Differential properties of three discourse connectives in Turkish

This paper presents a corpus-based quantitative investigation of three connectives in Turkish. As in D-LTAG, we take discourse connectives as lexical anchors which select their two arguments in discourse. Connectives can be grouped in two classes as structural connectives and discourse adverbials. While structural connectives select both of their arguments structurally and through adjacency, adverbials retrieve their first argument in the preceding discourse like anaphoric expressions. The three different connectives selected in the study appeared to have structural, anaphoric and both structural and anaphoric properties. We delineate how these connectives behave differently in terms of the adjacency of their arguments, the span of their first arguments and their position within the clause. Our corpus-based quantitative analysis shows that there is a statistically significant difference between the structural connectives and the discourse adverbial in our data in terms of the variables selected.