Review: Connectives as Discourse Landmarks, by Agnes Celle and Ruth Huart (eds.)

In the volume under review, papers by eleven authors are included which were presented at the international conferenceConnectives asDiscourse Landmarks (University of Paris-Diderot, May 2005). emain point of interest of present studies are syntactic, semantic and pragmatic functions of several discourse connectives in English. e term ‘connective’ is being used in a broad sense, without specific theoretical restrictions, herewith opening space for different treatments of discourse. In the book, this term covers not only traditional connective items like conjunctions (and, but) and relative pronouns (which), but also discourse adverbials (rather, still, yet), phrasal constructions (aer all) as well as whole sentential frames (the fact is that; it’s not that; A because B so A’) andmeans of contact (well, you know). As this set of connectives shows, the studies deal with two large aspects of discourse research: with questions of syntax, semantics and lexicology, understanding connectives as items expressing the relations between sentences (abstract objects, events), andwith pragmatics where connectives are understood as units linking the speaker and the hearer. e editors’ introduction describes briefly the historical context of present-day discourse studies, making short references to RichardG.Warner, Deborah Schiffrin and Jan-OlaÖstman. Further, it explains the development of the discourse terminology and touches upon some open questions of the discourse research, namely the level of grammaticalization of connectives, the issue, whether for the meaning of connectives, their core lexical sense is more important or rather pragmatic sense variance in different contexts and, finally, the relation between the form (conjunctive, subjunctive) and themeaning of connectives. Aer general remarks ondiscourse, the main points of the studies included are shortly summarized. In the “Part I. Connectives andmodality”, Raphael Salkie (“Connectives, modals and prototypes: A study of rather”) focuses on common features of different senses of rather (connective,