Connectors gramaticals i connectors lèxics en la construcció discursiva del debat parlamentari

Abstract

Summary: Text analysis shows that in addition to grammatical or grammaticalized connectives and discourse markers (like conjunctions and parentheticals such as however, in brief or for instance), there are non-fixed structures such as to summarize what we have seen so far or to take an example that contribute to discourse organization. These are often replaceable by a grammatical connective or discourse marker, but, unlike them, are not completely fixed, have a compositional meaning (and are therefore transparent) and are prototypically metalinguistic. In this article, based on a corpus of parliamentary debate in Catalan, I have identified and classified lexical and grammatical connectives and also endophoric markers that act as cohesive mechanisms at textual level. This allows us to compare the discourse function of these linking mechanisms. The analysis shows that by using complex and transparent expressions semantically equivalent to grammatical connectives the speaker anchors her speech and explicitly expresses way the different argumentative movements in discourse. Keywords: Connective, lexical connectives, discourse markers, discourse organizers, metadiscourse, parliamentary debate, Catalan