INVESTIGATING THE ANAPHORIC AND STRUCTURAL ARGUMENTS OF "OTHERWISE"

Back to Page Authors: Dilsah Kalay

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Keywords: Otherwise, discourse connectives, corpus study, COCA

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Abstract: Discourse connectives are proved to be critically important in communicative writing as they are utilized in order to reveal some relationships between specific clauses and sentences, which facilitates the interaction between the communicator and the interlocutor in terms of better understanding of discourse units. Another assumption on this case may be that the semantics of those units are not limited to single sentences within that specific discourse, on the other hand the meaning may be laid between the lines depending on the connectives related to adjacent units, which makes the arguments on discourse connectives much more complicated. To this end, the present paper attempts to investigate the discourse connective “otherwise” in English context. A corpus study has been carried out and Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) has been searched to determine different sense occurrences with respect to both anaphoric and structural arguments. After analyzing the collected data from COCA, some more lexico-syntactic characteristics of anaphoric arguments have been determined, as well.

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