Primary and secondary discourse connectives: Constraints and preferences

In this paper, we explore the linguistic factors that influence an author's choice of discourse connectives in the production of a coherent text. We focus on the competition between so-called primary connectives (grammaticalized and mostly one-word expressions such as therefore) and secondary connectives (not yet fully grammaticalized compositional discourse phrases such as for this reason). We attempt to describe the linguistic constraints on and preferences in connective selection. The analysis is based on manually annotated data from the Prague Discourse Treebank 2.0 (PDiT), which contains almost 50000 sentences from Czech newspaper texts. We demonstrate that discourse connectives are used in accordance with the economy principle in language, i.e. authors aim to achieve the maximal result with minimal effort. They most frequently choose short and semantically more generalized primary connectives. However, in cases where the discourse relations can be misunderstood, authors prefer more complex and specific structures. •The paper analyses linguistic factors influencing the author’s choice of discourse connectives in written texts.•It focuses on the competition of primary connectives (e.g. therefore) and secondary connectives (e.g. for this reason).•It presents a corpus analysis of connectives in the Prague Discourse Treebank 2.0.•Kinds of constraints on connective selection: syntactic, semantic, pragmatic, stylistic, and long distance (salience).•Factors influencing connective use: grammar; the principle of least effort; the effort to avoid misunderstandings.