The Centre and Periphery of Discourse Connectives

The paper tries to contribute to the general definition of discourse connectives. It examines connectives in broader sense, i.e. all language expressions that have an ability to express discourse relations within a text (e.g. both conjunctions like but, and, or and expressions like the condition for this is, due to this situation etc.). The paper tries to classify connectives from different perspectives and to divide them into several groups to specify their similarities and differences. We try to discuss various attributes an expression must have to be a connective. We understand discourse connectives as a set of expressions with a center and periphery and we focus here mainly on the periphery – i.e. on description of the secondary connectives (like the reason is simple, this means that... etc.) because it is not much investigated but a very current theme of discourse analysis.