A Data-Driven Method for Classifying Connective Phrases

This paper describes a three-stage methodology for investigating the semantics and pragmatics of sentence and clause connective phrases. The rst step in the methodology is to assemble a large corpus of connectives. The second step is to organise this corpus into a hierarchical taxonomy of synonyms and hyponyms, using a pre-theoretical substitution test. The nal step is to impose a theoretical interpretation on the taxonomy. The taxonomy lends itself to an analysis of intersentential/interclausal relations in terms of a number of orthogonal binary-valued features; connectives are then seen as signalling the values of one or more of these features. 2