Connectivity of Discourse Connectives and Its Role for Generalized Argumentation

Studies in Logic, Vol. 13, No. 3 (2020): 82–105     PII: 1674-3202(2020)-03-0082-24

Yang Hu

Abstract. There are three major accounts of discourse connectives: Fraser’s General Account, Schiffrin’s Coherence-based Account and Blakemore’s Relevance-theoretic Account. They all acknowledge the connectivity of discourse connectives, but they explain in different ways. Their difference consists in characterizations of the role of discourse connectives: the first considers the connectives as signaling the semantic relation between discourses, the second takes them to be the joints of text structure, and the third thinks of them as guiding the cognitive inference as regards utterance interpretation. Thus, we have three kinds of connectivity of the discourse connectives: semantic connectivity, structural connectivity and cognitive connectivity. These three kinds of connectivity can respectively contribute to understanding the thesis of Generalized Argumentation proposed by Ju Shi’er that argumentation is a sequence of discourses.