Exploring the behaviour of connectives within a textometric perspective

This chapter proposes to deal with the issue of categorising connectives as a wordclass by adopting an innovative outlook, based on investigating the properties that emerge from the linguistic environment of these forms. After recalling the criteria used in traditional classifications of connectives in Romance languages and the various issues such criteria raise, we will take a selection of French and Italian connectives and observe their favourite linguistic environments– i.e. the forms associated with them in a statistically significant way– within a press corpus, using a textometric methodology. The data thus obtained will reveal properties contributing to the semantic profile of a given connective and suggest categorisations and sub-categorisations not always matching those based on traditional relational/functional criteria, but providing additional insight on the behaviour of these forms in our corpora.