Azofra 2010, Octavio de Toledo 2018), muchos de los cuales no han pervivido en la lengua actual, pues hasta el s. XIX no quedan fijadas las funciones que el conector tiene en el español contemporáneo y, en concreto, la de conexión contraargumenativa con la que habitualmente se le identifica. PALABRAS CLAVE: deíxis, marcador discursivo, gramaticalización, transición discursiva, conexión contraargumentativa FROM DEIXIS TO DISCOURSE MARKER: FUNCTIONS AND GRAMMATICALIZATION OF SP. AHORA (BIEN) 'NOW' ABSTRACT We analyse in this article the discursive functions of ahora 'now' under its two forms: the simple form ahora, frequent mainly in spoken language and therefore used in contexts of communicative immediacy (Beinhauer 1973: 109; Santos 2003, Fuentes 2009) and the connective ahora bien, almost limited to texts of communicative distance (Montolío 2000, Domínguez 2007). Our research traces back the path of grammaticalization in the history of Spanish to show how this temporal adverb acquired discursive uses (Garachana

This paper discusses the epistemological and methodological bases of a scientific theory of meaning and proposes a detailed version of a formal theory of argumentation based on Anscombre and Ducrot's conception. Argumentation is shown to be a concept which is not exclusively pragmatic, as it is usually believed, but has an important semantic body. The bridge between the semantic and pragmatic aspects of argumentation consists in a set of gradual inference rules, called topoi, on which the argumentative movement is based. The content of each topos is determined at the pragmatic level, while the constraints on the forms of the topoi attached to a sentence are determined at the semantic level. Applications and possible applications to artificial intelligence and to cognitive sciences are discussed. In particular, the gradual models used to account for argumentation are shown to be extremely promising for knowledge management, a discipline which includes knowledge acquisition, knowledge representation, transmission of knowledge (communication, interfaces, etc.), knowledge production (decision help, reasoning, etc.). A first formal model is presented and discussed: it is shown in details how it accounts for most of the argumentative features of sentences containing but, little and a little, and how it can be extended to describe sentences containing other argumentative connectives. However, this model is shown to be too simple and to violate the compositionality principle, which is shown, in the first section, to be an important methodological principle for any scientific theory. After a detailed analysis of the possible reasons for this violation, an improved model is proposed and its adequacy is discussed.

"The analysis of the literary Tibetan verb system is an object of typological interest for several reasons. Firstly, it allows us to look at the evolution of the verb system notably auxiliary verb constructions and clause linking during a period of more than a thousand years. Classical Tibetan has the advantage of having preserved almost the same orthography during this very long period of time. I decided to focus on the fifteenth century by selecting a well-known book as a main corpus: the Life of Milarepa. I then compared the verb system of this period with contemporary literary Tibetan. The main reason for this study is to better understand the emergence of an auxiliary verb system in middle Tibetan which marks evidentiality, that is to say the grammaticalization of the epistemological source and the access to information. Literary Tibetan is the only language in Asia with an ancient history which has developed a complex evidential verb system. Apart from the analysis of grammatical semantics, the second reason for this study is my interest in the syntax of auxiliary verb constructions and of clause linking in middle Tibetan and their evolution in contemporary Tibetan. My data on literary Tibetan and my synchronic and diachronic analysis may make a significant contribution to the typological studies of evidentiality and epistemic modality as well as of the syntax of auxiliary verb constructions and clause linking.

Keywords : Auxiliary, Evidentiality, Epistemic Modality, Orientation, Clause Linking, Subordination

Morphosyntaxe et sémantique des auxiliaires et des connecteurs du tibétain littéraire. Etude diachronique et synchronique.

L’étude du système verbal du tibétain littéraire présente un intérêt typologique à plus d’un titre. D’une part, elle permet d’observer l’évolution du système verbal, notamment les constructions avec un auxiliaire et les connecteurs verbaux, sur une période de plus de mille ans. Cette langue classique a l’avantage d’avoir quasiment préservé la même orthographe au cours de cette très longue période. J’ai choisi de me concentrer sur la période du quinzième siècle en choisissant pour corpus principal une œuvre très célèbre : la biographie de Milarépa. J’ai ensuite comparé le système verbal de cette période avec le tibétain littéraire contemporain. La principale raison qui a motivé cette étude, est l’émergence en tibétain moyen d’un système d’auxiliaires indiquant l’évidentialité, c'est-à-dire la grammaticalisation de la source épistémologique et de l’accès à l’information. Le tibétain est la seule langue littéraire d’Asie ayant une grande ancienneté qui ait développé un système verbal évidentiel complexe. Outre l’étude de la sémantique grammaticale, la deuxième motivation à l’origine de cette étude est la syntaxe des constructions avec un auxiliaire et des connecteurs du tibétain moyen et leur évolution en tibétain littéraire contemporain. Les données du tibétain littéraire et les analyses synchronique et diachronique sont susceptibles d’apporter une contribution à la typologie aussi bien en ce qui concerne l’évidentialité et les modalités épistémiques qu’en ce qui concerne la syntaxe des auxiliaires et des connecteurs.

Mots clés :auxiliaire, évidentialité, modalités épistémiques, orientation, connecteur, subordination"

The starting point of this article is a notation of Joshua Blau who justifies the appearance of (wa)-lākin(na) in the apodosis that follows a potential concessive protase in wa-in ('even if'), by the fact that “concessives clauses [are] felt as independent sentences”. Inspiring us both from the Arabic grammatical tradition, and in particular the Šarḥ al-Kāfiya by Raḍī al-dīn al-Astarābāḏī (d. circa 688/1289), and from modern Western linguistics, especially that of the French linguist Oswald Ducrot, we will show that this apparition represents rather the crossing of two argumentative systems: a concessive system, belonging to potential, in wa-in and a system of rectification in lākin(na). This intersection is made possible by the fact that these two systems have one fundamental feature in common, that of contradicting an implicit conclusion. But it also makes possible the pre/anteposition of the potential concessive clause, which otherwise would not be interpreted as such, but as a potential one coordinated with what precedes it ('and if ...').

In the present paper, we focus on the corpus-based analysis of conjunctions as intra-and intersentential links in texts which play an important role in text organisation. Our research goal is to explore a broad range of cohesive conjunctive relations across languages, registers and with varying mode of discourse (spoken vs. written). For this purpose, we develop semi-automatic procedures for extraction and annotation of conjunctive relations in an English-German corpus.

Marja van Soest heeft me er gedurende het hele project aan herinnerd dat ik nog een leven naast het proefschrift had. Gerda de Kruyff maakte dat leven mogelijk met semi-permanente kinderopvang. Van alle anderen die belangstelling hebben getoond voor het welslagen van het project wil ik met name noemen Frank Jansen, die mij een hart onder de riem stak toen ik hem vertelde over mijn eerste herschrijfervaringen: aha, de hersenspoeling is begonnen. Rijsenburg, juli 1998. Chapter 1 18 Similar examples and argumentation are found in Lagerwerf and Oversteegen (1994) and Oversteegen (1997).

This article reports on an experiment investigating the impact of causal discourse markers (connectives and signaling phrases) on the comprehension of expository texts in L1 and L2. Although several psycholinguistic studies have investigated the impact of connectives and lexical markers of text structure on comprehension (i.e. off-line), there is no consensus on the exact effect of explicit discourse markers on

This paper investigates techniques of clause combining in spoken Latgalian, based on a corpus of 5 hours of recorded interviews with eleven speakers from different parts of Latgalia (Eastern Latvia). The study focuses on inter-clausal relations that are most typically expressed by adverbial clauses and in grammars of European languages are largely associated with adverbial subordinators such as English when, if, because, or although. In spoken Latgalian these relations are most often marked by a combination of lexical, grammatical and prosodic features. Patterns described in detail include asyndetic constructions with grammatical marking, clause chaining, clause combining with semantically vague or polysemous connectives, and correlative constructions. The study calls for a broad understanding of adverbial clause combining, without recourse to the problematic concept of subordination and without assuming the complex sentence as a syntactic or textual unit. Such an approach is needed to pay justice to the intricate structures of fluent speech.

Les  origines  lexicales  diverses  des  marqueurs  discursifs  signalant  une connexion  inférentielle  laissent  entrevoir  la    grande  richesse  sémantique de  ce  type  de  connecteur.  La  présente  contribution  traite  un  marqueur italien  basé  sur  un  verbe  de  perception, come  si  vede ('comme  on  le voit'),  qui,  parmi  d'autres  fonctions,  peut  signaler  une  connexion  inférentielle. L'analyse, basée sur un corpus écrit, décrit la polyfonctionnalité de ce marqueur, sa spécialisation pour certains loci et le rapport entre ces fonctions et le signifié compositionnel. L'approche choisie met en valeur la relation  conceptuelle  entre  les  connexions  inférentielles  dans  le  discours argumentatif et la catégorie de l'évidentialité.

Zeyrek, D., Demirşahin, I., Sevdik-Çallı, A., Balaban, H. Ö., Yalçınkaya, İ., Turan, Ü. D. (2010). The Annotation Scheme of the Turkish Discourse Bank and an Evaluation of Inconsistent Annotations. In Proceedings of the ACL 2010. LAW IV. The Fourth Linguistic Annotation Workshop.

In this paper, we report on the annotation procedures we developed for annotating the Turkish Discourse Bank (TDB), an effort that extends the Penn Discourse Tree Bank (PDTB) annotation style by using it for annotating Turkish discourse. After a brief introduction to the TDB, we describe the annotation cycle and the annotation scheme we developed, defining which parts of the scheme are an extension of the PDTB and which parts are different. We provide inter-coder reliability calculations on the first and second arguments of some connectives and discuss the most important sources of disagreement among annotators.

En este trabajo se estudia la intervencion del conocimiento del mundo y del conocimiento linguistico -semantico- en el proceso de comprension de relaciones causales y contracausales. La hipotesis inicial es que las relaciones causales son mas sencillas de procesar que las relaciones contracausales. El objetivo especifico es verificar esta hipotesis en cuatro condiciones. Por un lado, se evaluo como se comprende una relacion causal o contracausal entre dos eventos pertenecientes a un dominio de conocimiento "cotidiano" y a un dominio cientifico, sobre el cual los informantes no tienen conocimiento previo. Por el otro, se verifico que papel cumplen las particulas conectivas con contenido semantico especifico -causal y contracausal- en esos dos tipos de textos.

The purpose of this article is to test a hypothesis: that of a correlation, in Classical Arabic, between type of negation (mā fa'ala vs lam yaf'al) and type of adversative connector (lākin(na) vs bal). The first results of the survey in Koranic Arabic reveal remarkable modal properties of mā fa'ala and constitute a contribution to the study of the logic and the argumentation of Koranic speech.

This paper attempts to corroborate the claim made recently for a differentiating treatment of the two prototypical, monolexemic causal connectives in Modern Greek, i.e. γiati and epiδi, this time from an experimental pragmatic point of view. To achieve this aim, our experiment involves observing native speakers of Modern Greek of two age groups, that is, children and adults. At the same time, taking up this issue necessarily involves challenging the traditional justification of experimental pragmatics by recourse to the research on scalar implicatures. Hence, we aim to broaden the experimental pragmatic view, so that its scope includes causal subordinators, rather than just coordinating markers.

This paper is about one crucial paradox in pragmatics: on the one hand, pragmatics deals with language in context, but on the other, much of research in linguistic pragmatics are about how natural languages encode information activated at the pragmatic level, that is, information monitoring inferences and context access.
So, the relation between linguistic encoding and pragmatic inferential mechanisms is a core issue in pragmatics. In order to make it clear, I would like to address some questions: How does linguistic information contribute to pragmatic meaning? Is a contextual framework compatible with a linguistic-driven one? How does linguistic meaning interact with contextual information? How does pragmatics interface with syntax and semantics? What role does cognition play in context construction and conceptual information?
These questions are meaningful if some assumptions are taken for granted. In section 2, I address four main issues (grammar vs. usage, linguistic vs. pragmatic meaning, words vs. concepts, code vs. inference) in order to clarify the nature of the relation between language and inference. As these theoretical issues are made explicit, I next give three examples on how the language-context interplay can be addressed: the computation of temporal relations in discourses (section 3), the computation of causal discourse relation in discourse (section 4) and the computation of the scope of negation in its descriptive and metalinguistic uses (section 5). These empirical facts will argue for a general contextual approach to linguistic meaning, based on the thesis of the under-specification of meaning.

La logica è la scienza che si occupa di ciò che è comune e generale a tutte le branche della nostra attività conoscitiva, e quindi a tutte le discipline scientifiche, ed i suoi temi sono quindi quei temi che si ritrovano in tutte le branche dell'attività conoscitiva. La logica fa comunicare e interagire le discipline apparentemente diverse, in altre parole grazie al concetto di interdisciplinarietà, interconnette le branche conoscitive Tra i gruppi di temi che appartengono alla logica, e quindi comuni ad ogni branca dell'attività, in particolare troviamo: proposizioni, dimostrazioni e refutazioni, dibattiti. LA RICERCA DEI TEMI SULLA LOGICA NELLA STORIA La ricerca sui temi della logica è iniziata e si è sviluppata con Aristotele entro la filosofia. Nella seconda metà dell'ottocento, grazie ai matematici Boole e Cantor, scopriamo che la logica è una disciplina matematica poiché tratta oggetti di natura matematica che devono essere studiati con metodi matematici. La ricerca logica del novecento ha portato a risultati notevoli nella scienza e nella cultura attuale; la logica è infatti alla base dell'informatica. La logica è la disciplina che offre le basi teoriche concettuali e metodologiche dell'informatica.

This contribution aims to explain how discourse argumentation is mentally constructed. We present the
results of several processing studies performed with the eye tracking methodology to observe the effect on
reading behaviour triggered by Spanish argumentative connectives with three basic functions: counterargumentation
(e.g. sin embargo ‘however’, a pesar de ello ‘in spite of this’), causality (por tanto
‘therefore’ and por ello ‘that is why’) and addition (además ‘in addition’, ‘furthermore’).
Evidence shows that a) discourse marking by means of an argumentative connective gives rise to a
new route for the access to information; b) procedural meaning is a definitory feature of argumentative
connectives; c) the procedural meaning of connectives introduces asymmetry in discourse as to conceptual
meanings; d) processing utterances with a mismatch between instructions encoded by a connective and the
mental representation triggered by the discourse segments is more effortful than processing non-conflictive
utterances and, since connectives have a rigid semantics, accommodation processes is less problable than
in non-mismatching utterances.

El presente artículo analiza la relación que mantienen con la evidencialidad tres unidades que contienen el participio visto: visto que, está visto que y visto lo visto. Para ello, se han recogido ejemplos de estas unidades (todas ellas con el participio visto en masculino singular) en dos corpus sincrónicos del español, uno de referencia (CREA) y un subcorpus de discurso parlamentario seleccionado entre los años 1978 y 2018. A partir de los ejemplos obtenidos, se ha estudiado si estas estructuras presentan o no valor evidencial y, en caso afirmativo, qué tipo de evidencialidad presentan, así como los valores pragmáticos asociados más frecuentes. De acuerdo con los datos del estudio, visto que introduce oraciones causales fuertemente ligadas a la negación (sea gramatical, léxica o pragmática) y suele mantener el significado evidencial del verbo ver con el sentido de percepción intelectual; está visto que es el más claramente evidencial, mientras que visto lo visto se sitúa en un punto intermedio: por un lado, aúna características formales y funcionales que lo acercan a las unidades anteriores, a cuyo significado de certeza suma un valor conclusivo; por otro, presenta usos diferenciables sintáctica y semánticamente, y también en lo que respecta al carácter evidencial.

Coherence relations linking discourse segments can be communicated explicitly by the use of connectives but also implicitly through juxtaposition. Some discourse relations appear, however, to be more coherent than others when conveyed implicitly. This difference is explained in the literature by the existence of default expectations guiding discourse interpretation. In this paper, we assess these factors by comparing the number of implicit and explicit translations of three polysemous French connectives in translated texts across three target languages: German, English and Spanish. Each connective can convey two discourse relations: one that can easily be conveyed implicitly and one that cannot be easily conveyed implicitly in monolingual data. Results indicate that relations that can easily be conveyed implicitly are also those that are most often left implicit in translation in all target languages. We discuss these results in view of the cognitive factors influencing the explicit or implicit communication of discourse relations.

This paper investigates a peculiar language contact situation, namely the Ladin area in Trentino-South Tyrol, in order to verify the presence and distribution of Italian discourse
markers and connectives in a bilingual context. Based on a bilingual speech corpus, I will point out how Ladin speakers distinguishes between the pragmatic and semantic level of
connection, using Italian forms in the first case and Ladin ones in the latter. In conclusion, I will focus on Italian connectives perché ‘because’ and allora ‘then, therefore’ and their equivalent Ladin forms , i.e. percheche/ajache and enlouta/donca.