This web app was developed by Felix Dombek as part of a bachelor thesis in computational linguistics under supervision of Prof. Dr. Manfred Stede and Dr. Tatjana Scheffler at Department of Linguistics, Universität Potsdam, 2017.
The work on synchronizing the various lexicons originated as part of the activity of the TextLink COST action (2014–2018) and was subsequently supported by the DFG-funded project Anaphoricity in Connectives: From corpus analysis to lexical description and consequences for discourse parsing (2016-2021).
For more detailed information, and to cite this resource, please use: Manfred Stede, Tatjana Scheffler, and Amália Mendes. Connective-lex: A web-based multilingual lexical resource for connectives. Discours. Revue de linguistique, psycholinguistique et informatique, 2019.
The DTD to validate XML input lexicons is available here.
For any (other) questions or requests to add or modify lexicons, please contact
Peter Bourgonje.
Prof. Dr. Manfred Stede
Universität Potsdam – Department of Linguistics
Karl-Liebknecht Straße 24-25
Komplex II, Haus 14
14476 Potsdam
Germany
E-mail: stede@uni-potsdam.de
This web application enables you to browse several lexicons, or word databases, of connectives, also called discourse markers.
The app can be used with recent versions of Chrome, Firefox, Edge, Safari, and Opera.
Connectives are words or short utterances which set two phrases into a relation, e.g. "because", "while", "even though". They belong to various word classes, but are usually either conjunctions (coordinating or subordinating), adverbs/adverbials, or prepositions.
This webapp was created at Universität Potsdam to integrate their own DiMLex lexicon for German connectors and similar lexicons for other languages created at other universities. Each lexicon has a few hundred entries; each entry contains a connective and associated linguistic information, such as syntactic categories (word classes), discourse relations (semantic senses), synonyms and/or examples of their usage, among others.
The Lexicon Selection section of the sidebar shows all available lexicons. Select one or more lexicons to browse their entries. Click about for more info about a lexicon.
You can filter the displayed lexicon entries according to several criteria:
The result list contains all those elements from all selected lexicons which match the filter settings. The interface is pretty self-explanatory, but there are some not-so-obvious features which are explained here.
Word & variants: A connective can have multiple spellings. Some connectives consist
of disconnected parts. These can be specifically searched for by entering ...
into the
Filter field. Words marked with focus can be used as focus particles.
Syntactical category: Each connective has one or more word classes of which each has one or more senses that the word can have when used as this word class. Hover the mouse over a subtly underlined word class to see the original tagset and word class which this word has in its source lexicon. The original annotations use wildly different tagsets which are mapped to the four main word classes used by this app. Non-underlined word classes have not been changed by the mapping.
Ordering info: For lexicons which include this info, some results contain information about the grammatical context in which a word can be used. If available, this info is listed next to a word class. Some prepositions also have an associated set of cases with which they are used.
Discourse relation: The list of discourse relations for each word class lists the possible semantic senses this word can have when used as this word class. Usually, a word has only one of these semantic senses at a time. In some entries, however, you will see two senses on one line, separated by a +. In this case, the word can have these two senses at once. Similar to the word classes, the senses shown here are mapped from different source tagsets to PDTB3. Hover over an underlined sense to see the original annotation(s).